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You REALLY don't need to care about querying the whole population for these kinds of statistics. Steam has a MAU of at least 132,000,000 users. To randomly samp
by zamadatix 1y ago
You REALLY don't need to care about querying the whole population for these kinds of statistics. Steam has a MAU of at least 132,000,000 users. To randomly sample from just 17,000 users (0.0012% of the MAU) would provide a 99% confidence the sample is within +-0.5% the actual value. Given that you've personally been selected multiple months, they are almost certainly well and above a sampling rate worth worrying about.
The survey does have other statistical noises/biases/errors though - but none nearly as large as this "gap". E.g. internet cafe reuse of the same machines by different accounts means if you're hoping for a "hardware popularity survey" instead of a "hardware users use popularity survey" then the number won't always make sense.