Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

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Rob
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Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Rob »

For a couple of weeks now I have been thinking about a poll based on a simple idea: using the songs that only received one vote in our recent All-Time Song Poll as a basis. These songs are only really beloved by one person, perhaps in many cases because they are unknown. We have the complete list of votes now, so why not filter these unique choices out of it and share the love in a game?

Well, I did filter all the songs out of there and found there are no less 13.052 (though there might be some doubles there; I found one - don't worry, it doesn't influence the results of the actual poll). A bit much for one game, so this simple idea became a big question mark. How to do it?

Even before I knew the enormous amount we are dealing with I wanted to keep things simple. I thought about a song a day format, where you just have to listen to one song. This means it doesn't really interfere with other polls and games going on here and that that the commitment level is low, so it could remain interesting for a long time. It doesn't matter much to me personally that we won't even get the whole list done before the next all-time song poll; I see it more a song suggestion for the day.

Perhaps that is all that it should be. Every day I randomly grab a song, post it in a topic, those interested listen to it and perhaps comment on it. The next day we get another one. No, this is not going to be a replacement for my 10.000 Songs series as I'm not going to do a review with extended information for each entry. It would just be artist, song title, link to the song, year, name of the one voter and perhaps the album it came from; nothing more. This idea could be enough.

Still, this is a forum that loves polls, games and ratings so perhaps we could do more with it. My initial plan was to make a ratings poll for each song of the day. You could vote from 1 to 10 and I calculate the average, which I will reveal at certain times. Say, after every 100 songs I will do a roll-out of the current top 100, a bit like MegaCritic does every 15 days. And I'll reveal the whole list before the new Song Poll is revealed. Something like that. I would keep voting active after that one day, so people who are late can always catch up and people whose opinion has changed can correct their vote.
The downside is that I would have to start a whole lot of topics here. If I use the AM poll creator I would have to make a new one for each song, flooding the forum with hundreds of polls. I looked for an outside poll creator, but didn't find any that allowed people to change their votes, which I think is important.

A second idea is a weekly poll like the Classics and Weekly polls we already have. The rules are the same - every week 10 songs stay and 10 are replaced by new ones, based on votes; after 8 weeks a song makes the hall of fame - although all entries would be random picks from the list, so no specific user suggestions.
It could work and it has some appeal, but asks for more of a commitment from users, as one of these playlists contains 20 songs with a running time of around 90 minutes. The forum already has two such games and I suspect it doesn't need a third.

A third option is that I just post one song each day, like above and people can send me their vote (from 1 to 10) and I post results every so often. Or everyone hands in a top 100 after every 100 entries. Or something like that. But this misses some immediacy and I suspect it will get tedious after a while. Voting in-topic after each new song, by simply posting your vote is also a possibility, but it will be an ugly mess for sure. It has little appeal to me.

So, a simple idea, but lacking an execution. Any thoughts? Are people interested enough in these 1-vote songs to want to do something with it? I attached the list in Excel below (I don't know why some cells have blue mark, I copied that directly from the source).
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PlasticRam
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by PlasticRam »

I dig it.
I feel like that
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whuntva
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by whuntva »

Works for me!
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Romain
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Romain »

The idear is really interesting for sure. I vote wit ha big YES !

I think it's a very good way to introduce people to new things and even to change the next song lists.

On the other hand, for the: "but how am I going to deal with all this shit?"... I like the idea of "vote from 1 to 10 " so, your initial plan look great for me.

P.S.:
I must admit that the list of "only one vote" is already a great gift for digging! :D
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spiritualized
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by spiritualized »

smashing idea !
I like your first idea too...but maybe bunch them into batches of 10 to avoid the multiplicity of threads ? People could vote on a scale of a 1 to 10 and submit it on the thread, you do the tally ?
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Rob
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Rob »

spiritualized wrote:smashing idea !
I like your first idea too...but maybe bunch them into batches of 10 to avoid the multiplicity of threads ? People could vote on a scale of a 1 to 10 and submit it on the thread, you do the tally ?
This might be a good idea. I would than probably do it weekly or months, instead of every 10 days; it's just easier to remember. The voting would be visible and there would be less of surprise than using an outside voting system that is invisible, but it is practical.


Any other thoughts?
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whuntva
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by whuntva »

On the spreadsheet, why are some songs highlighted in green? It just seems a bit odd to me.
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Henry
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Henry »

It might be worthwhile to identify performers for which larger numbers of voters were biggest fans (for different songs of course). Then a poll could be put together to determine which of the songs for such an artist were favored by AMers as a whole.
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Romain
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Romain »

whuntva wrote:On the spreadsheet, why are some songs highlighted in green? It just seems a bit odd to me.
It's the songs with identical titles to another songs.
DaveC
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by DaveC »

A jolly good idea. I don't mind how you do this Rob. Would be happy with 10 a week.
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Rob
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Rob »

Henry wrote:It might be worthwhile to identify performers for which larger numbers of voters were biggest fans (for different songs of course). Then a poll could be put together to determine which of the songs for such an artist were favored by AMers as a whole.
This could be done, but it is a very different approach than I'm going for here. It would require a separate. In 2016 we had a couple of month-long in-depth polls for artists that better do such a job. With the recent polls around Prince and Eurythmics by Moonbeam and The Beach Boys by Hymie, it might be the time to bring that back. But that is something else of course.

I have decided on a format (1 song a day - one topic for each month). I'll explain more tomorrow when I'll start up with the first topic and the first song.
Zombeels
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Re: Simple poll idea: Biggest Fan

Post by Zombeels »

I would like to see more than 10 a week also. Maybe 2 songs a day. There were a lot of songs on the list that I was shocked that they only got one vote.
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