Daily Poll

Gobcord's **Daily Poll** is a text channel hosted by the server's moderation and other prominent members in which popular surveys and polls are conducted. The channel has been a tenet of the server since its inception, and was originally created as a way for moderators to ask personal questions to the server's commoners. Since then, its utility has broadened as an additional mechanism to enact popular change to the server.

## Uses

The Daily Poll channel is used most commonly in three ways:

* Political referenda; changes to the server including change to its channels, its emotes, its moderation, etc;
* Personal survey; questions on one's character, values, or stances on broad philosophical, ethical/moral, or ontological dilemmas;
* Dilemmas and guidance; questions on someone's -- usually the person asking -- deontology; whether they should act a certain way in a certain circumstance or what the best action in a certain circumstance is.

### Politics

The Daily Poll channel, since the advent of the Goup, is Gobcord's primary vehicle of democracy. Moderators will often use Daily Poll to gauge members' desire to change the server. The most pertinent political issues which Gobcord faces are conflicts over management of the server's media resources: emote storage, pinned message storage, and channel organization. Popular referenda regarding changes to the server have included changes to the server's name, the server's icon, the addition/deletion of channels and emotes, and certain server activities such as Gobcord Rewind.

In the context of running a democracy, Daily Poll is a double-edged sword. The accessibility of Daily Poll as a component of the server has made it easy for server members to voice their opinion in a streamlined way and has made it easy for mods to gather insight from the community; on the other hand, the informality of Daily Poll has facilitated coercion or rigging of votes, mis- or underinformed voting, or the disregard of voting results by the Gobernors' Council. Similarly, those who are not mod and do not have direct power in running the server are able to use Daily Poll as a means of generating sympathy or antipathy with a certain political viewpoint, in a manner usually heavily biased and misrepresented. This is usually hilarious, and what we like to see here at Gobcord (it usually doesn't affect how staff members make decisions).

Recognizing Daily Poll's loose format, more substantial changes are now more often voted on through Google Forms, where questions are not commented on by other members in real time and votes are harder to manipulate (unless done so by the host of the form).

### Surveys

1/5
The most common kind of polls in Daily Poll are personal surveys. These are most often done by non-mods and range from lighthearted questions on preference to existential quandaries on morality, ethics, reasoning, and character. Personal surveys aim to either satisfy the curiosity of the questionneur and/or to inspire fun or introspective thinking among server members.

To the right is a slideshow of some examples of personal surveys in Daily Poll.

### Dilemmas

The least common kind of polls in Daily Poll are polls requesting or inquiring another's personal guidance and decision-making. This usually takes the form of dilemma questions -- interesting and self-challenging hypotheticals in which respondents must choose from a set of choices in a given theoretical scenario. Daily Poll users may also ask questions on choices they want to make, requesting assistance in their judgement.

### Miscellaneous

Beyond the three main uses listed above, Daily Poll is used for all kinds of wacky inflatable arm-flailing mischief.