It really seems to me that recency bias would have a significant uphill battle against the dropoff in interaction from the majority - something that you yourself brought up earlier - and people mentally considering it settled. That this is able to swing at all seems to me to indicate that this isn't just... dangling a shiny new argument like jangling keys in front of the voters and them being so entranced by something novel that they blindly follow.
Eh, maybe, maybe not. I've been around the block a lot, but I'm not lying when I say that this is a corner case - it is
not easy to find examples of a vote being open this long and then suddenly swinging. There are no patterns to point to, no rules of thumb to describe what is happening.
Which is also why I'm concerned about whether or not it correlates to a change in overall player desires, because it being uncharted territory puts
that into question, too. How sure are we that we're improving our measurement of the playerbase's sentiment?
More thoughts about that question below the break.
And... well, this kind of proves that the feeling I had that this wasn't settled was justified, doesn't it? It was a metastable dynamic. If there was a clear winner, everything wouldn't be rattling around from a jostle. Believe me, I've seen a lot of attempts at very late rallies and a lot of them shift single digit votes and then fizzle out. Recency is not destiny.
It kind of sucks to be winning, and have a vote left open for months enable a last minute rally. It'd also kind of suck to have a split vote not get resolved because the vote closed before someone managed to articulate the resolution to that tension. It just plain kind of sucks to not win, to have a preferred way for the story to go and for it to not go that way. Honestly, I sometimes feel like I have it easier than any of you do.
I honestly can't even put my finger on what the resolution to that tension
was. It's buried somewhere in a no man's land of 20-30 pages. I've been disconnected with the thread more than connected with it for some time - and, like,
damn, I'm an effort poster, here! If I'm blindsided and unsure of exactly what's happening, then what's going on with anyone else?
The thing about a swing happening after people's "guard" is down is more than just about winning or losing, it's about attentiveness period. A major development in thesis and rhetoric
now is just... who's there to see it? Who's there to criticize or pick it apart? Is it really new, or something old that was independently thought up and articulated?
Who is
engaged? It's... I mean, not necessarily random, but this is rare enough of a situation that to me it may as well be.
All of the pomp and circumstance that normally surrounds a vote... the thought leaders, the surrogates, the Q&A, not all of it is still there and present, because nobody has called them here. Until you look inside, the thread looks identical to how it does when the vote is dead.
So how can we be sure if the thread at large has changed its mind, when only part of the thread is there for whatever it is that
did change?
How can we be sure that it's fair to those who only checked in after the threadmark, and set it aside to avoid a forever argument, confident that things had hit diminishing returns?
You make good points, and the "choose the winner by closing the vote along a sine wave" pitfall is very real, but I still can't help but feel that somewhere along the line should have been a release valve.
I dunno.
