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

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

I think the queue system for artist polls is fine, if that's what you want, but I don't feel it should cease every other poll on the board. Like, the point of ILM is to have some fun and interesting discussions on music, not to meticulously plan everything for the next 5 years. I think it's okay to announce it in this thread if you're planning a bigger general/non-artist poll, just to we don't get several of those running at the same time, and I think so far it's worked fine. But the idea that voting in each and every poll takes so much time and effort that you can't possibly do anything else while that poll is running sounds absurd to me! Okay, maybe it is like that for some people, but I can't imagine it applies to the majority of people here. So aren't the rest of us allowed to have fun because some people take these things super seriously?

Also, does anyone really vote in all of these polls? I'm looking at the list now, and it seems all the upcoming polls from #65 to #91 are Old Geezer Rock Music, with Burth Bacharach (and maybe Spoon?) being the only exception. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who doesn't much care about sone Old Canonical Rock Bands, so do we have to wait for the next 2 years before there is a fun poll around again?

So yeah, I get the point why people want to organize these polls, and it's a good thing they're discussed here, but having a single queue for everything is taking it too far, IMO.

Can, Dead C, Royal Trux, Bauhaus, John Fahey, Fairport Convention - what a boring bunch of old canonical rock bands!

For most of these polls I feel a good schedule is two weeks of listening/voting and one week of rollout. Nobody is forced to spend two weeks doing their homework, but most of my favourite poll experiences have been cases where I only knew a fraction of the discography beforehand and used the poll as an opportunity to dig deep (e.g. Motown, John Cale, Neil Young).

I doubt there's anyone here who votes in every single poll, and running overlapping polls is definitely a good idea, though organising one of these is hard work and every poll runner deserves to have the board's attention when they roll out so there shouldn't be two results threads at any one time imo.

I think it's okay to announce it in this thread if you're planning a bigger general/non-artist poll, just to we don't get several of those running at the same time, and I think so far it's worked fine.

I'm tentatively open to this way of thinking - - - so there's a less-formal but still-in-place way of making sure there aren't multiple long-ballot mega-polls competing (or covering the same ground)? That was part of the big issue a year ago (notwithstanding whatever else was in play) - "all time albums" was unveiled without preamble just as the similarly vast (and long-scheduled) Classic Rock was due to unfold. The system has survived other "big" polls gliding by, it's true.

fwiw there has been intermittent discussion of a half-decade thread happening in 2015 for a couple of years now

2) A track that's shorter than 10/15/20 minutes can be valid if it's at least twice as long as the second-longest track on the same album.

I doubt Leee or anyone is gonna start calculating average track lengths within a whole genre, so non-album singles would still be problematic... But I don't see how this poll could be run in a non-problematic way, since the definition of "epic" length varies so much between genres.

I'm disinclined to include songs based on their relative lengths, since a 4-minute punk song could qualify. What's more, I'm using "epic" merely to denote "really long song," not "WHOA THAT WAS EPIC, MAN," so no "November Rain."

I think the original 10-minute-rule is a pretty good one. It's not like the whole top 50 is going to be ambient tracks.

it would be best to break each epic up into its respective parts, so in the final result we would see, e.g. how the Sweet-like fast part of "Bohemian Rhapsody" fares vs. the repeating instrumental part of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)," etc.

subpoll?

Two Points

• Perhaps Genre/Label polls should be moved to a separate list, as they work on different timetables than individual artist ones.

• There really needs to be more of an overlap in the single artists polls. Seems to me a voting thread shouldn't have to wait to get rolling until after the previous poll is done rolling out. A attentive pollrunner should monitor what's going on before their turn. The sign that the poll before you is doing results should prompt you to get what you need together for voting, and once that's done get the thread going. Rollout Thread A and Voting Thread B can coexist.

^^^ I had assumed this was still/always the case!

rmde at any epic poll with rules that might exclude "Freebird"

Then strike "epic" and substitute with "15-minute long."

http://media1.giphy.com/media/STs07TDdxyKru/giphy.gif

sore gif of epic ack

I think the original 10-minute-rule is a pretty good one. It's not like the whole top 50 is going to be ambient tracks.

― ⊤ℝolliℵg M∃th H∑a∂ (seandalai), Wednesday, February 4, 2015 4:03 PM (18 minutes ago)

Kashmir - 8:32

favorite bible verse

http://download.lardlad.com/framegrabs/9F14/031.jpg

nah it's all about Pathway To Glory 8:37

just as the similarly vast (and long-scheduled) Classic Rock was due to unfold

and when did that classic rock poll take place again? july or something?

just run the poll when you like jf

Yeah. Doesn't seem that long ago, but I guess it is. xp

just as the similarly vast (and long-scheduled) Classic Rock was due to unfold

and when did that classic rock poll take place again? july or something?

― Eric Burdon & War, On Drugs (Cosmic Slop), Wednesday, February 4, 2015 6:29 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this does not strike me as a fair line of argument. IIRC (and brief control-Fing of this thread seems to back me up), some dude initially put it on pause because of the unheralded album poll. after that kerfluffle got sorted, he then had to postpone due to work etc., but - - - and this strikes me as significant to the points up for discussion - he resolved this by consulting with other people coming up in the queue, dropping himself down in line, and basically working it out with people. then when it came it was the best poll ever and the summer that never ended, and also Sandy.

he didnt put it on pause; he wasnt ready to run it. but who cares really. its just ridiculous that people want jf to join a queue for something that isnt an artist poll.