Polls, quizzes and the question that matters

Picture Monty, a monstera, on the floor of Flat 4B next to three empty pots: terracotta, glazed green and a woven basket. He's outgrown his nursery pot and the repotting is on Saturday. Ask a forum which pot to use and you'll get a paragraph about drainage and no decision.

A lot of what people want to ask other growers isn't a question in the usual sense. "Which pot for Monty?" is a choice, and twenty people tapping one of three photos tells you more than one long comment. Sometimes you know something and want to see who else does, like which of four plants is safe for a cat. And sometimes there's a real problem: a pothos in a north window, stems 30 cm long, leaves only at the tips. For that you want someone who has grown one and seen it happen.

We've written about why Growers exists and how its feed decides what to show. This post goes further into those ways of asking: polls, quizzes and plain questions. How each one works, and what each decision cost.

A poll is a choice, asked out loud

When you write a post in Growers, there's a button under the caption: "Add a poll or quiz". A poll has two to four options. Each one is a few words, up to 40 characters, or a picture from your photo library, so "Which pot?" can show the actual pots. Two options can't say the same thing. A post with a poll doesn't need a photo. A caption and the poll are enough.

Pictures in a poll are handled like any photo you post. The phone re-encodes them, which drops the location hidden in the file, and they're checked before anyone else sees them. The poll's words go through the same check as the post they sit on.

You get one vote, and it's final. The person who asked can't vote on their own poll at all; they watch the results come in instead. That has a cost: a mis-tap stays a mis-tap.

Totals for everyone, shares after you vote

Before you vote, a poll shows how many people have voted, but not how. The line under the options reads something like "23 votes · Ends in 2 days", with "Results after you vote" at the end. Tap an option and the bars fill in with each one's share, the leader in green. Keeping the shares hidden until then means the longest bar can't make the choice for you.

The asker sees the shares from the first vote, and everyone sees them once the poll ends.

Voting is part of Fern Pro, the same as liking, and tapping an option without Pro opens a small note inside the card: "Vote with Fern Pro", and under it, "Voting works like liking. Results show once the poll ends." That second sentence is the trade-off in plain words. Someone reading Growers for free still learns how a poll came out, just later.

In For You, a vote counts toward a post exactly as a like does. A poll gets no lift of its own, so being easy to tap doesn't let it skip the queue.

A vote doesn't need a connection either. Offline, the checkmark on your pick appears straight away, with "Your vote is saved. It's sent when you're back online, then results show." If the poll ends in the meantime, the vote is dropped and the card shows how it finished.

Who can see your vote

Only the person who asked can see who voted for what. The composer tells them before they post: "Only you'll see who voted for what. Everyone else sees totals, after they vote." On their own post they get a "See votes" button ("See answers" on a quiz). It opens each option with its count, its share and its most recent voters, with "Only you can see who voted" at the top. If anyone else asks the server for that list, it answers as if there were nothing there.

Next to each voter's name, the list shows their Helpful line if they have one, such as "Helpful on Pilea". So when most people pick terracotta, the asker can see whether any of them has helped others with monsteras before.

Votes from people you've blocked, or who have blocked you, are left out of every count you see. The asker's list says so: "Votes from growers you've blocked aren't counted or shown." One side effect is that two people looking at the same poll can see slightly different totals. That's what a block means in Growers: the other person doesn't exist for you, and neither do their votes.

How long a poll stays open

It depends on where the poll lives. On a post, you choose "1 day", "3 days" or "1 week", and it's 3 days if you don't. On a question, the poll has no timer; the composer says it ends "When you close the question". A poll on a story ends with the story, after 24 hours. A quiz has no clock either: "Quizzes stay open. Close yours any time from •••."

The ••• menu on your own post has the matching line: "Close the poll", "Close the quiz" or "Close the question". Fern asks once first. For a poll the confirmation reads "No more votes. Everyone sees the final results." For a quiz, "No more answers. Everyone sees the right answer and why."

When a question's poll closes, a green banner goes across the top of the question saying what won, like "Closed · More light won". Closing ends the vote and nothing else. People can still answer the question underneath.

When a post's poll runs out of time, Fern notices within five minutes and sends the asker a notification that starts "Your poll ended" and names the winner, or the tie, or says there were no votes. Votes along the way are grouped into one line per poll in Activity, with at most one new line an hour, and they stay in the app unless you ask for a push.

Quizzes: a poll that knows the answer

Switch the composer from Poll to Quiz and it asks for one more thing: "Tap the circle next to the right answer." You can add a short explanation, up to 140 characters, which is "Shown to everyone after they answer".

Picture a quiz asking which of four plants is safe for cats, with peperomia as the right answer. Answer it and the card tells you at once. A right answer turns green, with "Right!" and a small burst of leaves. A wrong one turns terracotta and says "Not quite. It's Peperomia". Then comes the why, and how many people got it right, as in "68% got it right".

The right answer isn't sent to your phone until you've answered. A quiz that only hid its answer on screen could be read by anyone watching the app's network traffic, so the server holds it back until your answer is in.

Quizzes can go on posts and stories, never on questions. Try it and the composer says "A question can carry a poll, not a quiz." Our roadmap puts it this way: a question asks, a quiz knows. Someone posting a question doesn't have a right answer to mark yet.

There's no quiz score on a profile, and no streak for right answers.

The question that matters

Polls and quizzes are the lighter side of Growers. The plain question about a plant in trouble has the most machinery behind it.

When a question is published with a species on it, Fern looks for people who grow that species, meaning they have one in their own garden in Fern. It leaves out the asker, anyone blocked either way, anyone who has said "Not now" to this question, and anyone whose Growers profile isn't active. People with Helpful answers on that species go first. Up to 20 of them get a line in Activity saying who asked about which plant, and that they grow one. Nobody gets more than three of these a day.

A question without a species isn't sent to anyone this way. It still reaches feeds like any other post, but nobody is asked about it directly. That's the cost of routing by plant: someone who can't name their plant loses the most direct way to reach people who could.

The same idea runs through For You. A question becomes a "Can you help?" card when you grow its plant, it's less than 48 hours old and it has two answers or fewer. The card gives the reason, like "You grow Pothos", and has two buttons: Answer and Not now. These questions are lifted in your feed by 1.8 times, or 2.2 times if you've had Helpful answers on that plant before. Not now means it won't come back to you, in the feed or in Activity.

Fern is strict about what counts as an answer here. It's a comment from someone other than the asker, at the top level of the thread, so the asker's own follow-ups don't take a question out of anyone's "Can you help?" cards. A question with no answers fades from feeds more slowly than other posts: its freshness halves every 72 hours instead of every 36. And while a new question is being tried on small audiences, each answer counts 8 points toward it going further, and a Helpful mark counts 15. A like counts 3.

A question can carry a poll too, for when you've narrowed things down. In the composer, "Your question is the poll's question", so there's nothing extra to write. The pothos from the start might ask "Leggy pothos: what would you do?" with "Prune it back", "More light" and "Add a moss pole". The answers below explain, and the poll counts.

Helpful, and a reputation that stays quiet

Only the person who asked can mark an answer Helpful. They pick one per question and can change it later. The "Mark as helpful" button shows only for them, next to answers that aren't their own. The chosen answer moves to the top of the thread on a soft green background, labelled "Helpful · picked by" and the asker's handle, and its author hears that someone "found your answer helpful".

Picking a Helpful answer doesn't need Fern Pro. Neither does closing your own poll or seeing who voted on it. Posting and voting are part of Pro; thanking someone and finishing what you started are free.

Each mark adds to a small record on the answerer's profile: how many Helpful answers they've given, and up to three plants they were on. It shows as one line, and it matters in more places than it shows. It puts them first when a question about one of those plants is routed, and lifts "Can you help?" cards higher in their feed. On a species page, it sorts them near the top of the growers.

None of it adds up to a score on a profile. The closest Growers comes to ordering people is the Growers map, where an area's "Top growers" are listed by what they've given, and a Helpful answer counts for more there than a post or a like.

The weak point is that Helpful is one person's judgement. An asker can't always tell a right answer from a confident one, and Fern doesn't check the advice behind the mark. Because the mark feeds routing, a confident wrong answer that gets picked also puts its author, if they grow that plant, first in line for the next question about it.

What we left out

Some limits are part of the design. A vote can't be changed. A question can't carry a quiz. Nobody but the asker sees who voted for what.

Some things are only later. Our roadmap has Fern's own quizzes, starting with a weekly "Guess the plant", and a way to close a story's quiz before the story ends, which today you can't do.

What we haven't settled

Should the person voting be told who will see their pick? Today the asker is told, in the composer, that only they will see who voted for what. The card a voter taps doesn't say it.

Should a quiz end on its own? Quizzes stay open until the asker closes them, so a good one keeps working long after it's posted. That also means a reader without Pro, who can't answer, may never see the right answer.

Is Helpful-first routing too narrow? We send questions to people with Helpful answers first and cap everyone at three a day. In a small community the same few people could end up with most of the questions about a plant, and we don't know yet whether the cap spreads them out enough.

On the list for later is Fern asking a question of its own, the weekly "Guess the plant". Until then, every poll and quiz in Growers is one grower asking the others what they think, or what they know.