Oops! has 260 entries, AC24 has 712 entries.
Who's gonna vote on all of this??

It's super cool, that people are excited to join battles and submit to them - and it's also super cool how many ideas were submitted to Future Battles, and how many more bigger battles people want... but I wonder who will actually vote on them.

I heard from a handful of people already, that they will not even bother trying to vote on Advent Calendar, because "its 712 entries, thats way too much to vote on".

Now here's the thing: We need a good amount of Criticists in order for this whole battle-thing to work. If you submit a lot and want more and more battles, keep in mind that voting is as important as submitting.

This thread is, first of all, a reminder to everyone who participated in Oops! and AC24, to at least start voting. I understand that going through all these submissions takes time, but its not an excuse to not even try.
During the minute you say something about "too many entries" you couldve already opened an entry and voted on it tbh.

The second thing I want to say is, if you know people who enjoy art, music etc - and you know they spend 4 hours every day on instagram and tiktok, maybe motivate them to spend their time voting on entries instead. It's cool we have so many artists here, but promoting BotB to non-artists is equally important.

And the last thing... battles won't run forever - also because we have more battles planned for the future.
If the battle ends up with only 10 votes per entry by the end of the deadline, it will close anyway. We can't extend it for months and months and wait for one more person to maybe finish voting. Also keep in mind that those few voters will dictate the whole outcome of the battle. A battle where over 100 people put time and effort into.

Invest an hour every day, sit down and listen to some of the entries. It will be rewarding, too.

Any ideas on how to get more votes in on the big battles? Post them here.

Personally it would be easier for me to vote if it was more mobile friendly. The player sounds glitchy on my phone for some reason, it's awkward how it opens in a different tab, and the voting form is pretty hard to use too. I actually thought about spinning up my own mobile friendly voting website that uses the botb API somehow but never got around to it.

I do wish and hope that many people can vote!! It is important. I will do my best although unfortunately I'm leaving for Thailand soon and not sure how much I'll be able to get done while abroad.

edit: ah, another small thing that I should probably make a feature request for: some way to "vote and go to previous unvoted track" would be helpful too. Perhaps a way to sort entries chronologically and/or filter by voted/unvoted would help a bit too.

edit2: back in the olden days, in sdcompo (a renoise compo) I believe you HAD to vote for everyone or your entry got disqualified, haha. Not that I think that's a good idea for botb, but it definitely is a powerful incentive :p

Maybe too much emphasis was placed on entry completionist that it's kind of too late to now ask people to shift focus over to vote completionist after all that effort spent. If at the start it was established as a big of a deal as the entering you would have had the ethos you desired

i remember Decadent Decade

having a similar issue with low number of votes. frankly, it just seems like the reward for voting is not high enough for many users.



"I believe you HAD to vote for everyone or your entry got disqualified"
a potential idea is to restrict this to the format you entered. e.g. if you entered nsf, then you need to vote on all the nsf entries.

though i'm not sure how much we should lean into PUNITIVE measures.



we could take the reward direction instead. bump up the amount of criticist points you get per entry you vote on in a large battle.

we could do something like, for battles with more than 100 entries, you get $num_entries/100 criticist points per vote. that means per advent calendar entry vote you get 7.12 criticist points per vote -> 5069 points for completing the whole battle

as an added bonus, throw in another $num_entries amount of criticist points for being a voting completionist. completionist voting AC24 would now give you 5781 points.

that might be a lot of points but it would be a greatly needed stimulus on high-entry battles.



we could also flip the incentive instead towards massively rewarding voting completionists. dole out the same 1 criticist point per vote as usual, but completionist gives you something like $num_entries * 3 additional points or something. you vote on 711 entries for AC24, you get 711 points. but 712-ing it gets you 712 + 712*3 = 2848 points.


numbers can be adjusted


this reward approach seemed to work great for having entries get proper renders, and we have botbrs whose entire meaning on this site is rendering other entries....................

I think if one submits an entry to a format on a battle, one should vote at least on all submissions of that format, otherwise one should loose some point for each entry not votet on, similar to latist points.

As Advent Calendar gets more and more entries every year, it's important to rethink how the whole voting system works. Much like participants are expected to submit their entries in a 24 hours period, I feel a similar method would encourage more voting.

Before the voting period officially starts, voters would still be able to cast their votes for as many entries as they'd want (as soon as the battle hits 56 entries, iirc). But when the voting period starts, everyone could only vote for entries that were submitted on Day 1, for 24 hours or longer, while entries from the other days would have voting inaccessible until it's their turn.

So, after the voting period for Day 1 submissions is over, people would no longer be able to vote for them and voting period for Day 2 entries would open and so on. This would also be accompanied by the major battle name changing from "BotB Advent Calendar 2024 - Voting Period: Day 1" to "BotB Advent Calendar 2024 - Voting Period: Day 2", etc, to emphasize each period, if possible.

Such a system may not be able to be implemented for this installment, but it would help people stay more focused with voting on bits at a time, while the process as a whole would feel less daunting.

I also agree with goluigi on criticist points potentially being more generous for voting completionists.

A daily sync listen during the event might encourage folks.

And I was thinking what Tex was thinking. Ofc this doesn't help if people just don't vote still in the 24hrs, then the problem is worse. I think the idea of only giving out medals/cans to people who voted makes sense to a degree too, but is it really helpful if we forced someone and then they spitefully give 1s to a bunch of people? idk. these ideas are probably worth exploring in further discussion but they seem high risk. *edit also what Kot said above is a solid point. Maybe there could be some sort of committee of botbr voters for battles to help mitigate the problem.

@agargara The site player integration used to be a thing, where did that go? lolwut?!

I don't really like the idea of having an entry I spent a decent amount of effort on being disqualified because I didn't have the time to vote on everything

more synclistens :D

synclistens are cool if they get more than 4 viewers xd

i think more emphasis on the importance of voting is good, but not sure about vote *completionism*. there are lots of scenarios where you might want to skip voting on a handful of entries -- maybe you entered with an alt account, or you don't get along with x botbr so you don't feel like you can vote without bias, or you just do not know how to interpret/score a particular entry

spitballing ideas here, what if voting on other entries was the price of admission? maybe you could tokens every time you voted on an entry (1 for xhb, 2 for major?) and need to spend N tokens to enter a battle? tho like d34d says it's dangerous any time you make voting a mechanical obligation, someone is going to try to abuse it and cast fake/bad-faith votes just to get the reward

and on another level it's weird to me to have to mechanically enforce basic reciprocity? but perhaps the same could be said of all religions

edit: also it's fun to think about mechanical systems but it'd probably be more productive to focus on ergonomics and culture, like agargara and gotoandplay did. very little if anything has changed about the mechanics of voting & participation in the 13 years i've been on this web site and i imagine this trend will continue

People like it when number go up.

What if Botbrs could flair how many votes they have ever cast and how many they've cast in sequence? It could be displayed alongside their aura or badges in threads and profiles. I know Criticists points can be seen in anyone's profile, but no one pays attention to it, i believe. I am thinking of something BotBcore to display it, such as "Pants Size", "Pants Style" or whatever.

Another idea is to display a podium of top criticists in the battle page when the battle ends; and to display in profiles the Botbr's top voted battles, aswell as all the other ones -- imagine "MajorBattle1 - 600 votes cast, MajorBattle2 - 300 votes cast" with cover arts and all.

People wouldnt lose anything from abstaining from voting other than a fancy profile addon. But who in their right minds would miss it, am i right!?

i've always considered it my duty to vote on every entry in the formats that i submitted to - anything on top of that is supererogatory. glad to see that others in this thread have come to the same conclusion independently. the question is how to get everyone on board with this standard of voting etiquette.

there are two ways to incentivise it.
the carrot is: increase the number of criticist points awarded per major entry voted on.
the stick is: some kind of score deduction from one's own entry for not voting on others.

i propose a simple formula:

number of entries in same format you voted on / (total number of entries in that format - number of those entries you were an author or collaborator of)
the output would be a multiplier applied to your entry's score.

e.g. if 56 people entered allgear, including you, and you voted on 24 entries then your multiplier would be 24/55, or ~0.44

if your own entry had a score of 28.56, its new score would be 28.56*0.44, or ~12.57 (the multiplier would actually be applied to each category score individually but the effect on the combined overall score would be the same).

if this seems too harsh, there could be some further modification to the score multiplier. i can think of one right now: take the output of the first formula, subtract it from 1, divide the output of that process in half and add the result to the multiplier.

for our previous example, that would mean: ((1 - 0.44) / 2) + 0.44 = 0.72

using this system would make it impossible to have a score multiplier lower than 0.5, which i think is reasonable. even if i think it's a bit of a dick move to drive-by submit to a big major, it's not a "ding your score to ZERO" level offence.

the main downside i can see to using a system like the one above is that if a BotBr used alts to submit multiple entries to the same category they would have to double-vote to avoid the multiplier, which is a no-no. therefore such a system could only work with some kind of official account linking, or else the death of alts (which would make me very sad).

* * *

i literally just came up with all the above off the top of my head, in the last 15 minutes. it's not supposed to be an "official suggestion", just me thinking things through out in the open with the hope for inspiring more ideas & discussion. what do you guys think - is a mechanistic solution like the one i just made up desirable? if so, can you think of a better one?

there are a lot of great ideas and suggestions in here already and i'm all for implementing something new to encourage more voting. (jangler makes a good point that alt-accounts throw a wrench in the idea of "completionism" though, especially with respect to anything that punishes you for not voting)

just gonna give my two cents about voting in general - i see it as a respect thing. if you entered the battle, you make time to listen/view what everyone else entered to the battle. do you want people to listen to your song? ok, you should listen to everyone else's songs then. if everyone submitted but decided not to vote, not only would the system not even work, but we'd just be a room full of people talking past each other, and as a community focused on making and practicing cool art, that sucks shit. why would you send something in and then not bother seeing what anyone else did? you spent 1, 2, 4, 10, 20 hours on your entry and no doubt so did everyone else. i think it's disrespectful.

i think it'd be nice to be able to mass download mp3s aswell so i could listen on mobile alot easier or something like that, not exactly sure how this would relate to voting but yeah

i kind of wish there was an easier way to vote

i think giving voters more of the spotlight is a great idea! we have crit points and votes/entry ratio on profile pages already but they're pretty subtle and uncelebratory

ngl the existance of this thread alone would motivate many to vote lol

i mean, it motivated me! without this thread i probably wouldnt have ever realized that people not voting was gonna be a problem..

@Jangler the entry/vote ratio IS subtle, i've only found it exists now that you said it XD

silly idea, but maybe throw a random unvoted entry on the home page for logged in botbrs with the description, donload+render, and vote submission form and all. would reduce friction to start voting since it's right there in your face.

this idea would allow votes to just trickle in more and i don't have to make some huge commitment to sit down and vote on a bunch of things if i am a casual browser.

we already have entry of the day on the home page.

For the scale of this compo I would prefer it if the inf was calculated differently (ie not so punitively) as personally it is a big ask to go for every single entry. Ahornbergs suggestion seems like the minimum reasonable bar that all entrants could follow


Or.more generally the larger the entry count the less punitive the inf calc to be be embedded in the formula

Agree with the vote on any format for which you submit an entry policy, doing so generally doesn't take too much time, even on big battles! Then if you have time for more vorting, it's always great!

I don't think penalizing people who don't stick to this rule is a good idea, unless not having enough voters is currently a big problem. I mean, if it only happens one or two times, it's not a big deal. Maybe reminding people to vote more often as said Mugo would be a good idea?

Also, I generally found Grafxicist/Pixelist formats easy to vote on as I'll spend less time on these entries than on audio entries and I can vote on it while listening and voting on audio entries.

Since vote comptetionism is becoming almost impossible, I think it would be good to encourage voting at least partially on large battles. We could for example have boon/points rewards for voting on every entry of a specific format, or rewards for certain milestones (10%, 20%, 30% of entries...).
For my personal case, I know that in the current state of things I prefer to vote either on everything or on nothing, so to be fair I don't vote a lot outside of OHBs I participate in and I realize that's not a great thing for the site and the community. Now I try to *at least* vote on entries in formats I submitted something to, I think this should be a good rule of thumb. (and people that want to/can vote more should definitely do so!)

For the specific case of the Advent Calendar, maybe encouraging people to vote for each category the next day would go a long way, since it really is 24 different battles ? Maybe putting a voting deadline of one day per format would help ?

I'm against any kind of "punitive" measures aside from those already in place, to me it would make voting feel even more like a chore and people could rush their votes to avoid penalties rather than take the time to evaluate submissions fairly on their merits.

Also, do you have more precise data on this ? Specifically the evolution of voting habits throughout the years ? Did entries get more votes on majors 2 years ago ? 5 years ago ? 10 years ago ? What if you divide it by the number of entries/participants ? I feel like quantifying the issue could definitely help working towards a solution.

i'd like to point out smth

if we do the vort on all formats u submit to, then do you know who loses the most?

completionists

why?

by submitting to every format, they basically need to vort on all entries, (or at least 1/2 - 2/3 of them)
and seeing how much work it can take to completionist, that seems backwards (especially for those going for the chip's champion challenge thing)

////////

now, i personally don't really vort on majors often simply because :

a) I'm usual just writing smal random tracks literally every breathing second (fancy way of saying im lazy, and i forget that no one is gonna vort on my entries if im not vorting on others)

b) usually try to write highlights of a tune in the comments when I vort, meaning I effectively have to active listen for several entries (double laziness smh)

and when I do vort, I gotta find the last submitted entry so I can vort easily

////////

an idea to maybe push more vorts (that im yoinking from itch.io) is a single (or multiple) random entry/(entries) on the battle page (maybe near where that "listen to all entries" button is)

or

show entries with the fewest vorts at top (i think it's actually done like this, but if it is then it's barely explicit)

thanks for hearing my $0.99 ted talk




this thread gets a
entries / 7

simpler version of my earlier idea

big VOTE! button that takes me to a random entry in any ongoing battle which i haven't voted on yet. could be a large button on the home page and an additional menu bar button

the fact that, if I don't vote on 712 entries, my voting influence gets reduced, is the one that stops me from voting on things like 64k and renoise that I care about more than the other formats. Why should my voice not matter unless I hit a certain number of hours? I think that in a large battle you shouldn't be disincentivized for only completing a few categories instead of the whole thing. It really really doesn't help that, being closer to an xhb than a major, the advent entries on average have less effort put into them than other majors.

Maybe this voting impossibility is saying "please never host advent again" or that is, don't host a battle that incentivizes submitting an insane amount of entries. Actually, why are we even telling people that completing every format is a good thing? (The answer is "because it's fun" by the way, but I think it's a good question to ask.)

Contrary to the previous paragraph I think it's better to change the voting system than to change the battles. I really like the idea of a penalty for not voting on the categories you submitted to - it very heavily disincentivizes spam entries as a side effect. Maybe voter influence can be calculated per category instead of per battle?

yeah, advent is really a herculean task - napkin math says if you're spending even four minutes per entry, that's... well I mean, that's like 48 hours of solid listening, voting, and commenting, and that's a conservative estimate, considering the time and effort involved in setting up stuff like tic or boom, relistening to original track when listening to cover, reviewing source photos for photomash, etc. Maybe even listening to a song more than once before you finalize your votes. The minutes become hours real quick.

so yeah of course it's totally understandable that people would balk at that kind of time commitment - and on that note, penalizing nonvoters feels too much like pissing on the poor. 🤷 if you've got the free time to commit to voting then you're one of the lucky ones.

... all that said, even if voting 100% is unachievable for most botbrs, voting even a little bit is very achievable for most botbrs, so just in terms of generally encouraging people to vote, yes, totally agree. Discussions of voting completionism just seems discouraging. Few votes always better than no votes.

I like the idea of incentivizing reaching some voting threshold (10%, 50%, 90%, etc) on a big major - and also favour the idea of promoting random voteless and/or commentless entries on the front page - also it might be a good use for the random banners, too.

Hey n00b, SmolF_sh worked really hard on their emtry "swimmin rn ig idk

" - listen and leave a comment, why don't ya!

yeah i personally don't really care about my voting inf (the community engagement is more important anyway) but i def agree that the formula is due for adjustment -- i think it was established long before these sorts of megacompos

Oh wow, you can vote on entries?

alright, if the stick is off the table, how about this for sweetening the carrot: tie the number of criticist points received per major vote to the number of entries in that major.

at present, a BotBr receives exactly 1 criticist point per entry voted on.

what if instead, for every 100 entries submitted to a major, BotBrs receive an additional criticist point with each vote? taking the currently open majors as an example, BotBrs would still get 1 criticist point for every apache saw entry voted on, but they'd get 3 points for every oops! entry voted on, and 8 points for every advent entry voted on.

it's daunting to be asked to listen to all 48 hours of advent '24, but i really think a system like this would encourage a lot more BotBrs to dip into these big majors and vote on a handful of entries. and smaller majors (thinking of monthlies) wouldn't be affected at all!

still just thinking out loud here, but i actually have a lot more confidence in this than my previous idea.

re: INF

i could see INF being tied to a per-format scaling rather than per-battle, that way you are both encouraged to vote on "formats you entered" and not given such a harsh penalty for bypassing others. (i should also say here that i think encouraging vote-all or vote-milestones is a great idea too. they don't have to be mutually exclusive)

however, in general i actually think INF is super important. for those who might not know, your vote influence (INF) scales based on how much of a battle you vote upon. if you only vote on a handful of entries, you have a quite low INF compared to someone who votes on all (or even just "more than you") - in fact it's a big difference - meaning your vote does not sway the score as significantly if you vote less

at its most blatant, this functions to prevent somebody from showing up to all-7 their friend's entry and bouncing outta there. i don't think we really have a lot of that, but what we do have is a lot of people showing up because the link to some entry was shared outside of BotB, casting an all-7 vote, and then bouncing outta there. for example, there is currently an entry to Oops! All New Formats which has 12 more votes than any other (and 17 more if you take away the next top ten most-voted); the winner of Summer Chip XIII has 14 more votes than the 2nd place entry; one of the high placers of Winter Chip XIX has 20 more votes than the winner... and considering majors generally average between 20-30 votes per entry, that is a huge difference. i would say there is quite frequently at least one entry to a seasonal major that does this.

INF scaling actually does a remarkably elegant job of answering that problem. it does not matter that those people showed up and voted all-7 on one thing and bounced. their vote means almost nothing. and i think that's a good thing! anything else would be unfair and turn this into a popularity contest! but getting back to my original point, if you tied INF scaling to each format, well those people are super unlikely to ever even bother voting on the relevant format for the thing they dropped in for (unless they were told to, which would be another problem entirely lol), so their vote being meaningless is preserved well enough... probably, assuming the math isn't wildly different than before. this would require some pretty serious refactoring to the voting calculations though, since INF is currently applied on a whole-battle level. doing different math per-format would probably be a difficult thing to figure out... maybe the best way to test it would be experimenting on local with closing old majors using new math and comparing.

i agree with tying INF scaling to formats rather than entire majors.

Most of my energy while voting goes into trying to figure out what the hell the categories mean. Very often they're not particularly different from each other; like, in the Oops battle there's "newly minted", "exploratory" and "fresh factor".

If there's a high chance I'm misunderstanding the categories, I feel that by voting I'm just introducing noise, which is kinda demotivating.

i for one really enjoy voting on tracks, and look forward to at least trying to get through the whole advent calendar. but i guess i am fortunate enough to have a job where i can be listening to tracks while being productive.

your INF should just be 0 unless you pass an entry threshold. one or two entries. done! Plus your INF sort of scales with your level

e: I mean voting on more than one or two entries, not submitting

@Max, the categories are deliberately vague, and i suggest making up your own rubric based on whatever you feel suits the vibe. i try to divide them out by things like "mix/arrangement", "development", "intrigue within its format", "personal enjoyment", etc.

Growing pains!

I agree with points made in particular about INF per format instead of the whole battle, and for increasing incentives in general via points or whatever.

I still think regardless of the time requirement, the best incentive of voting is just the appreciation of cool art. I have been able to make time to do full voting on most big seasonal majors I’ve been around for, and I have yet to regret the time spent on listening to all the entries. I continue finding stuff to love and that in itself keeps me coming back.

That said, the stuff mentioned above could be cool additions!

Tip: don’t think too hard about your votes

I have thought of another very simple solution : If we aim for say, ~30 votes per entry in majors to consider it fairly evaluated, we could just have INF max out or give diminishing returns at around 30-40 entries voted, and a bonus in either boons or criticist points for each "bundle" of 30-40 entries evaluated. If you add a progress bar with thresholds that would be even better for monkey brain activation.

The key thing here is having the goal of entries voted on be a fixed number instead of a proportion would make the experience of voting consistent in terms of time investment for the Criticist. This way, it encourages people to vote for a non-zero number of entries with a realistic goal (I am NOT voting on 700+ entries) and keep the number of votes per entries consistent to maximize fairness. The only issue I see is with stuff like advent calendar where the number of entries per person is higher than most majors.

a bot with 0.5x inf should vote randomly on every entry for the surprise factor but not give out anything above 5

inf scaling per format and higher point payout for a completed format of voting is cool for those of us who are invested in the game aspect of this place, but the only thing that will get people who are casually invested is fun, communal stuff. Sync-listens are the best we got for that by far.

It's hard. It's like promoting an album of songs you didn't even make most of.

PS punishments and guilt re: voting are definitely not it.
We gotta be nice and cool to each other here, there's enough nastiness and punishment doled out by dipshits online and in power.

Personally, I would have more fun voting for majors if I had one or two likeminded friends who were willing to sync listen the whole thing with me and we chatted about each entry while we voted.

Protip: you can vote on visual entries while listening to audio ones

---

Voting on teh big majors is something I often struggle to bring myself to do. I don't think that any of the suggestions made so far would motivate me, specifically, to vote more. Not saying they're bad proposals, I just don't think any of them would have a dramatic impact on how some people vote.

I question if people actually get motivated to vote more by the idea that their vote would matter more if they do. Whenever I vote it's as a courtesy towards the submitter, not the effect on the entry score or my booncount or whatever. And also, BotBrs make good music, and I want to hear it.

Maybe voting on an entry could transfer some perk to the submitter of the entry, not just the voter? What if votes received counted towards badge progress? What if your entry getting 10 votes meant you could drop a "supervote", doubling your INF for one vote only, to boost an entry you don't think is getting enough love? Etc etc.

Anyway I'm gonna go vote on some Oops! tracks now.

Do the entries need to be one per page + a lot of radio buttons? Itd be easy to have a list of all the entries on one page with a player and a short box to type in i.e. “77656” and press enter (without refreshing the page), move on to the next one etc…

"simpler version of my earlier idea

big VOTE! button that takes me to a random entry in any ongoing battle which i haven't voted on yet. could be a large button on the home page and an additional menu bar button"



i have implemented this idea
https://battleofthebits.com/academy/GroupThread/41803/VOTE+ON+RANDOM+MAJOR+BATTLE+ENTRIES+-+botb-vote+web+extension/#post205843