I’ve read the fun little flamings in the pit 
Maybe, but trying to fit in is the opposite of trolling. Or maybe it’s a subset of trolling. Is it trolling if you say something just to “score points” for those you are trying to agree with?
Anyone can pit another poster for an opinion expressed in any thread. There’s no difference in a public thread vs a regular post in that respect. That’s not calling someone to task on SDMB, that’s a normal Tuesday.
If you don’t want to express an opinion, then don’t. No one is forced to participate in a public poll or post an opinion in a thread.
Exactly. If they are neutral or apathetic, then does their opinion matter since they really don’t have a definitive one to begin with?
He’ll win the MVP this year?
That it happens all the time doesn’t mean i’ts not calling someone out. You asked the question, and you got an answer.
Yes, it applies equally to posts. That’s why you’ll notice that private polls tend to get a lot more votes than most threads get replies. Because people don’t want to be called out.
Hence why we mostly create private polls. Those who make public polls are considered to have committed a social faux pas. I presume the logic for banning them is to prevent someone from making that mistake.
I mostly don’t care. I nearly always explain my vote anyways. It’s not that I don’t care if I get called out, per se, but that, if someone is going to be a jerk about it, I’m better off knowing that about them.
Still, I have avoided answering a thread where the only purpose I could see was to start a fight. Same with a public poll. I would have voted in a private poll, though.
The problem there is the thread design to start a fight, not the poll.
If you are going to use a multiple-response poll, then making it private also makes it vulnerable to trolls. As happened recently in the z-word poll there were a couple of people who had a head of steam about the uselessness of the poll. One of those went through and chose every option. (Not calling him a troll, because he admitted that in his subsequent post.)
But it just goes to show that in some cases, the only way to get any real information is to use a public poll. And while no SDMB poll will ever be scientifically rigorous, a multi-choice private poll is basically useless.
Likewise, if the topic is something to do with sex, or another intimate piece of data, many people are going to flip right past it if the poll is public. In that case, the only way to get anything meaningful from it is to choose private. That’s why two options exist.
People who choose to withhold their opinions in any public poll are perfectly within their rights. But I agree with the folks above saying indiscriminate avoidance of all public polls is nonsensical. There is simply no logic behind refusing to publicly state your jelly preference on a PB&J.
And why anyone would take even a step further to try and block anyone from using a public poll at all is completely beyond me. I don’t see anything here which explains the logic behind that argument. I honestly do wish somebody would explain it, because the only thing I can come up with is “control issues.”
Until this thread, I never realized there were two types of polls.
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Who considers public polls to be “a social faux pas”? What type of person considers public polls to be a “mistake”?
It’s just another poll. People can either chose to participate, or chose to move along. No one is being forced to participate in any kind of poll.
Is this “committed a social faux pas” some kind of Groupthink effort? Oh no! You’ve created a public poll. You must now be told what you can, and can not, do. Failure to follow Groupthink will result in more needless attempts to correct your behavior.