Guessing the winner of 50,000 Reddit polls

Across 50,000 r/polls questions (bath or shower, cats or dogs, favorite season), how often does Jev guess which option most voters picked, and on what topics does it read them worst?

result50,475 questions

Jev names the winning option in 60% of 50,475 Reddit polls, where a random guess would get 34%, and 71% when the winner is clear. It reads voters best on food (73% on cuisines, where chance is 24%) and history, and worst on money and investing (45%, chance 36%), sacrificial dilemmas and personality polls.

0%25%50%75%100%

money / investing

values / sacrificial dilemmas

personality / type

history / figures

food / baking sweets

food / cuisines

Jevpeople

How to read this: One row per topic, the three Jev reads worst at the top and the three it reads best at the bottom. The magenta square is how often Jev named the winner, the ink diamond (labeled "people") what a random guess would get on those polls, and the dashed line Jev's overall rate, 60%.

50,475 polls over 118 topics with 40+ polls; 90% interval [0.596, 0.603]. Jev's own answer matches the winner 56% of the time, a little less than its guess.

In short

Jev has a working picture of everyday preferences: it names the winner of Reddit polls well above chance, and more often still when voters agree strongly.
The picture is sharpest where tastes are widely shared (food, history) and thinnest where answers depend on a person's circumstances or temperament (money, hard moral trade-offs, personality).
The voters are young, online Redditors, so matching them is not the same as knowing what most people think.

What the data shows

Success Kid meme: Guessing the r/polls winner: 60% (chance 34%). Food polls: 73%. — Guessing the r/polls winner: 60% (chance 34%). Food polls: 73%.

60% winners named, against 34% by chance. When one option won by at least 20 points, 71%.
Best on food and history. 73% on cuisines (chance 24%), 80% on baking and sweets (chance 37%), 70% on historical figures (chance 28%).
Worst on money, dilemmas and personality. 45% on investing (chance 36%), 59% on sacrificial dilemmas (chance 43%), 54% on personality polls (chance 38%).
Its own answer does a little worse. Jev's own pick matches the winner 56% of the time, a bit less than its guess of most people.

What it means, and what it doesn't

Jev has a working model of everyday preferences: well above chance across tens of thousands of trivial questions. Where people agree for widely shared reasons (what tastes good, who mattered in history), it reads them best. Where answers depend on personal circumstance or a particular community's attitude (money, hard moral trade-offs, self-descriptions), its picture is thinner.

It doesn't mean Jev knows "people" in general: these are Reddit voters, and a guess that matches them may not match anyone else.

Caveats

Reddit is not "most people". The voters are r/polls users: mostly young, online and English-speaking, and they vote on whatever reaches the front of the subreddit. Jev was asked what "most people" would say, which is a different crowd.
Joke options and small polls. Reddit polls often include a joke answer, which can win or split the vote. Only polls with 100 or more votes were kept, but a close result on a small poll is still partly noise.
Topics are the project's grouping. Each poll was placed in a topic of the project's question map automatically; a poll can land in a topic that fits it only loosely, and topics with fewer than 40 polls aren't compared.
Politics left out. A content filter hides political and sensitive polls from the site, and they aren't counted here.

Jev on this experiment

Would a person find it interesting to read?: Yes81%
Does it describe you?: No55%
Would you have predicted it?: No59%
How fair is the comparison?: The comparison is reasonable
How much should a reader rely on it?: Mostly
Which caveat matters most?: Reddit is not "most people"74%

Why ask this

r/polls is a Reddit community where people post simple questions with a few answers and everyone votes: bath or shower, cats or dogs, favorite season, would you give up your phone for a million dollars. It's the largest open record of everyday preferences with real vote counts attached.

A model that talks to millions of people carries a picture of "most people" around with it. Guessing poll winners across tens of thousands of polls shows where that picture is detailed and where it's thin.

How this was done

The people and the data

Native Reddit polls from r/polls, posted from 2020 to 2024 and collected from Arctic Shift, a public Reddit archive, each with its archived vote counts. This project kept polls with a single clear question, two to six options and at least 100 votes, and a content filter set aside political and sensitive ones: 50,475 polls remain, spread over more than a hundred topics, 118 of them with the 40 or more polls needed to compare. The voters are whoever was browsing the subreddit: mostly young, online and English-speaking.

What Jev was asked

Each poll exactly as posted, with its options, asked two ways: what Jev itself would pick, and what it thinks most people would say. For example:

Do you prefer swimming in salt water or fresh water?
salt water · fresh water

279 people voted on that one: 77% fresh water.

How it was measured

Jev's guess of what most people would say is checked for whether it names the option that got the most votes. Because polls have different numbers of options, Jev's hit rate is compared with what a random guess would get (one divided by the number of options). The same is done per topic, for topics with at least 40 polls.

Where these questions live

50,475 questions across 937 topics of the map; the 16 biggest are shown. Each opens on the map with every question in it.

Every question

All 50,475 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

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