[HN Gopher] Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement - 22 July, 2024
___________________________________________________________________
Glasgow 2024 Hugo Awards Statement - 22 July, 2024
Author : choult
Score : 54 points
Date : 2024-07-22 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (glasgow2024.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (glasgow2024.org)
| i_k_k wrote:
| A good argument for restricting voting to actual attendees.
| inasio wrote:
| Keep in mind that you have be to registered and pay a fee to
| vote, but from the sound of this they don't verify names.
|
| The total tally here is of less than 4,000 votes. It's not
| surprising that people game this, the economic gains of having a
| book listed as a Hugo award winner must be huge.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Huge by sci-fi novel standards. You could gains tens of
| thousands of dollars.
| ghaff wrote:
| So basically nothing. (I realize that comes across as blase
| but it really isn't a lot of money in the scheme of things.)
| drakythe wrote:
| Might be worth dropping some coin on getting the SFWA Lawyers to
| contract an outside data analysis group to verify these findings
| after the absolute fustercluck that was the Hugos 2023. I think
| this statement is made in good faith, and I believe they believe
| they are correct in their analysis but the shadow of the 2023
| Hugos is long and dark. There will be questions regardless of how
| many good faith statements the committee makes. I don't envy them
| having to deal with this.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Is there so much money to be made from winning a Hugo award or
| are bot farms so cheap?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Almost certainly not. Probably someone with an axe to grind,
| not someone trying to make money.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I would guess that to SF and Fantasy fans "Hugo Award winner"
| does serve as some indication of merit, beyond what is really
| entailed (some number of hard core SF/ fantasy fans liked at
| least one of their works).
|
| Outside, for example buying for a friend or colleague, I
| imagine it sounds like a generic literary award and they'd
| expect it was judged excellent by some number of experts, as
| with say a Booker.
|
| It's also a nice ego boost of course. If you like that kind of
| thing anyway. If you're Greg Egan or something it's probably
| dreadful.
| ghaff wrote:
| The problem is that "literary" awards, e.g. Nebulas in SF,
| probably tend to award more of a critic's sensibility than a
| fan's. But I'm not sure that Hugos are worth a whole lot at
| this point even as a fan's take.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Hard to say. Several of my personal favourite novels won a
| Hugo, including both Diamond Age and Rainbows End IIRC
| ghaff wrote:
| That's quite a long time ago before there was so much
| politicization. I do think there's still value but
| probably also increasing reasons for skepticism.
| hdlothia wrote:
| My friends and I have a book club where we just read hugo
| winners.
| BryantD wrote:
| Cost analysis:
|
| The administrators identified 377 ballots and associated
| memberships as fraudulent. Assuming all fraudulent memberships
| were new, the minimum cost per voting membership is PS45 [1].
| Total cost assuming no additional undetected memberships:
| PS16,965 or just under $22,000 at current exchange rates.
|
| Unfortunately current discussions of the marketing value of a
| Hugo Award have been somewhat drowned out by those who think the
| fan value of a Hugo is not as high as it once was, but it's not
| an influential award; if it's true that a Hugo Award for Best
| Novel generates a thousand or so additional sales, it's hard to
| make the economics of buying a Hugo make sense.
|
| [1] https://glasgow2024.org/for-members/memberships-and-tickets/,
| WSFS Membership.
| Arainach wrote:
| How many future sales, speaking gigs, etc. does being a "Hugo-
| winning author" open up?
| ghaff wrote:
| I expect very little of that makes much money.
| zmj wrote:
| I read a lot of SFF, but the actual Hugo / Nebula winners don't
| really move up in my reading list compared to the other
| nominees.
|
| Maybe the "winner" sticker drives some paper book sales?
| BryantD wrote:
| Some? Not a ton.
|
| https://humanlegion.com/hugo-award-sales-figures/ has some
| data for one year. "They do have an effect, but probably no
| more than a few thousand sales for most books, maybe over ten
| thousand for the luckiest, and then only in exceptional
| years."
| ghaff wrote:
| So maybe a dollar a book on the outside.
| thih9 wrote:
| To offer a counter anecdote: for a while I enjoyed reading
| books from the list of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula
| awards[1] - and later from the list of winners for a single
| award (same, Hugo or Nebula).
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_joint_winners_of_t
| he_H...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah, I've read a couple of more modern Hugo award winners
| and thought that they sucked. Maybe I just got unlucky, but
| it certainly didn't inspire confidence that I will enjoy
| reading the award recipients.
| egypturnash wrote:
| "I got a Hugo" is probably worth something in negotiations with
| traditional publishers; exactly _which_ award is being stuffed
| is not mentioned. If you 're up for, say, "Best Fan Writer" and
| are looking for a traditional publisher then it's starting to
| look attractive, if you can think of a clever way to cover the
| costs.
|
| "Prove you voted for me and you get access to a big download of
| everything I made in the past decade, which would cost $300 to
| buy normally" comes to mind as a way to cover a chunk of that.
| Crowdfunding!
| ilamont wrote:
| Coming on the heels of the 2023 Hugo Awards disaster (certain
| authors excluded for fear of offending China, see
| https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censors...)
| it's hard to believe the supposed post-Chengdu reforms didn't
| take into account loopholes like this.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| There haven't been any reforms yet, only a transparency pledge
| by the committee administering this year's vote.
|
| It's not even possible for reforms to take place until the 2025
| Worldcon because two consecutive business meetings need to
| ratify any changes.
| yzydserd wrote:
| What's the loophole?
|
| It's a fan voted prize, and you get a vote for being a member,
| and you can become a member with a fee.
|
| If some person, people, or organisations attempted to
| masquerade as multiple non "natural" persons they seem to have
| been found out, which I would not call a "loophole".
|
| By the way, as a member it seems you get a copy of all the
| books and stories, which makes the fee pretty decent.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > certain authors excluded for fear of offending China,
|
| That is an extremely misleading summary of what was uncovered.
| hdlothia wrote:
| I imagine that working for organizations like this is a thankless
| job.
| semanticist wrote:
| Volunteering, not working. Few, if any, people involved in
| running a WorldCon are getting paid for it.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > We have no evidence that Finalist A was at all aware of the
| fraudulent votes being cast for them, let alone in any way
| responsible for the operation.
|
| X doubt. Name names.
| perihelions wrote:
| This messy situation demands a lot of trust of the organisers--
| trust they do not have, after they corruptly tampered with the
| 2023 votes and tried to cover that up.
| teraflop wrote:
| Who's "they"? Each year's Worldcon is run by an entirely
| different set of people.
| rodgerd wrote:
| While the organisers have changed, up until this year the
| same person has written the un-audited software and run the
| voting process previously - which was how he was able to
| discard huge numbers of votes covertly last year, for
| example.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| This was discovered due to the bad actor being incompetent.
|
| Clearly by spending a bit more, or putting in more of an effort
| using plausible names for every alleged bot vote it could not be
| detected.
|
| Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" Gathering a list of 400 real names is trivial."_
|
| The FCC fake-comment fraud involved literally millions of real
| identities and real names [0]. It was caught for a different
| reason: many of the comments had identical text strings.
|
| [0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2023/attorney-general-
| james-...
| danielodievich wrote:
| Hugo and Nebula awards drive my fun-reading list. It is sad to
| hear that even this quaint corner of the book world is no longer
| ignored by vote and review manipulators. Is nothing holy
| anymore!? _man shakes a fist at the space-ship shaped cloud_
| astrodust wrote:
| They've been actively under attack for over a decade now.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
|
| We can't have nice things.
| yzydserd wrote:
| L Ron Hubbard will have to wait another year.
| edu_guitar wrote:
| Given how the names were generated, it seems the bad actor might
| actually want to be caught. Maybe it was trying to get the
| committee to disqualify a title. Since it doesn't make sense
| financially, as a sibling comments points out, so personal grudge
| might be the motivation. But I guess we'll never know.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-22 23:01 UTC)