You have probably heard about polls, one of the new feature releases of our amazing Leo Alpha UI. If you have not heard, then you are missing the latest decentralized voting tool making the headlines in the cryptocurrency industry. Polls was recently added to Leo alpha, and you could set up polls right from your compose threads page. I just made this poll below while preparing to publish this post. Click the link below it to respond:
Click here to participate in this poll
I really see Polls on thread as a strong selling point for our marketing project. The potential for new users liking this feature is actually endless. So here are what I think about Leo polls.
Benefits of Polls
The benefits of polls currently on the leo verse are huge. Here are some of them:
Feedback: Every team building a project would definitely appreciate valuable feedback from end users. Polls provide a rich and effective option to know what users think about any project or idea. The Leo team are definitely going to be first beneficiaries of valuable feedback that can easily be gathered through pools. Beyond them, many other projects and teams would appreciate the simple and immutable nature of results done through our polls. Even end-users that want to know what the crowd thinks about any particular subject would find it easer to get such views by setting up a pool for it.
Decentralized voting: This is another big use-case for polls right now. Voting in a fair manner is mostly not possible in centralized systems. On web2 for example, owners of the platform such as Twitter could easily manipulate results to favor a certain result. But here, we have pools whose data is immutably stored on a blockchain. So not parties have the capacity to alter results in any way because one cannot manipulate data already written to the blockchain.
When polls are used to conduct voting or election projects, everyone is rest assured that the results are authentic and free from any third-party manipulations. This is a big potential right now for polls in our ecosystem.
**Polls has a lot of potential for our ecosystem. Here is one of them:
- Partnerships with large organizations: Polls could become a product that will attract partnerships from mainstream organizations. For example, governments of various countries spend millions to prepare and conduct elections, But polls is free. These governments or organizations might decide to use polls instead. And in order to have technical assistance for the process, They might want to partner with the community leadership. In this way, polls will be a product that can draw partnerships.
Helping the global crypto community to adopt polls
Each of us have big work to do to create awareness among the crypto community to adopt and use polls. Some of the things we could do include:
Targeted social media ads: Crypto users are found everywhere in the social media space. The team could design targeted sponsored marketing campaigns for polls, this way we are able to reach out to individual crypto users everywhere.
Crypto Forum admins: There are many well known crypto forums with large userbase. The marketing team could try to establish contact with forum admins and send out proposals to work with these forums. They could allow us publish articles in their forums that all crypto users or members will see. In this way we create awareness for Polls.
Attending crypto events: Another place where crypto users could be found is in crypto events. That include project launching events and others. In these events, representatives could be sent to speak about polls. In this way, more users could get to know polls.
P2P Trading forums: Another place to reach more daily crypto users is in P2P crypto trading platforms. They usually have forums for traders and users. Each one of us that are there should use every opportunity to talk about polls.
Improving the User experience of polls
A lot could be done to make polls better and I think that would make the user experience more awesome.
More educational content about use of threads: There should be available how-to guides on the use of polls. As we are working hard to bring in more users, they need to learn how polls work and how they can set up or participate in polls. More how-to guides will go a long way in helping these new friends understand polls better.
Making polls a DAPP: In the future, I think having polls as a DAPP will go a long way. Mobile users are in their millions. If polls become a DApp on its on, instead of sitting on threads, it would give better user experience.
Integrating polls to other communities
I think the dev these would have work to do here. I believe it is possible to have Polls API which frontends can just plug into their interface and use polls from their interface. If that is done, many new users will be adopted as they will not have to come to threads to respond to or create a poll.
Creating a way to use polls from other frontends will eliminate a lot of challenges to using polls from the Leo interface. For example, users will not have to login to a different interface in order to access polls.
Leo polls Vs Twitter Polls
I tried to look at Leo polls and compare it with Twitter pools. One thing I noticed is that both have a similar way of creating the pools - by clicking an icon on the compose thread/Tweet window. But then, I like the way button used to publish the poll on Leo. Its a self-explanatory button labelled Add Poll. But Twitter used a + icon on the window which not many new users will understand.
Secondly, Leo polls result are stored on the blockchain which cannot be tampered, destroyed or modified. Twitter pools results are stored on a server owned by Twitter. They can manipulate the result to suit what they wants. While creating a poll, you can choose to discontinue. Its easy, just click Discard
Alpha polls hard or easy?
To create a poll on the alpha platform is easy. Just click the button above. To respond to a poll is equally super easy, just click on the option and you confirm the transaction.
The only a little hard part when creating polls is deciding to remove more options. For example, if I wish to create a poll with just 2 options or 3, how can I remove the remaining option boxes? Thats the area I will say its a little hard to do.
How to make a poll in Alpha UI
Its very easy. Once you are logged in, you can take the following steps:
Step 1: Type the title of your Poll as you can see below:
Step 2: Click on the Insert polls icon on the toolsbar. Check Image below:
Step 3: Fill in the options and then click Add poll.
Step 3: Click Thread to publish your poll.
Congratulations, you have published your poll. I did 2 polls for this presentation, wanna see them? Look below, click the links and participate:
Mini Reward: The first 5 persons to respond to the two polls above and reply too, will win 1 Leo each from me.
Lets Do polls!!!!!!!!!
Conclusion
Leo Polls is a revolution in decentralized voting and governance. It is a cheap and efficient means of getting public opinion or conducting an election 100% free from bias.
Lets create awareness for this project and make it a household name on hive.