I’d like to point out what I see as a couple of potential issues with the rules of the poll. Others might disagree, but this is just how I see it.
First, casting three votes without being able to indicate a preferred ranking could lead to some odd results. For example, there could be a wide spread of opinion on the best and second-best photos, but general agreement on the third-best. That would cause the third-best to get the most votes.
Second, disallowing a vote for your own photo could be a disincentive for many who have posted a photo. It’s sort of like telling a candidate for public office that he’s allowed to vote, but only for one of his opponents.
I would have preferred to see everyone get just one vote, for whatever photo they want.
I’m going to reply to your points slightly out of order:
I strongly disagree. The goal of this isn’t to find the objectively best photo, it’s to have fun, encourage people to participate and hopefully get people out taking photos. One-person-one-vote would likely lead to a single runaway winner every month, whereas allowing multiple votes spreads them around a bit - more fun for everyone. Since the watchword for this is inclusivity, anything that encourages participation is a good thing, and spreading the votes around achieves that.
My original design for this did in fact have preferred ranking (3, 2 and 1 points), but the board software doesn’t support that as far as I can tell, and the mods preferred to keep the voting on-board (rather than using SurveyMonkey or similar). I’d also argue that we’re not looking for the objective best photo (there is no such thing), only the most popular.
I suspect this is one of those things that might split opinion. Personally, I don’t see not being allowed to vote for yourself as a disincentive, and I feel that if everyone votes for themselves then it doesn’t change the overall outcome, it just means everyone effectively gets two votes instead of three.
Having said all that, this is the first one of these that I’ve run, and I said right at the start that there would be fine-tuning of the rules as we go. I’m not going to change how things work for this inaugural competition, but perhaps once the voting has closed we can discuss what worked, what didn’t and what we might want to tweak next time.
Having the votes spread across two polls creates a bit of difficulty in determining who got the most votes, too, because you might have a situation where one person gets a higher percentage of the votes in one poll, but someone in the other poll got more actual votes, but a smaller percentage of the votes in that poll just because more people voted for entries in that poll. Not insurmountable, but requires actually doing some math to figure out how many votes each person got. Making the votes public like @Mean_Mr.Mustard suggests makes it easy to see how many votes each entry received.
Is it possible to pin the photo poll thread to the top for a week? It might get lost otherwise.
It looks like some people are only casting one vote, which might be the best way to conduct it for future threads. I think the three vote thing is a bit confusing.
Is there a place to discuss the pictures themselves? Maybe after the polls are done so that there isn’t any influence on the voting? We could avoid showing who voted but generally discuss.
Hi everyone. Today is the last day of voting. I’ll be closing the polls at 9pm GMT today - for reference, at the time of this post, it’s 11am GMT, so 10 hours from now.
A reminder that anyone can vote - you don’t have to have submitted a photo. The poll and details of the voting rules are in the competition thread itself, which is linked to above.
Great question! That’s kind of what I intended this thread for, really. It’s turned out to be more of a discussion about the mechanics of the competition, probably because it’s the first one - but I’d love it if we talked about the pictures themselves here as well.
All these pictures remind me why I enjoy photography. Here’s a couple standouts to me.
I love everything about Mean Mr. Mustards Yellow House on a Hill. The different textures of the fore, middle and background. The composition, the muted colors until you get the shock of yellow. All works for me. Years ago I tried a similar shot. I’ll have to dig it up and post it some day when the subject is appropriate.
TwoCarrotSnowman’s woodland path is a great example of the classic path leading you into a picture. This one reminds me why it’s a classic. The framing is just perfect with the path.
Wow, thanks. That was a miserable grey morning, which perfectly obeyed TwoCarrotSnowman’s First Law of Landscape Photography: if I drag myself out of bed to catch the sunrise, there won’t be one. (The Second Law is that if I stay in bed, it’ll be spectacular).
It’s a great shot, for all the reasons you mentions. I also really liked that the house kind of looks like a face (the windows are the eyes, and the bush in the middle is the nose) smiling benevolently down on the landscape. You’d have to forgive me, I’ve had a lot of cold medicine today…
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