Lately I've been getting a lot of "we'd love to get your feedback about the [Product you purchased or Event you attended]. Please take at few moments and fill out our survey at ..." request emails. Usually they have the carrot of some trivial low-value prize. Other times they exhort you to help make the world a better place by giving some feedback.

There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I enjoyed filling out these surveys, and I actually participated. I really, truly felt that I was helping improve events and products, and generally making the world a better place. And hey, there's a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of winning a $10 Amazon coupon!

It was on someone else's time anyways (most of these are sent to employees at workplaces who are more likely to give up 15 minutes or more for some random survey), so why not?

Nowadays I never fill out online surveys - I've become too jaded about them. All opinion companies pull the same gross abuse-of-trust scam, which is the old "tell you that it's only a couple of minutes, but really it's 20 pages long with 10 questions on each page, with absolutely no indicator of how far you are. Ha ha ha sucker!". Of course they're hoping that once you've committed the time for the first 4 pages, you're going to keep pushing yourself to finish what you started. "Okay...fine...just one more set of questions," until you've burned 45 minutes of your time to help an opinion company get a commission.