2017 Gene Expression reader survey


Since I’m finally getting settled in here, I thought it was a good time to do a reader survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MW3YFZH.

So it’s open. You can only take it once, but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. There are 30 questions but the first 20 are mostly demographic and should go very quickly (e.g., your age, your sex, your race), and the last 10 are not difficult either (if you don’t know if you are a deontologist or consequentalist on ethics, don’t answer). Many are now of the form where you can answer more than one option.

I basically took the template of last year’s survey, made several changes, removing some questions and adding some. Also, I stole a few from Slate Star Codex.

You can read the non-text answers of the 2016 survey here.

In the middle of May I will the raw data (no-IP) and post it here so others can analyze if they want.

Addendum 1: Since I don’t know where else to put this, I have noticed an increase in referrals through my Amazon links. So that’s much appreciated. Obviously I’m not really getting paid much for blogging or doing the sysadmin activities, but it’s definitely going to covering overages from VPS traffic or anything like that. Remember, even if you don’t buy directly through the link I still get a referral if you are on Amazon during a session and buy something different.

Addendum 2: Forgot to mention. I’ve been doing reader surveys since 2004. The final tally of the number of people who fill the survey is always between 300 and 500, invariant of how much traffic I received (my traffic has varied about an order of magnitude over the years). It is curious to me that this “core readership” (as I perceive it) is about the same size as a Roman cohort.