First, the success of the game is in the enthusiasm of individual players, lovingly crafting tweets using the WOTD. It is not dependent on results! However, many players are proud and happy when they feature in the rankings, and anything that would encourage more people to vote and make the rankings more accurate, would be welcomed by many players.
The number of people who actually vote on the Artwiculate site has always been comparatively low, but recently seems to have nose-dived. From conversations with Artwiculati, it seems that the main problem is the number of tweets to read through (it's a daily commitment, not a one-off exercise). On an average day there may be 15+ pages, numbering in excess of a 300 tweets.
These tweets - which Artwiculate automatically indexes from Twitter - include a number of 'non entries':
- tweets that were never intended to be part of the game
- retweets that went wrong ("RT" missing, or comments added)
- tweets that reference other tweets - e.g. "<== this is awesome!"
- tweets from Artwiculati, thanking other players for RTs, etc
- duplicates, where players haven't used the Artwiculate 'remove' button
- spam (on a bad day!)
My idea is about 'filtering' the indexed tweets to a level that other players have agreed would be more manageable : 100 tweets, the equivalent of 5 pages. It would look something like this :
- with (e.g.) 2 hours to go, Artwiculate would issue a list of the 100 leading tweets, in a form that could be voted on
- 'leading' is defined as the 100 tweets which, at that point, have gained the most points by Artwiculate's scoring system, but see next..
- in order to maximise the number of players who would be able to feature in this list, only a player's best (e.g.) 3 tweets would appear (as more players joined, this could be reduced to 2, and perhaps even to 1 in the future!)
- No player would be able to vote for any tweet in the list which they had already voted on, on the main site (just as no-one could vote previously from a profile AND on site)
None of this would stop people from voting through all the tweets as now, if they wish, but it would be a boon for busy or tired players who at present find voting too much of a regular commitment, and are therefore - as can be seen from the figures - choosing not to vote at all. Looking through 100 tweets would still be a solid task, but it would be manageable.
My estimation is that much of what is required is already in place, in effect :
- A list of top tweets for the day (there is already a Top 50 produced daily)
- Limiting number of 'tweets per player' that can rank (already done for the Top 50)
- Limiting voting to once per tweet (already done)
- Announcing the list with 'x hours to go' (already done with "the lead has changed...")
A side-effect of this would its scaleability in the future : as more players joined the game, and the number of pages grew, the task of voting would remain the same. And the BEST result would be on 'spam' days, where even 60+ pages of tweets would still only require 100 to be voted on!
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