The Crunchyroll Awards voting is underway, and considering the waves it made last year, of course that’s the hot-button topic for the aniblogging sphere…
One particularly contentious point about the awards is the inevitable complaint that “this is going to become a popularity contest”.
My particular view on this issue is that there’s so much anime out there (roughly 40 anime per season, plus a scattering of movies that make it to Western licensors and metric tonnes of manga in both digital and physical formats), people are bound to only see things that interest them. Even with the write-in option this year, when it comes to polls for favourite [so-and-so] people are only limited to judging what they’ve seen. Unless it’s favourite OP, ED or score, which can be found scattered across easily-accessible music services (hopefully legally and) for free without much of a time investment or requirement for focussing, not every person in the world has the ability to watch every nominated show (and/or movie and/or read every volume of the manga in the case of one category) to determine winners for every single category.
Of course, since the nominees are listed on the page right above the poll, these will be the shows (or whatever else) people will think over the most when they submit their votes. When I was trying to vote for Best Score, I only remembered my post for the Spellbook said my vote went to Kado once I’d submitted one for Ancient Magus’ Bride. That’s actually not a shift in my tastes, because I still think Kado’s is superior – it’s recency bias, and there’s really no fix for that. There’s just something about being satisfied with picking a nominee than being shunned for something you liked but others didn’t (even though the Award people won’t actually tell anyone who voted for what).
Then again, people are being less wary of what Crunchyroll are doing this time because they’ve expanded their votes to series available outside their servers. Also, those write-in votes at least mean it’s not completely restricted to the nominees if there’s a passionate enough fanbase that remembers a certain show (or movie or manga). Obviously, with the infamous Yuri!!! on Ice sweep last year the signs of a popularity contest were more prevalent then, but luckily enough it seems like Crunchyroll is learning from their mistakes.
Also, because Ayano mentioned being impatient about the staggered voting – my opinion is that it’s so that people get in and out quickly, and not flood the servers all at once to create an accidental distributed denial of service attack.
So, where do you sit on the idea of the Crunchyroll Awards?
(Addendum from the progress stage: Crunchyroll is taking op-eds for either essay or video formats. However, that’s not the reason I mention this forum thread – I put it here for the discussion on how to improve the Awards.)
Hey! You linked my award post in the “Also, because Keiko mentioned being impatient about the staggered voting – my opinion is that it’s so that people get in and out quickly, and not flood the servers all at once to create an accidental distributed denial of service attack.” part but I think you put the wrong name lol my name is Ayano. Unless you meant to put Keiko’s blog and not mind XD
*mine
Sorry, I must’ve remembered it wrong. Ty!
No problem! I just wanted to make sure you had the right person lol
Well….awards are probably always going to be controversial. I mean look at the Oscars each year. Definitely don’t always agree with the winners there either 😊
But I guess we will have to wait and see. No matter which way you look at it, it all comes down to a lot of personal preference. What is loved by one person, may be hated by someone else. Still looking forward to who will win though! 😊
The staggered vote thing is annoying. They can give us three weeks to vote and still open all the categories as people didn’t all need to go at one time to vote. Instead you have to go to the voting page, navigate to the categories that are open, wait for that page to load (assuming it does and doesn’t crash – which for me happened twice before I gave up on a category altogether), then you have to go back and find the next one. To be honest, you’d have to really want to vote to put up with that and given everything, I’m not that invested in who wins to keep trying and then go back a week later and do it again. I’ll happily see who they announce as the winners but I’m officially done with any engagement in the voting process.
I haven’t actually run into any problems with voting, although I have seen a few complaints about that around the internet. That being said, I can see why you take that stance if you’re being taken for a ride like that…
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
It just doesn’t make sense to make it difficult for people to participate. Not to mention, the nominees for all categories have been up for awhile, people know who they want to vote for and then they go to vote and find the categories aren’t all open. You’d have to be fairly determined to go back again and then again to vote in everything.
They have been giving reminders this year on their tiny blue banners, and even had a news post ( http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2018/01/22-1/anime-awards-voting-begins-for-week-1-check-out-the-first-wave-of-categories-and-vote-now ) for week 1, which is one of the improvements I was referring to in my post.
Well, even if I’m not correct about what I thought about the staggered voting, there must be some reason behind it…