> They shut downs of other subs was overwhelmingly supported by the users.
r/Cooking went down. They had a vote, and 209 out of 230 people voted to go dark. That sounds like an overwhelming majority! But when you realize that the subreddit has 310,000 subscribers, it means that it went dark because less than 0.1% of the subscribers wanted it to. You can't draw any conclusion of support from that.
Given a population of 310,000 and a sample size of 230 you would have 95% confidence that 91% +/- 7% of your userbase is in support of shutting down the subreddit with your numbers.
So yes, you can draw a conclusion of support from that. This is how polling works.
From what I saw the shutdowns began on Friday evening and subs started coming back on the Saturday morning (EST, and it was a holiday weekend in the US).
As it was a spur of the moment thing, subreddit mods couldn't have polled users for more than an hour or two or the momentum would've been lost
Yeah, that comes across as a hand-waving dismissal. 203 out of 230 voters in a one hour window in a community of 31,000 is -not- indicative of consensus, no matter how you slice or dice it.
Can't edit my original post, so here will have to do.
Do you honestly think that every sub which went dark for a few hours (when a large percentage of their users were probably asleep) should've held a week long 'should we go private or not?' poll?
r/Cooking went down. They had a vote, and 209 out of 230 people voted to go dark. That sounds like an overwhelming majority! But when you realize that the subreddit has 310,000 subscribers, it means that it went dark because less than 0.1% of the subscribers wanted it to. You can't draw any conclusion of support from that.