Third of three posts: the effect of the new rules on the Hugo Awards

[nwhyte]

Several significant changes to the Hugo rules were ratified by this year's WSFS meeting. Although discussion has tended to focus on the new tallying system dubbed EPH (short for E Pluribus Hugo) by its creators, two of the other amendments can also be retrospectively applied to past voting results - specifically, that there will now be (at least)

Comments

[andyhat]

The problem with retrospective analysis in this case is that it assumes DEVILMAN doesn't adapt his tactics. My guess is that next year he'll slate 6 items in each category and instruct his followers to choose randomly among them, moderating the slate-detecting effects of EPH and potentially grabbing all 6 slots. That would require perhaps a 20% increase in his numbers to maintain the same effectiveness in the big categories (novel/BDP:LF), but would easily still dominate in the short fiction categories, etc.

I expect that in fact there will be a decrease in the numbers of his followers next year (they'll mostly need to purchase memberships again in 2017 to nominate), so I'd bet we'll have fairly clean nominees in the big categories, but the small and diverse categories (fan awards, related work, short fiction) will still be dominated by DEVILMAN.

Fortunately we've got 3SV coming up, which I think may more or less fix the problem in 2018.

[ext_3235758]

If the new rules had been in effect this year, and if the slates had adopted the strategy you describe, they would have needed 1284 members in order to sweep Best Short Story. By my best estimate, though, there were only about 370 slate voters in that category this year, so they'd have to more than triple their numbers. But I'll be surprised if they manage even 200 next year, which means they'll be lucky to get two items on the final ballot for short story.

[stevendj]

Thanks for putting this together. It may be picky to bring this up, but my name should be spelled "Steven desJardins", not "Steve Desjardins".

[nwhyte]

Oops! Sorry. For obvious reasons, I try to be sensitive to this kind of thing.

[catsittingstill]

Thanks for working this out!

I went to all 4 days of the business meeting in order to vote for EPH and EPH+ and 3SV. It was very interesting and rather exciting in its own way but I'd have been happy to spend that time doing other things at the con, so I'm very glad about how the business meeting votes came out.

I really hope they do a lot to moderate DEVILMAN's effects on the ballot, because I'm very tired of Puppy stuff.

[andrewducker]

Yes. Hopefully they will realise that their slates are no longer effective, and then lose interest entirely, and we won't have to think about them any more.

[newandrewhickey]

This is very, very encouraging. It seems that the combination would almost remove DEVILMAN's ability to push crap onto the ballot, without punishing any human shields he adds on. So next year, we can expect at worst another 2014, with one or two bits of outright crap in each category along with a lot of legitimate nominees.