IMO the trend is users with <100 karma posting Ask HNs. If you watch the newest page, nearly every single Ask HN (or other text submissions) are all by brand new users or people with otherwise a very low amount of karma. It's like they've all been introduced to something new and want to try it out. Some new users only post Ask HNs.
At least with polls it's either not obvious how you create them or the karma threshold required to pass is incredibly high.
I do not want to make it personal but I like ASK HN and I post ASK HN quite often. Ask HN is something that I guess was here long before I joined HN and it will be here for long time. Polls rarely initiate interesting discussion. This is the nature of a Poll unfortunately. Asking questions or advice is in the core of HN IMO.
Yes, I see now that you do post a lot of them. Text posts are not bad. I like that we have this feature. I use them on the rare occasion myself, but everything is good in moderation (so they say). A constant flood of Ask HNs has brought cause to make the threshold of up-votes required to front-page an Ask HN higher than a normal post. This means that people with worthy questions or review my startup type posts have a higher chance of getting washed aside when the people who do care about those posts aren't all surfing HN during that short window of opportunity. So basically it's a feature that I think gets used too often for too trivial of things. I don't want to risk getting too personal here, but most of your Ask HNs are too trivial of things. Questions that are just as easily satisfied by Google.
Edit: To be clear though, when I made that original comment to you I hadn't looked at your account, so the comment wasn't actually directed at you.
I did not take it personally-as if it was an insult. Just I did not want to talk about my behavior or my abuse of the ask feature. I agree with your points about the Ask HN feature. A reasonable user of HN will learn to regulate the tendency to post trivialities(as you pointed I am the first to plead guilty on that :)- even though Google or other resources such as libraries, doctors, lawyers, can satisfy all types of questions). Many worthy posts are washed aside(in News or in Ask) because the site becomes more popular or because more people tend to submit posts massively.
Glad we see eye to eye. Equally glad you didn't take it personally, because I tend to come off has kind of brash at times. Especially if it's somehow related to upholding my view of the HN standard. ;)
EDIT: I am not talking about this one of course