Folder Survey ’23 - RESULTS

[Capt'n Boatsalot]

Good survey, thanks Bolster!

[standy99]

Filled out survey….

If there was a forum knife in 2023 I would be happy with a Uptern with my forum name Spyderco engraved on the side

[yablanowitz]

Done. That should mess up your metrics.

[Unluckycharm]

Completed and interested in the results. Might be an outlier, we shall see. Great survey and great idea!

[sn0wman72]

Thanks for putting this together. It will be really interesting to see the results

[Sharp Guy]

I looked at it but didn't fill it out because I like a wide variety and no real preferences. It's well done though

[SpyderNut]

Done. Thanks for putting this together. Should make for an interesting study!

[Naperville]

Although you did not ask, I love Native Chiefs. If they made a folder that was 4.5 to 5 inches long that would look like a well proportioned Native Chief, I'd buy it.

[R100]

Thanks Bolster. My difficulty was that I like such a wide range of knives, handles, steels etc. it's hard to make just one choice for a lot of those questions. "It depends" would have been a good option for me!

Dan

[steelcity16]

Done! Cool survey!

[brancron]

That was a great survey, thanks! I look forward to seeing the results.

[Bolster]

Thanks for taking the survey, friends. Several of the questions are difficult for me also. They force me to make choices that are maybe 49 on one side and 51 on the other. I’m very evenly split on my favorite locking mechanism, on price range, and even my answer on corrosion resistance moves around as I think of one use and then another—the “in general” part is difficult because it requires a sort of mental averaging. I once had a professor who told me that a good survey is always a little bit painful to answer.

Responses are better and faster than expected. Evening of Jan 19 and we’re up to 131 responses which is great.

Nerdy introspection follows, please skip, if this is not your thing: When determining sufficient sample size and creating confidence intervals, it’s important to know what population the sample is generalizing to. I think the sample generalizes to “active forumites,” but that’s a bit difficult to define, since I don’t actually know the number of active forumites! I know that of several days ago, the number of registered users on the forum was a whopping 31,451. But I’m certain only a small fraction of those are active. Another approach is to draw a line artificially under a certain number of postings. Certainly forumites with 1000 postings are (or were) “active.” In that case, the number is about 340. But there are active forumites who don’t have 1000 postings, and some high-post-count forumites don’t post any more, so are inactive. So I’m stumped regards how to determine the size of “active forumites.” Any ideas on how to obtain that number? Not knowing doesn’t stop the research but it does help determine when enough people have answered that we can have some confidence the answers are representative.

[ladybug93]

instead of placing a number on it, i would just consider everyone that responds an active member. if they weren't active, they wouldn't be seeing the survey or responding.

[Mushroom]

The number of unregistered guests browsing the forum always largely outnumbers the registered members. Always.

I would assume the majority of responses are from people lurking, “guests,” or unregistered users.

[AH80s]

Done.

[aicolainen]

Thanks for taking on the effort, Bolster! Quite curious about the results. Looking forward to seeing some nerdy graphs at the end of this :)

[JD Spydo]

I did just complete that survey. I did find some of the questions to be a good guide for the types of knives that many of us tend to gravitate toward. It also made me think really hard as to which features on folding knives are most important to me.

I wish there would have been more questions regarding fully serrated blades. I also wish that there would have been more questions about blade steel preferences. But that's OK because it was still a good overview of what we all use our Spyderco folders for on a daily basis. We should do more surveys in the future about various aspects of our use of Spyderco knives. Maybe fixed blades in the next go-around.

[kennbr34]

Kind of feels like question #14 should have been multiple choice

[Matus]

Done, curios to see the results

[ladybug93]

The number of unregistered guests browsing the forum always largely outnumbers the registered members. Always.

I would assume the majority of responses are from people lurking, “guests,” or unregistered users.

interesting. i hadn't thought of that. now it kind of feels like a dinner party we're all having and there's just a few thousand people watching us through the windows.