ILM Ballot Polls for 2014 and beyond -- order, timing, "I would have voted if I'd known about it," etc

Bottom of the barrel? I totally disagree

so do i fwiw

I'm not gonna say artist polls have to stop to accomodate these other bigger more generic polls.

The poll's going to happen in the late summer regardless of what other polls are taking place.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, February 4, 2015 1:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nice B-)

Jf wants to do it late summer = fine whatever. If whoever's up for the next artist poll at that point wants to wait that's up to them. Imo.

At the rate these take place, we'd probably be down the list to the hair metal or CCR poll by August, and an ILM retrospective poll isn't going to take any shine off either of those.

(also, I plan to vote in both)

these polls are taking so much longer than they were initially expected to, can't imagine signing up to do something three years hence

Yeah, we used to be able to get through 2 a month, but somewhere along the line people started extending the voting period (for some reason?) and now the whole process is a slog.

The poll's going to happen in the late summer regardless of what other polls are taking place.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, February 4, 2015 1:31 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hope this advance notice gives everyone a chance to get some deep cut joke #1s ready

The results will be more interesting in 2020 than in 2015 IMO. It's a cool idea for a poll, but I agree it shouldn't jump ahead; EOY really should be the only exception to the queue. We hashed this out last February, and I agree with those saying it would end up being unfair to those who'd waited their turn. If ۩ had taken up the proposal, back then, to join the queue, he'd be justifiably pretty annoyed to find out that another 'general' poll had gotten community approval to skip, where his (I think rightly) was not.

I stand by this:

this thread and its predecessor work on the assumption that too many polls at once is bad for all of them - people can't make ballots, can't find time to participate in the threads, it's a drag. BUT: an unscheduled poll may, based on its topic, be really appealing to lots of people who aren't necessarily following the order-and-timing thread. They are, like the people making ballots in the current Albums poll, stoked to participate. That wouldn't be a problem, except now, the next person to start a poll that *is* on the 'schedule' is put in a bind: Do I start this long-scheduled poll, at the risk that much of ILM will see it as the late-comer that's adding to a pile-on? "Crap, I would totally have made a classic rock ballot, that sounds awesome, but..." Or do I wait, even though a) I've been waiting my turn, b) we just waited out the EOY polls, and c) waiting is in turn holding up every other poll further down in the queue?

Unless there's a larger ILM consensus to stick with the ordered-and-timed schedule, then that schedule can always get derailed completely by an unscheduled (I'm trying to avoid saying "rogue") operator.

My feeling is that there has been something of an ILM consensus about the validity of the order-and-timing threads in the three years since they've been in use. It's possible of course that I'm overstating that, or reading too much into the success of the polls they've spawned. I do think the results of this system have met with much more public approval than the results of a hypothetical world where all of the last twenty polls had taken place the same month would have! We don't really have a moderation test case though - the rogue Madonna poll was locked, but because it was a swipe at a particular poster, not specifically because the O&T list was "law."

I'd add that I think this applies uniquely to music polls, where ILMers really do want to set aside time to do some listening to refresh and narrow down the ballot - - - I would hope, particularly in the case of a 'retrospective' ballot where there's the chance for people to pull out a track they haven't listened to in a decade and go "Wait...I was excited about this?" That just takes time, and means that competition for 'ballot time' is a real thing in a way that I don't think it would be for movie or book polls or whatever...I mean nobody is actually going to watch a hundred films in a month to try and sort their ballot for Action Movies.

Yeah, we used to be able to get through 2 a month, but somewhere along the line people started extending the voting period (for some reason?) and now the whole process is a slog.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, February 4, 2015 11:39 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agree, time to get back to the core principles of polling

The core, the heart poll

Polls taking longer could be a fair point (though you don't want it to feel like a brutal assembly line)... and maybe should be a separate conversation around 'reforms.' How long is the average voting period these days?

For me the bigger issue with poll timelines is the really really fast rollouts, which make it impossible to take anything in if you, say, go to work one day. I don't see any reason results can't be spread out over a longer period, while the next ballot starts. The issue is with crowding out people's energy and time for crafting ballots, not for reading and discussing rollouts.

Like, voting should begin on a Monday with results beginning the following Monday. Then the NEXT Monday voting starts for the next poll. That ain't a hard schedule to stick to imo.

good post dr. casino, but i still feel like the 5-year retrospective is an established tradition that pre-dates the queue system (which has only been around since 2011)

I'm all for keeping voting/resuls rollout cycles to 2 wks. Sometimes huger discographies may warrant longer times.

To speed it up even more, voting on the next poll could begin concurrently with the previous poll's rollout.

i'm all for timely polls but as important and serious business as ILM is, give me a break ppl have lives, sometimes its better to wait for a quality rollout than have a poll-runner flake because life got in the way for a few weeks

If ۩ had taken up the proposal, back then, to join the queue, he'd be justifiably pretty annoyed to find out that another 'general' poll had gotten community approval to skip, where his (I think rightly) was not.

I don't care really. I still believe that Artist polls are for this thread only and other polls aren't and should run whenever they like.

Half decade polls are crap but 2000-2014 sounds ok to me. Just do it JF. A lot of last feb's stuff was personal by certain posters.

cant speak for nick though since the poll was as much , of not more,his

All I'm saying is that if the timeline on this became a lot more uniform, a user whose life gets hectic for a minute can slide down a list a little bit but still have a pretty good idea that the poll would take place in 8 weeks instead of 6 months maybe possibly.

iirc a precedent for an all time poll was set about 12 years ago grady. but really who cares. they arent artist polls.

and im still not doing the all time poll fwiw

as much as i am pro-polls and agree that this conversation is positive and productive, i feel its time to c+p one of my all-time fave J0rdan posts:

we had a thread where people lined up to take turns polling artists careers like soccer moms arranging post-game snacks, so let's chill on what we call "ilx at its worst"

― dirty deathdrone boys (J0rdan S.), Sunday, June 26, 2011 10:11 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

ouch

Like, voting should begin on a Monday with results beginning the following Monday. Then the NEXT Monday voting starts for the next poll. That ain't a hard schedule to stick to imo.

― Johnny Fever, Wednesday, February 4, 2015 1:45 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

JF, you've run some of my favorite polls here, and obviously contributed to ballot poll culture way more than I have, but speaking as maybe a less heavy-duty ILXor, I'm not sure I'd ever vote in a ballot poll again if the windows were only five or six days! (I'm assuming the poll-runner needs time to tabulate the results, and/or make cool graphics, assemble pull quotes, whatever.) Thank goodness for longer windows on, e.g. your Elton John and Pixies polls (fourteen and ten days inclusive, respectively).

These are supposed to be fun, after all, and part of that fun is having time to set aside a lot of your listening over a period of time to an artist you like and stir up tracks you'd forgotten about, realize "oh shit, THAT solo, gotta bump that song up" or whatever. This also contributes to the joy of the conversation in both the voting and results threads, as people have fresher bits and pieces to share.

I do, wholeheartedly, agree that something like an ideal/standard length should be thought about, for the sake of having a kind of approximate predictability.

good post dr. casino, but i still feel like the 5-year retrospective is an established tradition that pre-dates the queue system (which has only been around since 2011)

― gr8080, Wednesday, February 4, 2015 1:45 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This isn't totally unconvincing to me - just would be good to have a clear standard that makes clear why Situation X flies and Situation Y doesn't. Otherwise we end up with statements like "a lot of last feb's stuff was personal by certain posters," which is pretty dismissive of those of us who can't even keep track which weird symbol goes with which thrice-renamed poster, and were trying to evaluate the case on the merits. I think if we go in for the proposed JF poll, we need to say it's basically akin to an EOY poll, and be willing to put the other polls on hold in the same way we've happily done for EOY. If most posters feel like that postponement is unfair to those who had the idea two years ago and have waited their turn, then I'm not so sure.

I'd vote in a 2010-2014 poll but probably not a 2000-2014 poll, that's just too much to sift through

post game snacks post has me craving hi-c

Apparently you people haven't been to many games. What would happen if all the moms brought the same snack? It would be a FUCKING NIGHTMARE. Post-game snacks aren't something you can just do willy nilly.

those of us who can't even keep track which weird symbol goes with which thrice-renamed poster,

lol

dr. casino otm tho

Thank goodness for longer windows on, e.g. your Elton John and Pixies polls (fourteen and ten days inclusive, respectively).

I sort of betrayed my own set of rules for those polls just to make people happy. When I vote in these polls, I typically make a quick and dirty ballot based on my instincts. If I don't have enough songs to fill it, I'll go back through the artist's catalogue and refresh my memory on a few songs. It usually happens all in one night, and more often than not in the space of a single hour, so the concept of pouring a whole bunch of time and energy into a ballot seems completely foreign to me...especially for a single artist. (Genres, decades, etc I understand the more thorough process of course.)

so the concept of pouring a whole bunch of time and energy into a ballot seems completely foreign to me

more like procrastinating. I can't imagine it takes anyone more than an hour or so to do a ballot.

haha that j0rdan post

O_o

xpost

idk that seems actually really easy to imagine xxp

I mean, I'm not saying I spend those two-week periods just painstakingly working over the ballot with a jeweler's loupe and little implements, but even (or especially!) for artists I like a lot, there is some period of listening to shit on shuffle, realizing a song is better in the speakers than it seemed 'on paper,' etc. etc.

I admit I also just like the excuse of being able to say "these are the weeks of Paul Simon" and getting reacquainted with the catalog, which I'm actually less likely to do with the song-by-song rollout. It's an opportunity for this little, like, personal seminar or book club on these artists. So that's not really conducive to a one-hour "from memory" ballot process. I also feel like really short voting windows just scare off people who aren't die-hard fans or die-hard ballot-makers, and obviously all polls are better with more people participating.

Well—and I'm really not advocating we go one way or the other, just pointing out facts—we built up this huge list of upcoming polls when things were zipping along at a pretty good rate and then, for one reason or another, they slowed WAY down and now we have a list that we'll likely never get through. If we'd started out with the idea that these polls would be contemplative, immersive events in the context of ILM, then I bet the list wouldn't have gotten so large so quickly. The list we have now is based on fast-moving polls, though.

Oh, I wasn't thinking about actually listening to the music. I usually spend a few days with the tunes on ipod and then whip a ballot together rather quickly.

(FWIW, if anything could clog up the queue really it'd be artists who just don't have large enough catalogs or ILM followings for a ballot poll to be particularly revealing. Like, a Chuck Berry poll would be a good excuse to listen to Chuck, but I doubt it'd produce a richer discussion than the Great Twenty-Eight poll thread, since it'd basically be about ranking those songs plus a few more. But who am I to say? My Billy Joel poll is probably folly, and some of the ones that make me scratch my head will probably be bliss for a bunch of people.)

I'm patiently awaiting that Billy Joel poll tbh.

Huh, I never really thought of the list as particularly zippy - it's kinda always felt like "put your quarter down and then be surprised when that bird finally comes home to roost." Not that that's an argument for it staying that way! Maybe some of our poll-tabulating energies could go into compiling some kind of bar graphs figuring out when the perceived slowdown happened, and whether it was suddenly or gradually. I agree it's not really fun waiting for years for these things and it would be nice to know when your turn will (likely) be. Just wouldn't want it to turn into a world where the voting periods and rollouts are always so short that it destroys on both ends the fun of participating in the polls.

xpost You may be waiting for the... most extreme duration.

I go to extremes.

for one reason or another, they slowed WAY down

I seem to remember the James Brown poll having something to do with this. Massive discography + low turnout (fewer than 20, iirc) meant the deadline got extended, then I think ILX went down for a week or two.

does anyone want a max martin poll at some point in the (perhaps distant if the queue is truly as slow as has been suggested) future?

Just want to ditto what doc casino said-part of what I enjoy in voting is spending some extended time with a catalog, like on the XTC one.
The other thing that comes to mind in how long the polls take is that I also did Motown Singles (50) and Classic Rock (100) and 100 is a lot of songs.
But if we aren't digging deep, why bother?

That Aphex Twin poll just got way more challenging with all the tracks RDJ is dropping the last two weeks