Which fandoms Jev can read

On polls inside hobby and fan subreddits (r/Berserk, r/Naruto, r/thebachelor, r/Kanye...), which communities' votes does Jev guess best?

result8,335 questions

Inside fan communities, Jev guesses the winning option in 50% of polls, where a random guess gets 31%. It reads r/Berserk best (73%, chance 37%), then r/rpg and r/dragrace (58%, chance 28%), and barely beats chance on r/thebachelor (33%, chance 27%), r/Kanye (43%, chance 34%) and r/OnePunchMan (45%, chance 34%).

1. r/Berserk36%

2. r/rpg31%

3. r/dragrace29%

4. r/Naruto28%

5. r/DemonSlayerAnime27%

6. r/Sneakers25%

7. r/DCcomics25%

8. r/transformers24%

9. r/mechanicalkeyboards23%

10. r/Mario23%

How to read this: The ten communities where Jev beats a random guess by the widest margin. Each bar is Jev's share of winning options named minus what a random guess would get in that community.

8,335 polls in 30 communities with 40+ polls; 90% interval [0.486, 0.504].

In short

Across 8,335 fan polls in 30 subreddits, Jev names the winning option about half the time, against 31% for a random guess.
Some of the best-read communities are small (r/rpg has 53 polls, r/dragrace 59), while r/thebachelor's weak 33% rests on 341.
This tests predicting the fans' vote, not knowledge of the subject; insiders often vote against a work's general reputation.

What the data shows

If those kids could read they'd be very upset meme: which r/thebachelor poll won

Half the polls, against 31% by chance, across all 30 communities.
Best read: r/Berserk, the manga community (73%, chance 37%), then tabletop RPG players (r/rpg) and Drag Race fans (58% each, chance 28%).
Barely above chance: The Bachelor (33%, chance 27%), Kanye West fans (43%, chance 34%), One-Punch Man fans (45%, chance 34%).

What it means, and what it doesn't

Jev's knowledge of fan opinion is real but uneven. Communities built around a long-running, much-discussed work (Berserk) are the easiest to read; communities built around an ongoing show or a living artist, where the polls are about the latest episode or album, are the hardest, likely because many of those polls concern things after Jev's training.

It doesn't measure how much Jev knows about each subject in general, only whether it can predict the fans' vote.

Caveats

Some polls are about things after Jev's training. Fan polls about a new episode, season or album can concern events Jev never read about, and those are unwinnable. This probably hurts fast-moving communities (a reality show, an active artist) most.
Communities differ in size and style. Only polls with 50 or more votes were kept; hobby polls are smaller than general ones (the median is 272 votes), so a single poll can be decided by a few dozen fans.
Each community is its own crowd. Fans of a series vote as insiders, often against the general reputation. That's the point of the test, but it means "guessing wrong" here can mean "guessing what outsiders think".

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes75%
Does it describe you?: No59%
Would you have predicted it?: No65%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is reasonable
How much should a reader rely on it?: Moderately
Which caveat matters most?: Each community is its own crowd54%

Why ask this

Every fandom has inside opinions: the best arc, the worst contestant, the album real fans rank first. Those opinions are niche knowledge that shows up in a model's training data very unevenly, heavy for some communities and nearly absent for others.

So a simple test tells you something about Jev's cultural coverage: in which communities can it guess what the fans voted for, and where does it do no better than picking at random?

How this was done

The people and the data

Native Reddit polls, the kind where a member posts a question and the community clicks an option, from 35 hobby and fan subreddits (anime, games, rap artists, TV shows, tabletop games, sneakers, mechanical keyboards and more). They were collected from Arctic Shift, a public Reddit archive, for 2020 to 2024, each with its final vote counts. Only polls with at least 50 votes were kept (the median has 272). Polls flagged as political were dropped, and so were polls tied to a particular season, episode, chapter or upcoming release, and forecasts like "who will win", though a filter can't catch every poll about recent events. The comparison covers communities with at least 40 polls: 30 communities, 8,335 polls, from 45 in r/Sneakers to 587 in r/OnePunchMan.

What Jev was asked

Each poll as posted, with its options, asking what most people would say. For example, from a Kingdom Hearts fan community:

Which Kingdom Hearts handheld game do you think was the best?
recoded ds · 358 2 days ds · birth by sleep psp · dream drop distance 3ds

(Poll options were stored as short labels, so Jev saw them in this plain form.)

The fans picked Birth by Sleep (57%); so did Jev, narrowly (40%, against 34% for 358/2 Days).

How it was measured

For each community, how often Jev's guess names the option that got the most votes, against what a random guess would get (one divided by the number of options).

Where these questions live

8,335 questions across 18 topics of the map; the 16 biggest are shown. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Every question

All 8,335 questions behind this result, the telling ones first: the examples the analysis points to, then the ones where Jev misses, biggest gap first.

Jev’s own answer

Showing 0 of 8,335