This may be the case in San Francisco. It's not the case elsewhere, however, at least for this anecdotal sample size of one. :)
Could we stop shutting down opinions using the sample size argument? It's one of the weakest arguments you can make:
'I think different so your opinion isn't valid because anecdote!'
'Oh you don't agree with my opinion? Well that's not valid either because anecdote!'
Not every discussion is capable of having prior polling as evidence (polling has its own issues with bias anyways). A highly voted on comment has >> 1 people who share the same sentiment and the beauty of sites like these is highly up-voted comments bubble to the top.
While we're ignoring the very specific statistical requirement to have at least a minimum of a significance level, could we please stop using the faux-grammatical prepositional-because?
Regarding upvotes as a proxy for "me too": an upvote doesn't mean "me too" in many cases, it means "this comment was something I thought contributed to the discussion in a meaningful way." Thus using upvotes as a proxy for a sample size counter, isn't even remotely accurate because upvotes do not necessarily correlate to me or anyone else sharing your sentiment. They only correlate to someone saying that your posting added value.
I upvote things all the time with which I disagree because the commenter made a strong argument and it added to the quality of the discussion. I downvote things with which I sometimes agree because perhaps the point was badly made, inflammatory or otherwise not enriching to the discussion. And then, I also downvote comments that use trendy I "haz cheeseburger" level diction. Of course, given my own guidelines, I probably ought to downvote myself.
Could we stop shutting down opinions using the sample size argument? It's one of the weakest arguments you can make:
'I think different so your opinion isn't valid because anecdote!' 'Oh you don't agree with my opinion? Well that's not valid either because anecdote!'
Not every discussion is capable of having prior polling as evidence (polling has its own issues with bias anyways). A highly voted on comment has >> 1 people who share the same sentiment and the beauty of sites like these is highly up-voted comments bubble to the top.