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But that is exactly what we do by upvoting, statistically. There is a body of prior work to look at. Our collective stance on oss or mass surveillance is clear, and you can infer the resulting upvotes with certainty, statistically (might actually be a fun game).

The spirit of hn has clear biases and it's not equally open-minded towards all ideas.

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A tiny subset of the site's users have accounts to vote with, and even less make use of it let alone make comments. Any guess about the "average" would be quite inaccurate. The stance of a vocal minority on X can be quite clear on a given thread, but even that is just the opinion of maybe 20-40 people.

And this is assuming there is no point manipulation at play, which is not the case for any popular site. In my opinion points alone can't be taken for more than a slight grain of salt.

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