this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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I still don't get why I can't opt in to participate in the survey every month, I've only been asked twice in the last three years on Arch
Because thats not how good stats works. They want random samples to draw actual stats from.
Volunteering ruins the point.
They could just pull the stats from every system
privacy issue
censuses only have marginally better results than random sampling
Probably. But it'd 50x the cost of the tool. And for only marginally better results.
Would pushing a request through steam to participate in the survey realistically increase cost?
The notification would be negligible in cost, but the collation and processing of that collected data would not.
We're talking about ~5c worth of energy...
And, in your professional opinion, how much in compute, database, network, and storage costs? We mutli AZ, with some offsite backup or nah? We got a test version of this stack with some junk type-correct data? You 50x the dataset, you 50x all of that.
Look. I’m not saying its gonna bankrupt Valve of all companies. But its clear that people replying have 0 idea about how much hosting 4 9’s available, resilient, reliable, web tooling costs.
Yeah, you have a point, but still, twice in three years? I don't know how representative it really is, ESPECIALLY when you see 50-100% ups and downs in the Linux user base. 5 to 3 percent and back cannot be the actual stat, that has to be unreliable selection of users.
It happens when they survey China. I don’t know why China isn’t included in the regular survey runs, but if they know the parameters of their surveying, they can make more accurate analysis of it than us.
steam has at least 130 million monthly active users
a margin of error of 1% (resulting in a range of 3–5%) is very, very good