I, too, would prefer something other than the 'popular vote' method.
The most important advantage to 'popular vote' is that it's easy, both for the participants and for the moderators. So it encourages people to come vote and look at the awards, and almost any other method would be more troublesome for the people tallying the results (which is already a time-consuming task, I expect). So I understand why the organizers want to stick with it.
But still: it does little to promote interest in the other nominees, and it rewards existing fanbase without commenting on the quality of unknown works.
I'm wondering if there's a way to preserve the 'anyone can participate' aspect without keeping the 'popular vote' aspect. Tossing an idea out: instead of a straight-up vote, have voters judge the nominees on a numerical scale, on several different qualities. (Qualities depending on category -- eg, for fiction: Plot, Style, Creativity, whatever). Each voter has to complete the ballot for each nominated work (or a significant fraction thereof), and each voter has to attest that they have reviewed the work.
This makes a lot more work for the voters, so you'd wind up with many fewer of them. But most of them (except those lying about it) would be ones who'd looked at all the nominees, which would be a benefit, and it would encourage voters to judge on quality rather than checking the box for whomever had pointed them in the direction of the voting page.
There might be a better way of handling it, and you'd want some spiffy back-end coding to make tallying results easy. But it is something worth considering, at least.
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Date: 2010-03-05 06:13 pm (UTC)The most important advantage to 'popular vote' is that it's easy, both for the participants and for the moderators. So it encourages people to come vote and look at the awards, and almost any other method would be more troublesome for the people tallying the results (which is already a time-consuming task, I expect). So I understand why the organizers want to stick with it.
But still: it does little to promote interest in the other nominees, and it rewards existing fanbase without commenting on the quality of unknown works.
I'm wondering if there's a way to preserve the 'anyone can participate' aspect without keeping the 'popular vote' aspect. Tossing an idea out: instead of a straight-up vote, have voters judge the nominees on a numerical scale, on several different qualities. (Qualities depending on category -- eg, for fiction: Plot, Style, Creativity, whatever). Each voter has to complete the ballot for each nominated work (or a significant fraction thereof), and each voter has to attest that they have reviewed the work.
This makes a lot more work for the voters, so you'd wind up with many fewer of them. But most of them (except those lying about it) would be ones who'd looked at all the nominees, which would be a benefit, and it would encourage voters to judge on quality rather than checking the box for whomever had pointed them in the direction of the voting page.
There might be a better way of handling it, and you'd want some spiffy back-end coding to make tallying results easy. But it is something worth considering, at least.