February 24, 2008
What’s with the phoney poll?
Source: CnetNews
Author: Walterny
In case you haven’t noticed, CnetNews ran a story this week asking which is better, Aperture or Lightroom? Photoshopnews.com pubished a link to this article and subsequently run a further story questioning whether this was a legitimate poll or not. See: CNET Aperture/Lightroom Poll Skewed? However, further doubts about the reliability of this poll have been raised by reader Walterny, who has made some interesting observations about the apparent static nature of the published poll percentages. Editor’s note: on Sunday afternoon this was showing Aperture 64.2%, Lightroom 35.8%, with 8002 votes cast. Here is what Walterny had to say:
I found myself a bit bored yesterday so was reading various web pages. My home page is Apples start page. One of the links is to a CNET “review” of an Apple photographic software product vs an Adobe equivalent product.
http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9875221-39.html?part=dht&tag=nl.e703
Titled “Which is better: Aperture or Lightroom?” it states:
“That’s what Stephen Shankland (c|net news) wants to know, and he’d like your help. “With the new Aperture 2 now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?” The polls are open.”
So I clicked it and read the review. And noticed the poll. I’m not a user of either software. I noticed that Apple was ahead 64.3% to Adobe’s 35.7% with some 2000 plus votes cast. I was feeling mischievous and voted for Adobe, then looked at the results. I also realized that I could vote over and over. So I did. Some 350 times. And all for Adobe. But the strange thing was that while I saw the vote count rise slowly, the percentages of Apple and Adobe remained the same. And I kept refreshing the poll results to see a trend in how the number of votes increased. It was always in a defined time frame. I checked later on that night and noticed that with over 4000 votes there was only 1/10th of a percent difference in the results than earlier in the day. Now it was 64.4% to 35.6%.