Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm sorry, but it is an election campaign. It always has been. An election is simply "the selection of something by vote". The Hugos are a popularity contest, pure and simple. It's never been about "what's the best book?", but "which book do most people vote for?", which is entirely different. All that's happened here is that people with an agenda have started using social media for campaigning, just as happens in any election. It was inevitable that this was going to happen.
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[Just to check: you do understand the mathematics and mechanics of the nomination process, don't you? And they way in which a small number of people nominating an identical slate can overwhelm a much larger number of people voting for a wide diversity of beloved works? That the slate nominators in no way represented the majority?]
"It was inevitable"? Was it? I read a large number of SF blogs and take part in a lot of SF social media, and I've never seen a slate proposed and adopted like this before the Puppies. I see a lot of people talking about stuff they love, and saying "hey, what do you love and why? If I like the sound of it, I might read it too". None of that is campaigning or slate-nominating or encouraging slate-nominating. Neither are the simple eligibility statements some publishers/authors make; those are useful for figuring out which category a work should be nominated in so you don't have to do the word count or publication-year check yourself, if you're already a fan.
Maybe it was eventually statistically inevitable given enough time and enough monkeys (or maybe not), but if you think this is business as usual for the Hugos, you're wrong. It is a popularity contest in that the works/authors with the most votes win, but that doesn't mean that it is a "campaign" in the sense that party political election campaigns are campaigns. Most fans are honest folks who take the nomination process as an opportunity to vote for the stuff they loved, instead of playing simplistic culture-war games.