Promotion Poll Redux

Scott Hardie | August 22, 2015
Rock Block players:

I wonder if the sidebar poll that exists now, which keeps asking whether you think artist A or artist B is greater, is an inefficient and inaccurate way to gather information about artist rankings. The poll never asks you about the same pair twice, but considering that there currently 1,590 possible pairs, and more pairs created every week when a new artist is added, that's a lot of thought that you have to put into it. You might rate the same artist inconsistently, and there's no way to go back and change previous votes. At least it's fairly convenient, just clicking that button.

I could instead build a whole page just for this, and let you drag-and-drop artist names onto a sortable list for each rank. This list would be your way of saying that artist A is greater than artist B, who is greater than artist C, who is greater than artist D, and so on. Once you put an artist in order on that list, that would settle their placement respective to all other artists on the list, without the need to say over and over how you see the same artist. You could change the sort order at any time. When a new artist is added or promoted, the sidebar would prompt you to visit this page again and drag that new artist into the list where you think they belong. I could even pre-sort the options based on promotion poll data already gathered, to make it easy to make your initial lists and to get more use out of the data that we already have.

This page would ultimately be less work for you, since you would only need to decide once where an artist fits and be done with them, and it would have other benefits like letting you change your mind later. But it could be a lot more cumbersome to use than a simple A/B poll, and I don't want to make the process harder for anyone. So before I proceeded with spending the time to make this, I figured I should just ask whether you would even use this page. What do you say? Go with this sortable-list page, or stick with the A/B poll in the sidebar? Thanks for the feedback.

Follow-up question: If we do go with the sortable-list page, would you want to sort each rank independently from the rest, or all artists in one long list? The latter gives you the flexibility to put, say, an R2 higher than an R3 in your list if you think that's how they should be, and you would not need to re-sort an artist upon their promotion, but trying to manage one giant list instead of nine smaller lists would be even more cumbersome to use.

For what it's worth, either way that this goes, I really appreciate the data that you keep giving me. It's a major factor in my decisions about which artists to promote, and it helps to keep my own biases in check. Thank you for participating.

Scott Hardie | August 30, 2015
I take it from the sounds of crickets that nobody gives a damn. :-) I'll continue to ponder this on my own.

Erik Bates | August 31, 2015
[hidden by request]

Steve West | September 1, 2015
The side poll works for me. I think I've made over a hundred comparisons in the last few weeks.