The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hey Spud, I bought you Something pretty. Would you mind puttin' them on before we get started?

I got something for you too! What a coincidence!

Awww, you shouldn't have. That really is a co-inky dink.

Billy's Little Trip wrote:Bottom line:
1. More time to make better songs
2. More time for reviews and voting per title
3. Increased votes

1. More time to make songs
2. More time for reviews and voting
3. Less pressure and motivation=less songs and less votes.

I'm also starting to think we shouldn't have good/okay/bad buttons (I don't remember who suggested it, but I liked the idea at first), because as I see it - the less like somesongs SF is, the more likely it is to be successful! No offense to those who treasure somesongs, but the system doesn't get people up and voting.

EDIT: Sorry to shift the focus from thongs, guys.

Has anyone seen my stapler?

Fluf, click Mr Happy, above...shhhhh.

frankie big face wrote:I don't think most people want to listen to 30 songs with one title and keep notes about which ones they like so they can cast that vote.

this certainly seems true to me, although i will leave it to people smarter than myself to figure out how to fix it (or whether it in fact needs fixing).

if i am going to vote, i feel like i have to listen to each song, usually a few times, and comment at length (when possible) about what i do or don't like; to do anything less, to me, is unfair to the people who put all that work into creating their songs. since i infrequently have such a large chunk of time to devote to this activity (that is, as much time as i feel i ought to devote to it), i usually don't devote any time at all. sad, but true.

If we actually care about the vote then we need to change the voting system (I like the "what's better" approach where a listener is given random pairs of songs and is asked to decide which one is better). The fact this keeps coming up tells me that, repeated assertions to the contrary, people actually do care about the vote.

Does anyone think that a different UI might make it easier to listen to more of the songs? Like, if there were a Flash MP3 player embedded in the home/fight pages so that you could listen to the songs right on the page, with the ability to skip around within and among the songs? Or some other UI?

Another voting option would be instant-runoff voting, where people can vote for more than one song if they want, and apply a ranking to the songs they vote for (so, they could choose one song as their #1, a different song as their #2, etc.). If no song gets a majority of #1 rankings, then the other rankings get factored in to pick the winner. (The wiki entry linked above has a better and more detailed explanation of how that works.)

Any voting system which requires everyone to listen to all the songs first before deciding which one(s) to vote to is inherently flawed. A voting system which allows different people to listen to some subset and then combines those subsets together is much better. (Which is the main reason I like "what's better" because it means that even if someone just listens to two songs they can still contribute positively to the vote.)

Lunkhead wrote:Does anyone think that a different UI might make it easier to listen to more of the songs? Like, if there were a Flash MP3 player embedded in the home/fight pages so that you could listen to the songs right on the page, with the ability to skip around within and among the songs? Or some other UI?

Plus it's nice to look at the cover art while listening. I like that idea, Lunk.

Not that I'm advocating instant-runoff voting, and not that you're saying this isn't the case with IRV, fluffy, but I'd just like to try again to explain that IRV doesn't require anybody to do anything more than what they're already doing. At a minimum, voters can just pick a #1 choice.

But having to pick a #1 choice is a big part of the problem with the current system, since it requires that people listen to all the songs first (since you can't know that there is no better song until you've listened to them all).

The current system doesn't technically require you to listen to all the songs, or any of the songs for that matter, to be able to vote. There is no actual -requirement- to do anything in order to vote, other than visiting the site, I thought. People may not consider votes like that to be very legitimate (since as you've pointed out you can't truly know what your favorite is if you haven't listened to them all) but it is a completely legitimate vote in the current system, as far as I understood things. It also seems like the openness of the system is intentional, though maybe I'm wrong there. (FMs?)

fluffy wrote:Any voting system which requires everyone to listen to all the songs first before deciding which one(s) to vote to is inherently flawed.

This is absolutely correct, especially when there is a great number of song (like 25 or more). I almost never vote because I'll listen to a few songs (usually by names I recognize), but not vote (because I haven't heard the other songs yet) and before I know it, there's a new title. If I could rate the songs as I go, I'd be much more inclined to listen and participate in the voting process.

I think that people are so hung up on reviews that they forget that people outside of songfight just skip past songs they don't like: they don't sit down and try and figure out WHY they don't like a song, they just dislike it and move on. It really doesn't take that long to listen to 25 songs if you only like 2 of them and the other ones you FF past after 10 seconds.

I still understand where this idea of "requirement" is coming from. How does the current system require people to listen to all the songs before they are allowed to vote?

It's an implied requirement. There are 25 songs. Vote for your favorite. That requires (from a fair, anonymous listener's perspective, not from a systems design perspective) to know which one your favorite is.

Requirements aren't necessarily imposed by systems.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. So fluffy, do you feel like a drop in votes could be the result of a lack of votes from folks like you and frankie, who it sounds like aren't voting (as much, anyway) because the fights are too big for you to listen to all of all the songs? That could be.

Of course, historically, it seems like a lot of people have voted who have a very different idea of what they're "supposed" to do before voting (like people in friend floods...). I personally fall more into the kind of situation that Erik is describing. I generally won't listen to all of every song. If a song starts out really bad, I will skip ahead into it a couple times, and if it's still bad I will move on to the next song. It's hard to do more than speculate about listening habits without any data, though. Perhaps there is interesting data in the http access logs that could be parsed to show trends about voter behavior if someone wanted to do the work involved in that. Any volunteers?

I dunno, when I say "The Pixies are my favorite band", I don't imply that I've listened to every band ever. Or even on a smaller scale, if I say "Fried chicken livers are my favorite thing to get at Threadgills", I don't mean to imply that I've sampled the whole menu. I think you can fairly say that something is your favorite without having sampled everything from the category to which your favorite thing belongs.

Erik: Yes but those are unbounded sets, whereas there is a set of 25 songs. Whenever I point friends to Song Fight they're all "oh, so I have to listen to all these songs before I can vote? Fuck that."

Lunkhead: I believe that is why the vote count has dropped, yes. I also believe that the vote is more or less irrelevant anyway.

Lunkhead wrote:I generally won't listen to all of every song. If a song starts out really bad, I will skip ahead into it a couple times, and if it's still bad I will move on to the next song

I don't mean to empty the tool belt into the mechanics of this debate, but when you say, "I will skip ahead into it a couple times, and if it's still bad I will move on to the next song". Are you referring to the recording quality, guitar, drums, lyrics or maybe the volume? Just curious as to what grabs your G spot.