Statistics on my losing stories

[ffutures]

Out of a morbid sense of curiosity:

• Best Portrayal of Dawn - Omphalos 18 votes not placed, the winner got 188 votes.
  
• Best Comedy - Dead Trouble 19 votes not placed, The Right Technology 27 not placed, there was almost a dead heat for the winner with four stories on 115-120 votes. I think I wouldn't have been in the top five even if all of the votes for Dead Trouble and The Right Technology had gone to a single story. More evidence that my sense of humour is VERY different from the average fanfic reader.
  
• Best Harry Potter - Dead Trouble tied in 2nd place on 142, the winner got 227.
  
• Best Stargate - The Key to Byzantium in 3rd place on 143, the winner got 195.
  
• Best Movie Crossover - The Right Technology in 2nd place with 124, the winner got 146. Just a few more votes...
  
• Best Non-BtVS crossover - Nine Lives in 5th place with 61 votes, the winner got 253
  
• Best Drabble - Friends Help You Move in 2nd place with 115 votes, the winner got 121; another VERY close miss.

I'm disappointed that only a couple of the stories I nominated won awards; in some cases they were greatly superior to the winners, in my opinion.

There's an ongoing debate about the rules for the awards on the TTH forums - I'm trying to convince people that a "No Award" vote option would help to improve the quality of the winners. If you're interested and have a TTH account I'd suggest commenting.

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed that only a couple of the stories I nominated won awards; in some cases they were greatly superior to the winners, in my opinion.

Some of the winners were... not to my tastes... to put it kindly. Not terribly good would also describe them...

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Isn't just being nominated the real honor?

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I prefer the Conan version of victory

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women."

There are several stories in there I would have been delighted to crush...

[ponderoid.livejournal.com]

No, because all it takes is one nomination, and the only vetting that happens is the mods check to make sure it qualifies under the rules for that category. IMHO, getting a nomination ranks a bit above getting a recommendation or two.

*** Ponder

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The effect of No Award is going to depend on the vote counting algorithm.

The Hugo Awards have had None of the Above on the ballot for a long time. If you follow the vote counts in Locus, you'll see there nearly 100% of the time, NA gets fewer first place votes than ANY of the nominees, and thus is first eliminated. Those who put something on their ballot after NA move to that column; those who didn't simply are not counted.

The Nebula Awards are (or were when I last checked) even more stringent: They don't allow you to vote NA except in first place. That is, you can vote "Nothing this year deserves this award," and if a majority agree with that then no award is given; but if you vote "Only one thing deserves this award," that doesn't count. So it's pretty much impossible for NA even to come from behind.

The Prometheus Awards use a different treatment, under which NA cannot be eliminated. We have to go through all the other nominees, weeding them out one by one, until only one nominee survives, and if it doesn't have a majority over NA, it doesn't get the award. I'm not sure if I'd recommend that approach, as it does add extra complexity to the vote count.

[sirernest.livejournal.com]

Too true. It's working just as well as looking at the reviews to judge the quality of a story.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

At TTH there are initially an unlimited number of nominees in each category - after the first round of voting only five go through to the remainder of the voting. If the story you initially voted for has been eliminated you can reuse the vote. The snag is that this time there were 15 categories which had nothing else I wanted to vote for after my first choice had been eliminated. A lot of others had similar problems.

The idea of adding a No Award at that point is that it's unlikely to win - typically stories are failing to make the cut with fifty votes or more, so all of the finalists will have at least that many votes while No Award starts on zero - but a sizeable vote for it might be interpreted as an indication that the category rules need to be tweaked a little, or that the overall standard in the category wasn't particularly high.