audience vote (Closed for comments)
Comments about this discussion:
Started
it would be great if the audience got some say in the judging. they don't need to be part of the real judging it could be as simple as in addition to the top 3 there would be an audience favorite.
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Copying these two over from the Presentation discussion, with edits to mine:
Comment by John Foss
The audience is often pretty good at spotting the best performances, but not always. I often agree with the audience's favorites than what the judges chose, on the Presentation side. But the audience doesn't necessarily know our rules, don't necessarily have any background on the subject, and are also biased and political. Popular people get more weighting. Stuff people haven't seen before might score higher than it should (compared to people with more background of watching the performances), etc.
A people's choice type of award, might be interesting, but I don't know if it's something for the Rulebook, or would be better in that mythical "convention guide" that never seems to get made. That's the book that would contain all the collected knowledge of past hosts, and recommendations for avoiding their mistakes, doing things more efficiently, ect.
Comment by Jamey Mossengren
I don't like audience vote as that is basically just a who's the most popular or who has the most fans from your country.
As for making presentation judging better and more accurate, I think training should be the number one thing to focus on. From what I read on Kirsten's post it seems like the current system works with proper training. Maybe we could follow how they do it.
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I'm against audience vote, as Jamey says the audience will vote the most popular performance or they vote for their one club. It will always be an unfair vote.
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I am completely against this for the reasons that have already been stated. I think the hosts of competitions could decide to add a category like "audience favorite" or "most entertaining" but that would be completely up to their discretion and doesn't need to go in the rulebook.
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To be clear, the audience should not have a formal part in Freestyle judging. It's just kind of sad, currently, that they often do a better job on Presentation than the hard-working judges. But they are untrained, and certainly biased. Informal audience voting could be fun for them, and be a way to pay more attention to the performances (and maybe even for recruiting future judges). But it should be done on an informal basis and not be connected to the actual competition rules.