Close of Nominations for LemmyVision 2 - Australia (aussie.zone)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The grand event, Lemmyvision 2 is about a week away, which means we need to decide on aussie.zone's winning nomination!

Lots of nominations this year! I've definitely found a few songs i'll be listening to more!

So, we'll have to collate them, and whack em up in some kind of final nominations list to vote on them.

If anybody has an idea for how we should vote for the nominations please say.

I think we should aim to get that post up and nominations voting on by tomorrow night.

top 8 comments

sorted by: hot top new old

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I propose, for the sake of it, we can have fun with an Instant-Runoff Vote similar to our electoral system. (This is not to endorse IRV as the theoretically ideal method for this election, see here, but it's simple enough, ~~familiar~~ Australian enough, and good enough)

How my proposal would work:

A post for the election lists (and links to) the nominations and explains the election premise, and instructs voters to reply with a new comment ranking all of the nominations in order of preference (we can create a source ballot template using code formatting so they can copy-paste it into the comment field). Once the voting deadline is up, the IRV process is followed - votes are allocated to each ballot's top remaining preference, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and their votes re-distributed to those ballots' next preference, repeat until a candidate passes 50%.

(Since this competition is a small scale, there are online tools which can semi-automate and validate the IRV count - https://petertheone.github.io/IRV/ seems like a simple one)

Some issues I foresee:

Eligibility: Who is allowed to vote? Only people living in Australia? Anyone in the region? People who have lived in Australia but are now citizens elsewhere? Anyone who cares enough about Australia's LemmyVision journey to vote?
Invalid votes: if there's one constant on the internet, it's people unwilling or unable to follow basic instructions like "copy-paste this ballot as a new base comment, fill in all the numbers and then click post". If a vote is incomplete, contradictory, duplicated or otherwise hard to understand, we should ask the poster to edit their comment until it is valid. (Non-anonymous voting FTW)
Uninformed votes, such as someone just picking a song they already like as [1] and donkey-voting the rest. This is why I added the requirement to rank all the candidates

An example of a ballot template:

(use the 'source' button to see how I created this, note the four backticks surrounding everything, because there's already three backticks used for formatting the candidate section)

___
**LemmyVision 2 Australian Nomination Ballot** (1977 edition)

Place a number inside the box next to ALL songs, ranking them from 1 to 4 in order of preference.
```
[] "Advance Australia Fair"
[] "Waltzing Matilda"
[] "God Save the Queen"
[] "Song of Australia"
```
___

What that ballot looks like when filled in and posted:

LemmyVision 2 Australian Nomination Ballot (1977 edition)

Place a number inside the box next to ALL songs, ranking them from 1 to 4 in order of preference.

[2] "Advance Australia Fair"
[1] "Waltzing Matilda"
[4] "God Save the Queen"
[3] "Song of Australia"

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I was going to suggest a preferential voting system, too! I support what you've laid out 👍

Eligibility: Who is allowed to vote? Only people living in Australia? Anyone in the region? People who have lived in Australia but are now citizens elsewhere? Anyone who cares enough about Australia’s LemmyVision journey to vote?

We might not need to worry too much about it, and if ballots will be submitted as comments, people would at least need alt accounts to do ballot stuffing.

If we do want to set some eligibility standard just in case, though - and it could avoid contention to set a standard up-front - I think it'd be reasonable to set the criteria that users should be 'active on the instance'. An objective standard for that could be something like 'has commented at least 2 times in communities on this instance, prior to this week'.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

activeness criteria

I think this is a great idea.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah i think thats fair.

The only stipulation i saw from Jlai.lu was to gather 'members' of the 'Community'. So i supposr they're meaning anybody subscribed to c/rage. My concern is c/rage isn't the most subscribed to community on aussie.zone.

I can ask, but i'd imagine if we've got a fair system for capturing lots of aussie.zone users in general that'd be acceptable.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I don't really understand what the backticks are being used for.

Other than that, this set up looks great! Far better than i could've thought of!

I can try to implement this idea, but i think you've got a good vision here i doubt i'll recreate well. If you have the time, could you do the ballot post? I can sticky it when you post it.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Sure thing, I'll post it tommorow night.

backticks

Some sites like reddit and Lemmy used 'markdown' style text formating, certain symbols tell Lemmy to format text differently (the Lemmy guide can be found by clicking that (?) button at the end of the formatting buttons in the top of the reply box).

Mardown sometimes tries to format text when you don't want to. If you just want Lemmy to ignore symbols then you can use a backslash to 'escape' the formatting character (e.g. I use \* to type *claps hands* instead of claps hands).

Markdown uses backticks to signal code formatting (intended for any data a computer would input or output). Single backticks are for small snippets of inline code and triple backticks are used to mark

  * multi- *
 ** line   **
 ** code   **
  * blocks *

Code formatting adds programming language syntax colouring, makes the letters all the same width ('monospaced') and, most importantly here, ignores markdown formatting which in this case would have normally turned that text all bold and italic.

My ballot template is markdown code for people to copy. I can't just type it out normally, or Lemmy would interpret all the formatting when I post it and you wouldn't have any formatting left to copy and paste! So the backticks tell Lemmy that it's code, don't format it normally.

The quadruple backticks are an advanced trick, I had to look up how to do it. My ballot template (markdown code) also has a code block nested inside it! The nested one is because I wanted the actual list of songs in a code block to make the boxes line up to look neater and be easier to read: [1], [2], [3] could be all different widths in some fonts but [1], [2], [3] are all the same. The quad backticks is kind of similar to double quoting, triple quoting, etc., adding more of a symbol to nest the formatting:

> > > triple
> >
> > double
>
> single

triple

double

single

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Wow! Thats attention to detail with the nested code blocks. Didn't even notice this.

I'll have to save this comment and try it a few times. I've been slowly experimenting with Markdown, the guides are usually good, but it is time consuming, and i didn't think it was appropriate for me to pissfart about this week experimenting, while people have votes to be casting! :)

Cheers @[email protected]