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May. 23rd, 2016 10:54 amHaven't posted much on the Hugos yet. Still pondering.
The results this year seem a lot less bad to me in a lot of ways. It is obviously still frustrating that a group of trolls has disrupted the awards, but the disruption is less terrible- there is still competition for Best Novel among legitimate worthy novels, there are some choices in most of the other categories worthy of consideration, and Chuck Tingle has trolled the Puppies back with marvelous touch.
I would like the Puppies and slating in general to stop being a thing. You can read a lot of different things into the Schneier paper, but one of the big ones I read is about what the authors call the 'long tail' of nominations- the typical Hugo voter is mostly nominating works that won't get anywhere near the ballot ( I think their number was that in the Novelette category, 75% of non-Puppy nominators did not nominate any of the top 5 non-Puppy nominees), and that's how it should be. Worldcon fandom is an incredibly diverse animal and most years any given person won't agree with most of the winners. The point of the Hugos is to give us something to argue over, it's okay if the awards give the wrong result. The only thing that's not cool is when the awards get trolled, when people with no respect for fandom and its institutions decide to thwart the diversity of fandom solely so that they can laugh at people they don't like.
The Schneier paper shows that EPH on its own is not enough to get the slate entirely off the ballot, but that shouldn't be something we achieve through EPH so it doesn't really matter to me that it doesn't work. The way to get the slate off the ballot is just to persist as Worldcon. The idea that hundreds of trolls will each spent $50 once or twice in order to laugh at people they don't like is plausible. The idea that hundreds of trolls will each spend $50 every year for five or ten years in order to laugh at people they don't like is far less plausible. Eventually the Puppies will get bored, because all that is in it for them is trolling. Worldcon fandom will not get bored, because Worldcon fandom is in Worldcon fandom for much, much more than the Hugos.
If the Puppies stick around for another couple years messing up the Hugos, so what? I almost never agree with the Hugo winners anyway, so it doesn't bother me if the 'wrong' winners win for a couple years because of the trolls, and eventually they will go away.
File770 is now trotting out all sorts of increasingly complicated and annoying proposals for solving the slating problem. I really hope none of them ever come to fruition, because sure, they might help us mitigating the current trolling, but what happens in three or four years when the Puppies are gone and we still have a stupidly complicated and annoying voting system that serves no real purpose except to make the Hugo administrators' jobs harder and will take us years to get rid of?
The results this year seem a lot less bad to me in a lot of ways. It is obviously still frustrating that a group of trolls has disrupted the awards, but the disruption is less terrible- there is still competition for Best Novel among legitimate worthy novels, there are some choices in most of the other categories worthy of consideration, and Chuck Tingle has trolled the Puppies back with marvelous touch.
I would like the Puppies and slating in general to stop being a thing. You can read a lot of different things into the Schneier paper, but one of the big ones I read is about what the authors call the 'long tail' of nominations- the typical Hugo voter is mostly nominating works that won't get anywhere near the ballot ( I think their number was that in the Novelette category, 75% of non-Puppy nominators did not nominate any of the top 5 non-Puppy nominees), and that's how it should be. Worldcon fandom is an incredibly diverse animal and most years any given person won't agree with most of the winners. The point of the Hugos is to give us something to argue over, it's okay if the awards give the wrong result. The only thing that's not cool is when the awards get trolled, when people with no respect for fandom and its institutions decide to thwart the diversity of fandom solely so that they can laugh at people they don't like.
The Schneier paper shows that EPH on its own is not enough to get the slate entirely off the ballot, but that shouldn't be something we achieve through EPH so it doesn't really matter to me that it doesn't work. The way to get the slate off the ballot is just to persist as Worldcon. The idea that hundreds of trolls will each spent $50 once or twice in order to laugh at people they don't like is plausible. The idea that hundreds of trolls will each spend $50 every year for five or ten years in order to laugh at people they don't like is far less plausible. Eventually the Puppies will get bored, because all that is in it for them is trolling. Worldcon fandom will not get bored, because Worldcon fandom is in Worldcon fandom for much, much more than the Hugos.
If the Puppies stick around for another couple years messing up the Hugos, so what? I almost never agree with the Hugo winners anyway, so it doesn't bother me if the 'wrong' winners win for a couple years because of the trolls, and eventually they will go away.
File770 is now trotting out all sorts of increasingly complicated and annoying proposals for solving the slating problem. I really hope none of them ever come to fruition, because sure, they might help us mitigating the current trolling, but what happens in three or four years when the Puppies are gone and we still have a stupidly complicated and annoying voting system that serves no real purpose except to make the Hugo administrators' jobs harder and will take us years to get rid of?