Haha true that
I did think about changing my vote when I saw it was down there, but… 
As I said: tough vote (for me) x)
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We have a winner the next Manga we will read is God Bless the Mistaken!
Since it is a short manga we will also read Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun afterwards!
Thank you to everyone who participated!
We will also have to say goodbye to some of the nominations:
- Mashle: Magic and Muscles [Manga]
- ひらめきはつめちゃん
- Ranking of Kings
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Could one of the regular change the title to
Beginner Japanese Book Club // Now Reading: 耳をすませば
Thank you!
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That one looked like fun, but I don’t know if I could put up with that name appearing in thread titles every week. 
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It’s probably been explained before, but what’s the criteria for removing nominations? If they don’t get picked a certain number of times? 
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When the nominated book/manga has not gotten more than 20% in the last 3 polls in a row it will be removed.
The home thread for 神様が間違える is up and I have started a poll to settle on a schedule, have a look over there!
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The enormous amount of negatives in Japanese is quite contagious
but in this case I think it’s one too many or one too few…
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fixed ^^. When I proofread that sentence I just read the more and not the context…
This might actually be a good timing to bring up something that I have wanted to bring up for some time. Looking at the current poll only 1/3 fulfill the requirements of having more or equal to 20% in the poll. Do you guys think that 20% is too high? Does the stipulation of having to meet these requirements 3 times in a row make up for the high bar?
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If only 2 in 10 people want to read something, I wouldn’t say it’s what the club should read.
Or is it based on total of votes, idk.
Yeah, 19% here is 8 against 22 for the winner. I’d say that’s pretty fair if less than 50% wants to read it.
It can always come back, right?
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That’s a good question, I recently wondered the same for the IBC (where it’s 20% as well) and ABC (where it’s currently 10%). The effect of these thresholds is that in IBC we regularly kick out books that don’t get picked while in ABC we hardly kick out any books because at some point they usually end up getting enough votes. (We’re also talking very low poll participation rate here, so often two votes is enough to get over the threshold.)
So when I look at IBC and ABC, I try to not only look at the amount of books that get kicked out but also at how many people vote and how many proposals you get. The more people vote, the harder it is for a nomination to accidentally fall below the threshold (i.e. I guess it’s rather unpopular in that case), and the more proposals you get, the better it is to get rid of unpopular proposals to keep the club interesting and the nominations fresh.
So no clear answer from me because I don’t have one either, but some things to look out for as well when judging what’s currently going on.
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The tricky part is that some might want to read it, but it’s not in their top [number of votes they can cast].
I look forward to the day when AI can analyze everyone who is interested in participating in a book club, and will go out and discover the best pick considering the skill level and interests of the participants. (AI programmers just need to work out that bug where the AI keeps suggesting manga about machines taking over the world.)
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Mmm, I think that the threshold should be set at a level that means you aren’t running out of spaces in the poll for new proposals. The last ABC vote had 15 options, so we had plenty of space for more. But the BBC has way more members, probably more proposals, and the dynamics are likely very different.
Note that “only got 20% of the vote” doen’t necessarily mean “only 2 in 10 people want to read it” – for some of the other 8 there might just have been 5 other options they liked more.
That said, the current threshold resulted in 3 drops for the BBC, and they were 3 of the bottom 4 in the last vote. That feels to me like the algorithm is producing basically reasonable results.
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It is the case that in the last two polls at least 2/3 of the options got less than 20%. In that sense, I feel like 15% might be better. We do have to be careful not to make it so lenient that we get stuck at 20 nominations and people can’t nominate new books though.
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I feel like it’s worth noting that out of 15 proposals this time, only 5 had a vote higher than 20%, and only 1 had a vote higher than 50%. And in the previous poll out of 17 proposals only 5 got more than 20%, and none got 40% or higher. I checked the poll before that one too, and in that one only 4 books got higher than 20%.
Edit: @seanblue beat me to it, and put it much more succinctly.
Anyway, that seems like very stiff competition. But maybe that’s a good thing. I don’t really know…
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That does seem like quite a lot might drop; and it’s not like the poll was very close to being completely full. Maybe drop the threshold to 15% and see how it goes, then?
(Idle musing on system dynamics: I think if the threshold is too high you might get a cycle where a lot of books get dropped; then the next poll has a comparatively short list where it’s much easier to hit the threshold, so almost everything in it gets to be ‘safe’ for another couple of polls; so then it takes another three or so polls during which the list gradually lengthens, before you get another drop-lots cycle. But it’s a bit hard to tell given the time between polls 
)
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The only way to be fair is to disappoint the most people and read the most unpopular books
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I know everyone really wanted to pick Blue Box but I understand most people had to make sacrifices this time round. Don’t worry guys there’s always next time
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Thank you for all the arguments and participation in the discussion. It seems the most prevalent two options are 20% & 15%. If the rule had been 15% before the end of the last poll, we would have 1 more book since Ranking of Kings scored 19% in its first appearance.
What should the threshold be for a nomination to be removed? (3 polls in a row)
- 15%
- 20%
0 voters
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With those results we will switch to a 15% threshold from the next vote onward
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