Is there any interest in regular short Tildes surveys?

Bauke
2026-04-16T17:59:05Z

I've been thinking about the demographics surveys recently and how they usually draw a good reception, but are difficult to compile in a privacy-minded way and finally visualize the data. I think the 2024 survey never ended up getting its results published?

So I thought maybe instead of one big yearly survey we could organize smaller weekly or monthly surveys that ask one or a couple questions at a time. And then while the current survey is running the question+answers for the next survey could be plannedy out. And the questions could be about anything and not just demographics related things.

In terms of technical setup I've been using a self-hosted n8n instance for a while and with tinkering around with it I've come up with a decent proof of concept to make these surveys happen via n8n's Form nodes. This makes it so all the data is in our own control and it's just a matter of building out any visualizations we may want.

And at the end of a survey the data could be anonymized and published so any further analysis can be done by whoever wants to.

One other thing I've come up with is a way to "authenticate" responses so we can know when a response was made by a real Tildes user. In the survey flow the server can generate a UUID and give it to the user to put in their profile bio. Then we scrape the user's bio and check if that UUID is present and now we know that yes, this is a real user. And then the UUID can be removed again from the user's bio (so it can't be linked back to them). This would also enable us to not have to save usernames at all (yay privacy). Edit: this would be entirely optional if it were to be added. There would be no requirements to fill in the survey unless we start seeing a bunch of spam or bogus responses.

What do you Tildoes think? That's what we settled on right? Is this something you'd be interested in?

Edit: Since the topic has a good amount of votes I quickly set up a server and a form to collect questions for anyone that has ideas! :)

-> https://survey.tildes.community/form/submit-your-question

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~talk/1tqp/is_there_any_interest_in_regular_short_tildes_surveys

Votes: 35

Comments: 17