How many of those 310,000 evens till go to r/cooking? This is like some app promoting it self based on total users instead of active users.

Given a population of 310,000 and a sample size of 230 you would have 95% confidence that 91% +/- 7% of your userbase is in support of shutting down the subreddit with your numbers.

So yes, you can draw a conclusion of support from that. This is how polling works.

If it was an independent sampling, maybe. Which it absolutely was not.

Hey, not much different from US federal elections!

From what I saw the shutdowns began on Friday evening and subs started coming back on the Saturday morning (EST, and it was a holiday weekend in the US).

As it was a spur of the moment thing, subreddit mods couldn't have polled users for more than an hour or two or the momentum would've been lost

Yeah, that comes across as a hand-waving dismissal. 203 out of 230 voters in a one hour window in a community of 31,000 is -not- indicative of consensus, no matter how you slice or dice it.

Aggrieved users are welcome to take it up with the mods of /r/cooking, or make their own spinoff sub - that's the beauty of reddit.

Can't edit my original post, so here will have to do.

Do you honestly think that every sub which went dark for a few hours (when a large percentage of their users were probably asleep) should've held a week long 'should we go private or not?' poll?