When I want to signal my presence and willingness to communicate, I’ll often literally say “ping.” It works well enough.
Rolling your own protocol is at best useless, and more likely actively off-putting: it adds another layer of inference, one that unlike the cultural standard won’t automatically be dereferenced by the people you’re talking to.
Personally, I tend to use “ping” for online scenarios where I know the people I’m talking to will automatically dereference that layer of inference. Otherwise I just use cultural standards.
Because of the online context, for me “ping” tends to substitute for “Hi” in those scenarios; while it does signal “I’m present and willing to communicate” to recipients, what I mean by it is “I’d like to talk to you; are you available right now? If not, please let me know when you next become available.” Since it’s an inquiry about the other person’s availability, it’s also very analogous to the computer networking meaning of “ping”, which may well make it easier for recipients to infer what I mean when they first see “ping” from me.
Delurked and taken (finally); this is my first comment. I’d been wanting to take this survey for a while, but offline matters kept me away until now. At least I got in a good stab at most of the extra credit questions.
I second the following suggestions:
Clarify the income question on tax status (pre-tax / post-tax / pre-some taxes and post-others) and individual vs. household. I mention the third tax possibility here because some taxes are deducted by the employer, so employees don’t see that money in their paychecks. If the question intended is along the lines of “Other than tax refunds, how much money do you / your household receive (that you can use in a budget and could theoretically spend, although some of it may be set aside for further taxes) in a year?”, then this matters.
Add a “None” option to the mental illness question to distinguish between “none” and “didn’t answer”. Checkboxes would be nice, since mental illnesses can interact with each other, but Yvain has stated that he can’t put them in the survey. I will mention this anyway in case checkboxes become viable for future versions of the survey.
I will also make a further suggestion, although I understand that it may be too onerous to implement: have an option to make only part of one’s responses private. I mention this because I started by choosing the “public but anonymous” option, but switched to “private” once I got to the point that all my responses together could probably identify me out of the dataset if someone was moderately determined to do so and knew a few specific facts about me.
In my case, making a single extra credit section private (showing it as if I hadn’t answered in the public dataset) would have been enough for me to be comfortable putting the remaining responses in the public dataset. That section has data that I don’t mind giving Yvain and CFAR, but don’t want to leave readily available to potential future agents trying to identify my responses in the dataset. I would prefer to make only the single section private, but I did not have that option available. I am also curious if other people are in the same boat.
Should I win, I precommit to spending the prize on myself, as per Yvain’s stated wishes for the prize.