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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

/r/minecraft has 5 million subs.

17k people voted > 59% on go full private. So 10k people decided over 5 million. Sure there are powerusers and casuals, lurkers who never comment etc. but to say that it's a "community decision" is far from truth when you can't even make 1% to vote

https://www.reddit.com/r/minecraft

https://i.imgur.com/qYbUaWT.png

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"17k people voted > 59% on go full private. So 10k people decided over 5 million. "

No, because everyone of those 5 million had the option to participate. They choose not to, likely because the did not know/care enough.

So the active users decided - and they are the ones making the community alive. Communities are made up of living, active beings - not lurkers. And even they had the same vote.

(Nothing against lurking, I never participated in reddit communities, but got enough information there)

I create a new Reddit user every few years, to reduce traceability. I never unsub the accounts I abandon. Not sure the 5M figure is even relevant.

https://subredditstats.com/r/minecraft

2k comments per day suggests an engagement-DAU of less than 2k. Suggesting the 17k might at least be more than those that actively comment. (Though it would be cool to see votes/day as a metric.)

How many of that 5 million are actually active users, though. I don't mean power users. I mean users that post/comment with some frequency greater than "rarely" and browse regularly. I'd bet the vast majority are users who come in to ask a single question or make a comment in one thread that caught their attention, and then never engage with the subreddit again.

clicking subscribe does not make you an active community member of a subreddit. JFYI

If that’s the number of people who participated in the previous poll, why would a new one have a different population of voters?

If we’re going by this idea that “only power users vote” it’s similarly hard for me to imagine a casual viewer reading the details of some Reddit-proposed poll and not just exclaiming “reddits broken” and bouncing.

So like voting works almost everywhere? It's decided based on who shows up? Most countries don't have any concept of quorum for votes. I've seen local elections get decided by 1-2 votes with something like 70%+ of people not voting. This happens with all votes. If you don't care enough to vote then you can't complain later.

I don't find your argument compelling at all. Just like democracy, we don't force people to vote. The results are indicative of the will of the people who care enough about the nation or subreddit to vote. If the standard were that at least half of the entire population had to vote in the same direction for anything to change, nothing would ever change. "Only" 81 million people voted for Biden, out of a total population of 332M adults. That's only 24%. Are you really arguing that Biden should not have been elected? Of course not.

>I don't find your argument compelling at all. Just like democracy, we don't force people to vote.

I mean I live in a country where voting is compulsory and there is nothing wrong with that. Better than the 1% deciding (and a lot of countries have a threshold to make votes valid)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting

How would this work on Reddit, exactly?

If you are subbed to a sub make the vote forced when you visit the sub? Not just a pinned post with a link burried somewhere.

OK but i am 100% positive at least half, speaking super conservatively, of those 5 million, have come and gone years ago. 5 million subscribers does not mean that 5 million people have even visited Reddit in the last 10 years.

You're ignoring that the vast majority of /r/minecraft's 5 million subscribers are not active daily. Over the last six months, they've received roughly 2,500 comments per day and around 600-700 posts per day. Even if all of those were unique users, that's still just a fraction of the people who voted to close which is just a fraction of the total subscriber count.

Anecdotally, I have 3 accounts subscribed to that sub and I've made just one comment there in the last 3 months. I open the actual sub maybe once a week and that is generally through Relay, a third party app.

There are likely millions of subscribers who have not visited that sub in the last year.

<1% of a subreddit's subscribers actually engaging is par for most large subreddits in my experience.

From their roots they used sockpuppets to make the site seem like it had more users than it did. I consider this fact as a counterexample to your words.

5 of those are my suspended accounts

What else can you do?

Not framing these extreme decisions as being community backed.

I mean, how do you propose getting a quorum then? What is your definition of a community? What about lurkers, they're ~90%?

I don’t know, but that’s besides the point. Does 59% of 1% of subscribers signify a community decision? Maybe action should not have been taken since there wasn’t a quorum.

The fact is that they are, and thinking otherwise demonstrates that you don't fully understand how most people on reddit utilize subscriptions. Subscribing to a subreddit is most frequently done so that posts from it can occasionally appear on your front page and nothing more. I would think of the community as the group of people that actually post and comment in a subreddit, and I fully believe that to be <1% of subscribed users.

If they chose not to vote that's on them. It doesn't matter what percentage of people voted, it matters what percentage of the votes that were received went to each choice. It's like how the right wing keeps winning elections because most lefties don't vote.

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