Monthly Community poll on 5 featured artists

Ordinary Resolution

Proposal (2/2): Monthly Community poll on 5 featured artists

Description:

Monthly, all active members may participate in a quadratic voting poll to vote for 5 artists to be featured on the platform’s home page in the “featured artist” and hero banner for the subsequent month.

Should a quadratic voting solution not be available, members may vote using the built-in poll functionality in the forum.

Why:

The site has a hero banner pulled from the featured artists, and a featured artists section, but no mechanism for the community to choose what artist(s) to feature.

How to artists get nominated for this? A thread on the forum??

How to pick what artists to remove? Not sure on this either. Perhaps all are put up to vote, with the artists from previous months on the ballot by default.

Why quadratic? To give the members an opportunity to strongly support a particular artist.

Why 5? The each row of featured artists allows 5 artists.

references from other communities

(AMPLED Community Digest: August 2021):

Artist-owners recently voted on how to prioritize the rollout of numerous site features. To do so, they were all invited to a special election using a method called quadratic voting. It’s a complex but highly effective form of voting that works best in situations that involve collective decision-making. (To learn more about the technicalities of quadratic voting, visit the website for the RadicalxChange Foundation.) Artist-owners voted to prioritize four artist communication features from most to least urgent: Click here and scroll down to “Event Votes” to see the results. That’s now the order in which Ampled’s developers will work on improving them.

Furtherfield:

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The idea of community driven narratives seems very powerful. The community ‘chooses its own adventure’.

Not sure about popularity contests though.

On the other hand, adding a deadline where votes are tallied live might be fun to watch…

Weekly?

@richjensen just for discussion:

Monthly vs Weekly vs Other Time Scale:

  • My feeling for monthly is that participation is low and probably will stay low for a while, and the pool of voters should be larger than the pool of nominators

Popularity Contest

For me, this is a feature, not a bug, and with some rules/structure/goals it could be a non-issue.

Lets do some popularity contest nightmare scenarios. A charismatic artist decides they want to get on the featured list for whatever reason, and:

  • …sends their sizable mailing list to become members and vote them to the top. Unless there’s something severely problematic about the artist, the coop only wins. There’s more members, more engagement, and some of the rabid fans might stick around.
  • …starts annoyingly spamming the forum with links to their music. This behavior might not with them any points, but could reveal where some forum management weaknesses. Nobody really wins here and it gets uncomfortable.
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This also probably wouldn’t win them much popularity among those in the forum (who are also gonna be voting).

Also, every forum needs moderators. With active moderators, we wouldn’t need to worry as much about this kind of stuff

Another potential mitigation for rampant popularity contests is to rate-limit nominees & featured artists. For example:

  • If an artist is nominated for x sequential periods, they may not be nominated for y subsequent periods.
  • If an artist has been included in the hero banner, they may not be nominated for z subsequent periods.
2 Likes