Forced to lie on a questionnaire (BioLife)

Why are people who make questionnaires so bad at making questionnaires? It's baffling. This post is particularly glaring but I always find stupid errors or assumptions like this.
- Where i live, none of the forms to apply for a flat ask only allowed questions. The respective agency even provides a summary, what questions are not allowed (like gender, religion) because discrimination potential but all ask at least two of them.
  
  What do you do?
- Bias. Good 'ol plain bias.
  Unless you're very self-aware, one requires actual training and practiced mindfulness to break free from that in all endeavors. There's also some lack-of-the-outside-world going on too - one would need to have at least thought about world experiences apart from one's own, to consider alternative possibilities.

By not having "None of the above" or an "Other" allowing you to fill in the blank, instantly discards this data as viable. which makes this question pointless to even answer, let alone ask.
- I think they shot themselves in the foot, one thing thats worse than no data is wrong data. And they are forcing people to produce wrong data.
  
  Choose every option.

Hey, look, all the sites I specifically avoid, plus Pinterest which just happens to get avoided.
- I got the uBlacklist Firefox extension specifically to block Pinterest from search results.
- Pinterest... I got a Pinterest account because my wife recommended it after I asked what it was.
  I got it. Very uninteresting. I see one image of like, lingerie or something, so I'm a heterosexual dude and I click that shit, think to myself, hey that's sexy, maybe my wife will look good in that.
  Kid you not, my feed was nothing but lingerie and sexy stuff after that, and women's clothing. And there was seemingly no way to reset my algorithm or delete my view history or anything. I wanted to see stuff from my interests, like art, skateboarding, gaming, sports, computing, technology, what have you. But my feed was ruined forever.
  My bad, I guess. 🤷‍♂️
  
  Just search for something else.
  I use it a lot to find photos to draw and paint from, but I do use some unknown site to do it (on the web so adblockers work), the app or the normal website is a total trainwreck but this one is fine IMO: https://kr.pinterest.com/pin/

“Please poison my data”

That's objectively poor survey design. For questions like that there should always be an 'Other' option. There should also be a 'None' or 'N/A' option.
- A radio presenter this morning was talking like we all have Instagram, I found that incredibly annoying.
  
  There are 2 billion MAUs on there. We are the weird ones.
  
  Pixelfed?
- Agreed, the only way this would be acceptable if this was in an application for a Social Media manager position?
- I complained in the "other" box that they did include for a different question lol
- And yet, I think most people are checking all those boxes, unfortunately. Pray for their mental health! 😵
- I was thinking the same thing. But if this was a survey specifically for social media, there wouldn’t be a N/A option except at the beginning to make you not have to continue further and waste your time and theirs. (Survey for getting users’ input on social media use, etc.)
  But definitely agreed on other. There are so many social media sites out there.
  
  There's way more social media than these options. Where's?
  Reddit
  4chan
  Lemmy
  Mastodon
  Bluesky
  Forums
  Discord
  YouTube
  Patreon
  Medium
  Steam
  Whatsapp
  Pornhub
  VRchat
  Some of these are very very popular. Asking people their social media habits, and preventing people on most social media from answering, will produce garbage biased data. I hope this study fails peer review and the PhD student responsible flunks.

Didn't even have Reddit lmao
- They sabotaged themselves years ago by squashing popular votes with an algorithm, so a large amount of people don't realize the size of the site.
  You can go look at recent popular tweets and see 200k reactions, meanwhile the top posts on reddit show 10-30k votes, despite having 2-50 times as many behind the scenes.

how the hell someone can use pinterest for more than one hour a week? Just accidentally browse it when trying to search an image on the web and curse the ux team to have hidden the download button in a way that you click the image and brings you in a completely unrelated site with 10000 images except the one you wanted
- Collecting cute images of fruit bats and wolves.
- Before they went all out nuclear with ads, promoted content, shops, and AI slop, I was using Pinterest a shit ton to look at fanart and memes (mostly stolen/reposted art, but real human art at least). I'd be on there for an hour or so every other day tbh, I liked making boards of my fixations and shit.
  Then the app went to hell a few years back and I ditched it, because the web version sucks, and I didn't know about LibRedirect instances. Now I just don't bother with the place anymore.
- If you're a visual artist it's great for finding reference and inspiration material. When I'm not sure exactly what I want to draw I'll usually scroll Pinterest for a bit, find something that gives me an idea, then use Pinterest again to source reference material for said idea. So if I'm really in the mood to draw I can definitely rack up a couple hours in Pinterest a week.

What the what? There is no "none of these" choice? In that case I'd check them all. And in the next screen when they ask how many hours for each, put 100 hours for each of them.
I have never had an account on any of those, did have a very long run on Reddit and a couple of interest-specific communities.
- Who is Pinterest really for?
  
  No idea. One of my kids likes it, I always block Pinterest results on searches once I figured out how, because I can't stand that site.
  
  Interior designers
  
  Mostly just older moms and people into arts and crafts. My mom used it for a while and i would get some fairly outdated memes from Pinterest. She and Dad mostly just use Facebook nowdays though.
- There are 168 hours in a week. Why not use them all?
- Put 0 hours for each of them

Wow. I can honestly say I spend less than an hour a week on all of those. I wasn't expecting that.
- I can honestly say I have spent less than an hour in my life on all of those added together. Probably less than 10 minutes. Does that mean I am winning?
  
  It does, in fact.
- I spend about 10-20 mins on Snapchat a week.
- Zero on all for me.
- If they don't count FBMsgr for family/portalTV chat, then I'm under an hour as well.

Pinterest. They're like half of google results.
- And I never understood how to use it. If I click on a Google result from Pinterest I'm always taken to something completely different.
  
  Oh good. I'm not the only one.
- I seriously don't understand why anyone would use it. It's basically a platform that copies images from the internet and lets you bookmark them. Something browsers had since the 90s. Or you could just download the pictures to a folder, so you can see all the thumbnails.
- Not with -pinterest
  
  Or maybe google shouldn't include spam in its results.
  
  If you use kagi you can just permanently block Pinterest. And any other site you want. Or rank their listings lower.
  
  If you use kagi you can just permanently block Pinterest. And any other site you want. Or rank their listings lower.

All they need to do is put YouTube on there for a more meaningful survey.
- I hate that "social media" is such a broad umbrella term. It totally lacks useful context. "Social networking site" is great, straightforward and descriptive. But "social media" encompasses every way we communicate with each other except for "traditional media" which got grandfathered through. BBS predates the internet!
  All that to say: YouTube is, for many, a public-access TV station and I'm too young to be this mad about it.
- Would be my only answer, unless Lemmy is there too. Although I watch YouTube with ad block and sponsor block and never post a comment. So it's just a one way stream of only useful information (I don't watch junk, only stuff I learn from)
- Still would be zero for me.
  
  Touching grass I see

Oh man I’m taking research class this is non exhaustive because there are gaps in the survey such as a lack of other or none and there’s a second criteria I can’t remember
I really hope my professor doesn’t have lemmy
- They don’t
  
  You might be on to something here

closes questionnaire

Lol tell them you use Pinterest.
- i still don't understand what the point of that site is, is it literally just made-up SEO spam that they managed to convince people is even slightly organic?
  
  Pinterest? I've only touched it a few times to see what it was and it's basically just Instagram, but instead of duck lips, misspelled names on coffee cups, and pictures of food it's mainly focused on hobbies/crafts. That was years ago, tho. I have no idea what it's like now.

Think of it as giving them bad data.
- I'm exclusively on Pinterest 100hours/week. (I forgot to close the tab with the image search for cool origami)
  
  What’s the coolest origami you’ve ever made? Never tried it but it seems fun.
- No one will like hearing this answer but they may already understand the issue of it being bad data and have a good reason not to care.
  Here’s the thing. When “none” or “skip” is there, people gravitate toward it. You end up getting 75% of people saying “none” for every question, and then your entire survey is meaningless. I hate surveys too. Everyone hates them. All the more reason to just mash “skip” or “none.” Because fuck you and fuck your survey.
  Meanwhile, what % of people don’t touch any of these social networks? Maybe we can’t say for sure, but it’s way less than 75%.
  So you’re choosing between two possible sources of bad data, and choosing the one you know to be of lower magnitude.
  
  Then provide an "other" option with a text box instead.
  Make entering some text mandatory if you click it.
  No one gravitates toward that.
  Besides, a "none" option can just be discarded when you analyze the data.
  If all your boxes are social media sites, you have no idea which ones are poisoned by bad data, and by how much.

None of the above?

Why bother taking the survey then, or is it somehow mandatory?

I would get discord, youtube, lemmy, and reddit
I try to avoid new platforms tho bc I don't trust myself not to get addicted and social media already takes up too much of my time
- I don’t use any of those. Quit Facebook 10 years ago and never really used the others. I just got booted (the account was literally vapourized)off of Reddit after 9 yrs today. Posted a pic of a hat that said is he dead yet. No text just the pic. I don’t care anymore really as once Reddit went on the stock market it was all over anyhoo.
  
  You're... You're on Lemmy now? How can you claim not to use 'any of those' when you're posting on one of those?

I’d just abandon it if I couldn’t answer a question or it was too involved (like a free text box answer).
- Which is why proper survey design never allows for this.

The questionaire is kinda badly made but also i would choose snapchat because for some reason everyone i know uses it.

Select all
- chaos! chaos!

Choose at least one option? I don't use any of those platforms. My only social media is Lemmy and Reddit.

Lemmy

I'm a middle aged guy, so I only use Snapchat. Because me and my friends have children and no free time so that's how we keep in touch and share our lives.

Username checks out?

Lemmy, Sharkey, and YouTube for me. I'm on Facebook, but less than an hour a week. A friend posts a weekly "how's everyone doing?" post and I usually comment on that.

Can I participate in this survey?

Snapchat for only texting other people
Instagram for memes & some minor ""celebrities"" (YouTubers and some trans folk that give tips)
Pinterest for outfits/tattoo designs/etc. I get memes from there and post to 196 sometimes.
discord for uhhhh.. discord stuff, idk. I scroll meme channels sometimes. and sometimes chat
YouTube for 99% of my online things. Unhealthy AF addition
Lemmy for more memes and news (not the best practice tbh) I mainly use just bc I want to support the fediverse and it's better than scrolling reposted Instagram reels
I don't use any twitter/bsky/threads/mastodon type platform, I just don't mesh with the type I guess. It's just short political stuff that's depressing and memes which I get from literally everywhere else 🤷‍♀️