#9 The First Poll: The Results!
Hey folks!
Assuming you aren’t just joining in, last week I dropped the very first Best Album Brackets newsletter poll! Buttondown has a “survey” feature, and I wanted to test it out and see if it could work for the Best Album of 2000 tournament. How’d it do? Keep reading!
Before we get to that, a few recurring announcements. First, the nominations for the Best Album of 2000 tournament are open, but they’ll be closing soon. Here is the link to submit your ballot. You have until February 29, end of day, to get your ballot in. Furthermore, I really, really, really would like 100 or more ballots before closing. How many do we have so far? Let’s look at the big board!
That’s right, we currently have 75 ballots, and about 16 more days to get it to 100. I think we can do it, and if you’re holding off from submitting until the last minute, that’s fine, just don’t forget! (At the same time, all ballots are can be edited until closing, so even if you’re only half done, you could submit now and edit before Feb. 29.)
Second, a reminder: Bluesky, the official Best Album Brackets social media platform, is now open to all! That’s right, no more pesky invites. If you haven’t, and you’d like to stay up to date with Best Album Brackets, go there now and make an account. You can find Best Album Brackets here, and you can find my personal account here. As of this writing, Bluesky does not have a polling function (hence the experimental one last issue), but should it gain one, that will be the primary focus of Best Album Brackets.
Okay, so: how did the first Best Album Brackets poll fare? What, if anything, did we learn?
We got 104 votes. As of this writing, this newsletter has 279 subscribers, so that’s 37%. I’m pretty happy with that for the first go, especially since this was an experimental, non-binding poll. I’d want to see higher in a real match, and based on this, I think I would.
It seems like most of you want to stick with the way we’re doing things. The question posed was, and this is a direct quote, "Should the Best Album Tournaments abandon the current pattern (2000, 1989, 2001, 1988, etc.) for determining the year of the next tournament and find a new method?" Now, assuming that you understood the question and weren't confused by me using "Yes" to mean voting for a negative, most of you would prefer we alternate years like we did for the ‘90s. This result is non-binding -- I'll do what I like -- but it's good to have this info. Here are the complete results:
It was easy (I think?). Nobody seemed confused by the poll option in the newsletter. I couldn’t see it myself, but from the examples in the documentation, I’m assuming it was pretty plain jane. (Soon as I learn CSS, I’ll be able to tweak its appearance, probably into something garish and godawful.) Apparently, you can hit an answer button all you want, and it looks like it records multiple votes from one voter, but thanks to a Best Album Brackets subscriber, we were able to test it and determine that only one vote gets recorded. Whew!
Problem: Nobody can see what’s going on. On Twitter, if you voted in a poll, you’d immediately see the current results. Here, though, it just tells you your vote has been counted. Yay? Thanks? There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this format, but I imagine a lot, if not most, people like seeing the state of the match after they’ve voted. Here, you’d have to wait until the poll ended and I posted the results in a following newsletter. Except...
Problem: Can’t actually end a poll. The only options when clicking on a poll are to view the results and to delete it. That’s right; there is no option to simply end a poll and save it to an archive or the like. Right now, even though this poll is “done,” anyone who hasn’t voted could still vote. And now that I’m done with it, the only thing I can do is destroy it. As you can imagine, that’s less than ideal. It’s such a problem that it might render the whole idea of using Buttondown for this purpose moot.
Sure, just throw away my hard work, no biggie.
What did you think of Buttondown polls? What did you like? What did you not like? Contact me on Bluesky at @bestalbumbrackets.bsky.social or @kentmbeeson.bsky.social, or shoot me a line at kentmbeeson@hey.com. (I thought I read that Buttondown has or will soon have comments, so that’ll be another way to contact me.)
Thanks for reading, see you next week, and get those ballots in!
Kent