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Guides

Longer reads on what a vote actually measures, on the words that divide us, and on the debates this site settles.

A voting site raises more questions than it settles. Why an online counter does not tell you what a country thinks; why some words stop at an invisible regional border; why a slice of pineapple makes people angry; what happens when an organised community decides to win a ranking. These guides answer those questions, separately from the matches, with sources and without shortcuts.

They are written by hand, reviewed and dated. None is generated automatically, and none tries to settle a debate that is open on the site: their job is to explain the mechanisms, not to hint at an answer. Where a guide draws on existing work — the sociology of food, dialect geography, the history of televised voting — the references appear at the foot of the page, and the date of last verification at the top.

They are also deliberately kept apart from the match pages. A match page tells you what people voted and what the figures currently say; a guide explains the mechanism behind it, and stays true whatever the score does next. That separation is why you will not find the same paragraphs in both places, and why a guide is worth reading once rather than checked daily.

The first of them, on our counting method, is also the most useful to read before voting: it sets out what our counters actually measure, what they do not, the countermeasures we apply against fraud, and the ones we deliberately decided against. Start there if you are wondering what a figure shown here is worth.

📄 Why an online poll is worthless — and how we count voices here What distorts a vote on the internet, and the countermeasures we apply — including the ones that only half work. 📄 The words that divide English speakers Soda, pop or coke; biscuit or cookie; how you say scone — the words that stop at an invisible border. 📄 Why food divides us so much What the sociology of eating says about arguments that begin with "you are not seriously putting that on there". 📄 A short history of public voting, from televoting to fandoms How the public became the judge — and what happens when you really let the internet name something. 📄 Why the next town along always has a bad reputation Why hostility between two cities peaks when they are most alike — and what that does to a counter.