Same. I voted “Leave it as it is”, because I like having the option to change my mind about my choices and also don’t mind if other people do the same. In this poll, I withdrew my vote for Mushishi 2 days ago because I read the first chapter of the currently free Bookwalker version and realized that it’s a bit on the hard side for me and also probably won’t hold my interest.
I also like seeing other people’s votes so that I can redistribute my own votes to save unpopular nominees if necessary.
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I also voted “Leave it as it is”, and I really hope that there isn’t some kind of silent (i.e. not participating in the discussion so far) majority going for hidden votes, because I think that would definitely hurt the club.
Ongoing voting results are exciting; excitement drives discussion; discussion leads to thread visibility; thread visibility attracts new voters. I feel like losing that would be too heavy of a price to pay just for the suspicion that somebody might possibly change their vote in a manipulative way.
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I’d be very interested in experimenting with unlimited votes. It might make the voting less exciting, though?
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I agree that it’s an interesting idea and maybe the form of voting that makes the most sense in this context (voting for all the books you’d consider joining). My main concern wouldn’t so much be that voting would be less exciting and more that it would favor “middle of the road” manga over more unique/niche titles.
For instance would 紡ぐ乙女と大正の月 ever have won in this format? Not sure.
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So I did check the data (specifically I looked at the polls since 2022 for the ABBC, BBC, IBC, IMC, ABC and BAC) and it turns out… probably not. I guess I’m just too influenced by the recent 3 way ties in the IMC and BAC.
Voting history data
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With only 8 voters the BAC 3-way-tie is not too surprising, statistically speaking. That makes this latest IMC poll the only “suspicious” result here I think.
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I’ll confess that I voted “don’t show votes” but simply because I think it’d be interesting to see what the results of one truly blind book club poll would be. I changed my vote 2-ish hours before the poll closed, like a few others did, and it was purely because my original votes ended up not being frontrunners but I wanted at least one of my votes to “matter” for the final choice. If no one could view who the leading series were, I wonder how varied the results would end up. Would we still have a tie? MORE ties? One clear winner? A winner that was memed on lots beforehand, or a winner that no one expected? The possibility of experimenting is entertaining to me.
I don’t necessarily think it would be a good plan to always have blind polls moving forward. But I also don’t think a blind poll would kill the club – we’re a silly group and I could see the advertisements and meme-posting taking on a new flavor when we don’t know whether our favorites are winning or not.
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I think if “don’t show votes” wins, it wouldn’t just be a one-time thing though, because then it would seem like the majority wants blind votes (and not just once, since that’s not part of the “don’t show votes” poll option).
And no, of course it would not “kill the club”. But a majority of the posts are either direct reactions to the poll and then reactions to those posts, right? Even the meme posts - I think just posting a meme without anything to reference (like “This is how Bocchi feels about currently leading the poll”) would feel weird to me. And the really good advertisement posts happen when there’s enough pressure, i.e. you see something that you want to win not doing well.
So while there will likely still be posts, the major topic of conversation that we had so far will be gone.
A morbidly curious and rather reluctant part of me wants to add: I’d actually be on board with trying it once just to see how it goes. But apart from satisfying my curiousity I really don’t see how it could possibly improve the voting process. I still see plenty of potential for making it worse though.
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With unlimited votes I think also the elimination threshold might need to be reconsidered so people don’t just vote for something to “save” it at the expense of making room for newer entries.
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If we tried one blind poll and it turned out that, actually, everyone hated it and it didn’t go well then I don’t think it would be unreasonable to request a new vote. Thankfully we’re a manga club and not a bureaucratic office 
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You’re more optimistic than me 
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Define “didn’t go well”. Surely the most popular book would still win even if people didn’t enjoy the process.
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Well, yeah, the most popular book would win. But if afterward everyone says all the fun was sucked out of the voting process then I would count that as “didn’t go well” 
Competition can be exciting but, like I said, I think it would be interesting to see what we’d pick without it.
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Apart from the fun angle: “Less people voted than normally” (due to less visibility due to less reaction posts)
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Got curious to see how many are we actually to be voting, so pulling out some numbers too 
| Poll # | Date | Total voters | # of votes for the winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Poll 1 | March 2024 | 56 | 36 |
| Poll 2 | April 2024 | 46 | 16 (two winners) |
| Poll 3 | July 2024 | 48 | 17 |
| Poll 4 | Sept 2024 | 46 | 16 |
| Poll 5 | Jan 2025 | 36 | 13 (three winners) |
Not sure what we can do with the numbers right now, but maybe for the next poll, we can observe if we make changes, it is brings more or less votes (the total participation keeps getting lower since the start but I think that’s to be expected)
Also 27 people have voted so far on the “Book Poll - do we make changes”, so that’s a great representation of the number of voters!
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I would have expected the very first poll to have more voters due to the novelty of it but I didn’t think that we would see a decline in the long term. In fact the 3 subsequent polls were fairly stable, it’s only the last one that saw a steep decline.
I can think of maybe two reasons:
-
This time we didn’t have some super-popular, anime-adapted manga in the lineup (well, there’s Initial D but that’s pretty old-school). Before we had 鋼の錬金術師, Dungeon Meshi and Bocchi which all had mainstream appeal (I remember 鋼の錬金術師 in particular drawing a lot of new participants… and then most of them immediately dropped out, probably because it was pretty difficult
). -
Also I wonder how much the difficulty of the current pick influences engagement in the club as a whole. Our last few picks were “high intermediate” in terms of difficulty and as such maybe have driven some people off.
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I think that’s normal for a book club. The amount of voters goes up and down (sometimes I think it’s seasonal? but probably not). People come and go. Some stay as regulars. Poll stats from the advanced book club:
The intermediate book club is even more up and down (wildly, even 
). The table is so long I can’t capture in a screenshot. Here’s the thread if you want to take a look.
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Yeah, I was one who immediately dropped out 
.
Another reason might be the rising number of offshoots. I know they make a difference for me - as long as the Tongari club is still going, I nearly don’t care what gets chosen on the main club (and I was half-glad that I wasn’t that interested in the stuff that got chosen lately), because my minimum weekly manga needs are already covered.
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Next picks announcement!
We will be reading ふたつのスピカ from Feb 1st! @Belthazar are you willing to run the club?
After ふたつのスピカ, we will read 銀の匙! @meagstudies, are you willing to run the club? Would start March 22nd.
And finally, we will read 蟲師, @DIO-Berry, are you willing to run the club?
The three home threads can be started as soon as the people running the clubs are found and have time 
that way we can start the schedule & buying book discussions.
Looking forward!
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Yep. Already part-way through the vocab sheet.
Guess I should start a thread, though. We’re almost halfway through January…
Edit:
There we go
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