Statistically those tied entries would probably be at the top of subsequent polls anyway.
In general I feel like we risk over-engineering the whole thing: these polls are flawed and biased in a million ways but in the end what matters is that we end up with a book that a large number of people are interested in reading.
People who are not interested can join one of the many other clubs or read on their own while waiting for the next round. There’s no way around it, no matter how you poll it’s very unlikely that any single book win end up with a large majority of voters behind it.
If the objective is to exclude as few people as possible every round, the solution is not to change the polling but simply allow several books to be read at the same time (optimizing for the least amount of overlap in votes) but again, I think that’s over-engineering it.
Oof, these stats are spooky. Although admittedly my main issue with 鋼の錬金術師 was generally the grammar, especially the very casual way the protagonists speak.
So they’re pretty similar by %words used once but silver spoon has more words and is denser. I guess this is volume 1 vs volume 1 to keep the length even. I had assumed the farm book would have less vocab to learn than the alchemist book.
Same. I have a slight interest in Spica, but not enough for when I’m already in several book clubs and the series is too long for my liking. The other two I have no interest in. But I’m fine putting this club to the side for a few months and getting these picks out of the way.
I’m not surprised. I read Anna Karenina in Russian last year and those farm-centric chapters were the bane of my existence. “Oh ten pages discussing the harvest of wheat? Don’t mind if I do!”
So on the voting changes, I’ve thought similar about it for the BBC
On the one hand, if there’s clear favourites, I don’t think it’s wrong for people to reevaluate and go “well of the two leaders, this is the one I’d rather read” and for people to have the case to draw votes for their own favourite. (I did see on the Discourse forums there was actually an experiment with ranked choice voting which would allow people to have this kind of decision without having to have votes public, but I think it went nowhere)
On the other, I see people joking about causing draws deliberately because “haha draws are funny”, but given the recent increase in draws (and especially: multi-way ties), I can’t help but feel that some people are actually following through with that, which is just wasting everybody’s time. Or alternatively I do worry that’s it being used to create fake popularity for some books and cause people to spread their votes then change the choice at the last minute.
I don’t think the manual close will really affect it too much - it will transfer some power from the voters to the organiser, but I don’t know how many fresh votes are really coming in on day 7.
Yeah, I’ve done “read both” for 2-way ties before in the BBC, and maybe since this club reads faster a 3-way tie isn’t that different, but it also feels like it means the less popular entries are stealing the oxygen from new nominations also as with fewer votes there’s also fewer chances to remove options from the bottom as well as the top.
But any book that can be manipulated into a tie by shifting a single vote was clearly popular to begin with, so I don’t think it’s a big issue.
If people start sockpuppeting and casting multiple votes for some entries then yeah, that would be a much bigger issue, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Status:
In two days we will see which book we begin with ( this poll ).
For the discussion for the way we make Book Polls, it is a bit less urgent to come to a conclusion, so the discussion can continue, and if something makes you change your mind it’s also okay to update your vote ( this poll ). Maybe I’ll close the poll in a week or so.
And in case there is a lot of discussion happening and you want to find your way back to the polls without having to scroll forever, remember that you can simply find the links to the polls in the first post
Even if that happens, that’s fine! We’re not trying to choose the objectively best book here. We are trying to choose the one that the most people would read with the club. If the preliminary results gets people to take a closer look at the leading books, and then decide that those are fine and they would read them… well, there’s no problem with that.
On a tangential note, I’m wondering if an unlimited amount of votes (and a different nomination pruning system, e.g. “X lowest voted in each vote”) would do a better job with getting a “most people would read with the club” result. I feel like if the votes are hidden, it would be almost necessary, since you have no idea which books even have a chance of winning. I’d rather vote for my 6th favourite if it has a chance of winning, than waste it all on my top 5 who won’t win.
I’m also against the idea of hiding the results until the poll closes. As for changing it to manually closing the poll, I’m also against that. Why?
There’s the risk of accidentally missing the voting window.
I remember when the Advanced book club still had the tradition of closing the polls manually. It felt so arbitrary to me, the timing of when that happened. It felt so unpredictable (and kinda unfair). So we changed it to have it automatically close like in the ABBC and BBC. There was this comment back then:
Now it’s a given that a poll will close after one week (which was not the case in the ABC back then, hence miwuc’s post). If however, that is changed to “close manually”, how do we/the poll maker know when it is appropriate for the poll to close?
When the voting has dried up? That should not be up to the poll maker’s discretion, imo.
After one week like it is now? Then people will still be able to calculate when it’s about time for the poll to close and have the opportunity to change their votes before that, even if it might help against last minute changes.
I agree this could be an improvement, but it probably wouldn’t change the problem at hand. People still might add or remove their votes at the last second to change the outcome.
Yep, I don’t think there will ever be a decision that makes EVERYONE happy, and maybe we don’t even have a problem, but it’s nice for me to hear what everybody is thinking and how the voting is experienced. Got many useful insights of things I hadn’t thought of already!
