Methodology

A percentage on Optants is arithmetic over votes that real people cast. There are no seeded tallies, no simulated participants, and no placeholder figures anywhere in the product. A new question launches at zero and stays there until someone votes.

This is a constraint in the codebase, not a policy we remember to follow: totals are derived from the vote ledger at read time, so there is no counter for anyone to set by hand.

Voting discloses nothing. You can choose to say how you voted — by weighing in, which publishes your statement with the option you picked — and that option is only ever offered after you have voted and seen the result, so the possibility of disclosure never hangs over the choice itself. An unobserved choice is what keeps a margin honest.

You do not need an account to vote, and you never will. We will never ask who you are as the price of a preference — no name, no email, no signing up, and nothing that ties a ballot back to a person.

We may check that a voter is a distinct person, and that is a different thing from knowing which person. Any such check answers one question — is this one human — returns nothing that can be joined to a ballot, and is described on this page before it ships rather than after.

The sides are dealt evenly, too: which option appears on the left is balanced across visitors, so neither side of a matchup inherits the small advantage that comes with being read first. Your own view of a question stays put — the balancing happens across the crowd, not under your cursor.

Optants has no rating system. There is no ELO, no skill estimate, no Bayesian smoothing, no recency decay, no confidence adjustment. Where we show which option is ahead, that is a direct count of head-to-head choices within a defined pool — and it is recalculated from the votes each time it is read, never stored as a score.

We also never infer a comparison nobody made. If two options have not been put against each other, we do not estimate what would have happened.

The same restraint applies to people. Your record here is a ledger of things you did — questions answered, positions held — never a reputation number, karma, level or rank.

What you see is not personalized. There is no recommendation engine, no profiling of your interests, and no ordering that reacts to your behavior. Every visitor is served the same questions in the same order, and editorial prominence — our own judgment about what is worth asking — is a single global setting, visible in its effects to everyone equally.

Where we publish a result broken down by group, every figure comes from information people volunteered about themselves. We never infer who you are from your device, your address or your behavior, every field is optional, and none of it is ever a condition of voting.

A breakdown is published only when every cell within it clears a minimum of 50 votes. Below that the slice is withheld entirely rather than shown thinly — small cells are how an aggregate stops being an aggregate and starts identifying somebody. That floor is enforced inside the database, so no page, query or future feature can quietly lower it.

One vote per question, per voter — enforced in the database rather than by trust. A unique index and a single-pick check reject a second ballot outright; there is no path through the site, or around it, that adds one.

What “a voter” means here, precisely: your account if you are signed in, and otherwise the browser you voted from. Someone determined to vote twice can clear their browser and do it. We would rather say that plainly than claim a guarantee no accountless system can honestly make — because the only way to make it airtight is to demand identity before a preference, and that is the trade Optants exists to refuse. You do not have to tell us who you are to tell us what you think.

Changing your answer replaces your earlier one — it does not add a second. The tally always reflects where people currently stand.

If we find votes that were not cast by real people, we remove them — and when a removal moves a published number, we say so: what went, when, and why. Taking out a ballot nobody cast is not an adjustment to the count; it is the count. We would rather correct in the open than defend a total we know is wrong, and we will never remove a vote for being the answer we did not want.

Optants measures the people who chose to answer. It is not a representative poll of any country or population, it is not weighted to match census demographics, and no result here should be read as a projection of what everyone thinks. It is an honest count of a self-selected group — which is exactly what it says it is, and nothing more.