The Human Wave, Sad Puppies, and SFF Monoculture, Part 5

[jeff_duntemann]

(This series began here.)

I held back Part 5 of this series because the Hugo nomination finalists were announced yesterday, and I wanted to see whether the Sad Puppies (and a separate but related slate, Rabid Puppies) would make their mark on the ballot. The answer is, egad: What a broom does.

But I'll get back to that.

First I wanted to mention a

Comments

[chris_gerrib]

As the guy who's put in play a rules change to reduce the impact of bloc voting, I couldn't disagree with you more. Here's a little thought experiment.

Imagine that CBS launches a public campaign to lock up all the Emmy nominations with their shows and actors. Imagine that they then mostly succeed, so that, for example, in Best Drama it's 4 CBS shows and one HBO show.

Even if the HBO show wins, of what value is that win? Was the HBO show really the best drama, or did the voters give it an award as protest over CBS? Moreover, if CBS got their four slots with less than 20% of the nominating vote, does that really mean that the majority of the voters liked the CBS shows?

So, next year, HBO says "two can play at that" and has a competing slate. Now who gets the Emmy depends not on who has the best show but who's able to get a committed group to vote for a slate.

Awards have value only if the people voting for them are perceived to be voting on what they care about. If it's "Democrats vs. Republicans" or "Sad Puppies vs Happy Kittens" then who gives a damn about the award?

[jeff_duntemann]

We have a problem only because there are so few people nominating and voting. Like I said in the series, I want dozens of slates and tens of thousands of readers recommending and voting. At that scale, influence averages out, and I seriously doubt that any faction could game the system.

I've always hated two-party politics. Parties (which are just factions, after all) work best when there are lots of them, sort of like a parliamentary system on steroids. Many parties make influence peddling and polarization a lot more difficult.

What this may mean is that the Hugos need to be separated from Worldcon. I'm not sure how that might be done, and haven't quite decided whether or not it would be a good thing to do. It might, however, be necessary for the awards to operate at a scale that would make the Hugos reflective of general reader preference.

[chris_gerrib]

Maybe you have your back copies of Locus better at hand than I do, but IIRC, Locus, a free online poll, only gets around 1,500 ballots. My concern is that the group of people who care enough to show up and vote (free or not) is not big enough to avoid being gamed by determined minorities.