Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The Hugo has always been a popularity contest; it's never been about literary merit.
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I'm not a writer or WorldCon member. My only interest in the Hugo is that it indicated that a book was popular and considered to be good, so worth trying out. If we consider the polling to be an informal census, then it does provide useful information about the books if the sampling is done evenly across the distribution of members. Gaming the contest ensures that the sampling is no longer even, and that it is no longer possible to conclude that the "winner" is the book that had the most people who thought it was good compared to the others. Having people select books that they haven't even read makes it even worse. It turns the exercise into a competition rather than a census, and makes it useless as a polling and marketing tool. Perhaps you thought it was always useless for that, and feel no loss at the destruction of the census. To me, it is sad, especially because it was done for such a pathetically small power grab.