About Take a Stance
An anonymous opinion game about the questions people actually argue over.
What this is
Take a Stance shows you one debated question at a time and asks for a straight answer: agree, or disagree. The moment you answer, you see how everyone else who has answered that same question split — worldwide, and country by country.
That is the whole idea. Most places online where opinions meet are built around argument: threads, replies, quote-tweets, the loudest voice at the top. This is built around the count. You commit to a side before you are shown the result, so what you see afterwards is a fact about the world rather than a suggestion about what to think.
How it works
- Pick a category — around thirty of them, from Climate and Politics to Food, Music and Work — or leave it on Random and take whatever comes.
- Read the question and answer Agree or Disagree. You can skip anything you would rather not answer, and skipping costs you nothing.
- The result bar splits at the real global figure. A dashed line marks where an even split would have been, so the gap between the two is the reading.
- Scroll past the figures and the globe is handed over. Every country that has answered enough times is shaded by how much of it agreed; drag to turn it, select a country for its numbers.
- Each question carries a short argument for and a short argument against, so a side you did not take is never left as a mystery.
- Keep answering and three things open up: your own statistics, a look at the most-liked questions, and the form for suggesting one of your own.
What the numbers are, and what they are not
The percentages move with real answers. A question does not open on an empty bar — it starts from a baseline reading, and every answer given here shifts it from there. Nothing is weighted, filtered or rounded in anyone’s favour.
They are also not a poll. Everyone here chose to be here, nobody is weighted to match a population, and there is no verification of who anyone is. A country’s figure reflects the people from that country who found this site and answered that question — which is an interesting thing, but it is not the same as what that country thinks. Read the numbers as a conversation, not as a survey.
The questions
Questions are written to be genuinely arguable. If a question has an obvious right answer, it is a bad question for this site and it does not go in. That means some of them will strike you as wrong, or as provocative, or as unfair to a position you hold. Asking a question is not endorsing either answer to it — the point of a debated question is that reasonable people land on both sides of it.
Readers can suggest questions from inside the game once they have answered a few. Suggestions are read before anything is added, and most are not added.
Voices from around the web
Under some results you will find short excerpts from public discussions elsewhere on the internet, one or two for each side. They are quoted anonymously — no usernames, no links back to individuals — and they are translated into your language where the original was written in another. They are there to show the shape of an argument, not to represent anyone in particular.
Languages
The game runs in fourteen languages: English, Español, 中文, Português, Français, Deutsch, 日本語, हिन्दी, Italiano, Polski, Română, Nederlands, Українська, Türkçe. Every question, every argument and most quoted excerpts are translated, so the same one is being asked everywhere the count is being taken. The Privacy Policy and the Terms and Conditions are the exception — they are kept in English so that what they promise is unambiguous.
Who runs it
Take a Stance is an independent project, not a company, a media outlet or a research organisation. It is free, it has no accounts, and it does not ask you for anything.
There is no sign-up, no profile and no email list. Your answers are stored without any identifier that points back to you — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what is and is not kept.
Get in touch
Corrections, complaints about a question, requests to remove a quoted excerpt, or anything else: the Contact page has the address.