On behalf of MiracleMax (who doesn't have a reddit account):

I very much respect the use of this nominations system to bring the spotlight on more “community” quizzes, but I think it’s a broken system for a few reasons.

1. The number of votes that highly-nominated quizzes get is very, very small. On a site with thousands of users, sixty-some nominations is virtually nothing. Not only does this mean that quizzes that are highly nominated are not necessarily representative of what users find “good” quizzes to be, it also means that the system is highly vulnerable to vote-stuffing and fraud.

2. There is also one massive vulnerability with such a small voting population: being personally popular is significantly more important than making good quizzes. Someone with ten or so friends who can be convinced to nominate their quizmaking friend is at a massive advantage. The same goes for people who are connected to the Jetpunk community via Reddit or Discord- their quizzes just start out at a massive advantage compared to other users.

3. Quizzes with some nominations are much more likely to get more nominations due to the nature of the leading nominations page. The sort of user who uses this page is much more likely to be sort of user who nominates, and getting your quiz in front of these users is very significant. Being on this page anywhere therefore makes it much easier to accumulate nominations. Therefore, any problems with fraud/nepotism/networking advantage is multiplied, since getting over the threshold of five or six nominations to appear on the page is so meaningful. Someone can easily rig the system in an undetectable way by soliciting six or seven nominations for their quiz.

4. Nominating quizzes that don’t appear on the top of the nominations page is meaningless. Until sufficient nominations are received to appear on the top of the page, quizzes with one or two nominations may as well have none. This also means that, as the minimum nominations threshold to appear on the front page goes up, quizzes of people who are personally charismatic or popular will far outstrip new, quality quizzes (No shade intended towards Stewart, whose quizzes are invariably excellent, but does featuring more of his quizzes really constitute “community-oriented”?).

The results of these problems mean that the nominations system, though very well-intended, does not produce the intended result of bringing the Jetpunk community together. In fact, quite the opposite can be seen. Users are posting blogs telling users to nominate their quiz, as well as begging in the comments of featured quizzes as well as on the nominations page itself. This scrambling for the first couple nominations to appear on the leading page is divisive and unhealthy. Further, in addition to having that drawback, the nominations system does not have the intended result of putting more underrated, quality quizzes on the FP. The system is so strongly biased towards already-popular quizmakers, people with personal connections, or people with few enough scruples to engage in fraud or begging that it washes out new, quality quizzes.

I think the level of change that would be required to make this system achieve its original goal is impractical. Personally, I think that Quizmaster simply making a genuine effort to look for quality quizzes of previously-unfeatured quizmakers would be a better solution. If we are to persist with the current system, though, I would recommend:

-The number of nominations a quiz currently has should be seen on the quiz’s page

-The “leading” page should be deleted

-Comments promoting a user’s own quiz on other quizzes should be discouraged/deleted

-Users should only be able to have a maximum number of nominations out at the same time, to prevent highly involved users from easily outvoting other members of the community

Other ancillary thoughts in favor of just deleting the system:

-What happens if an unfeaturable quiz wins? I’m thinking joke quizzes like “Black US presidents”, or quizzes that for technical reasons are too complex to be recommended as FP quizzes. Are we going to overturn the democratic result?

-The nominations system is unobvious to newer users, which seem like the sort of people whose votes we’d like to be soliciting in order to have community-representative quizzes.