What’s next for the Pop Polls?
So, we’re almost at the end of the Modern Qualifiers on the new People’s Pop site. It felt like a good time to take stock of what’s working well and what isn’t in my efforts to move the PPPolls off Twitter and onto something else.
I’m going to get into the good points and the problems in separate bits, but there are two overriding things that kind of inform everything else and will ultimately dictate what happens to the polls next.
The first is that I really enjoy doing the polls. I love the community and the way it’s been an engine for discovery and fun. Ultimately that’s more important to me than how or where they happen.
The second is that it’s taking me vastly longer to do them.
It’s slightly hard to measure this, because I spent a fair bit of time on the polls before when I wasn’t strictly working on them but was refreshing, enjoying the chat, checking in, fretting, etc. And there’s stuff that I’m doing upfront now before a poll goes up – sourcing sleeves etc – which I was already doing as part of an “origins” post. Doing it as part of prep feels more laborious – cos I’m not getting the dopamine hits of responses/comments, I guess – but actually it’s not taking any more time.
But even taking those things into account, a much more significant chunk of my day is being taken up by poll work. I’m not 100% sure WHY it’s so much more work, especially given the raw number of matches is lower each day, but it is. And if I’m honest, it’s an unsustainable level of work, especially given that Life Developments elsewhere means I might have less time anyway.
So those are the basic issues. I don’t want to stop doing the polls. I need to stop spending this much time on them.
Now onto the move itself, and what’s working well. Some things are working both well AND badly, or at least very differently.
WHAT’S WORKING
First up, the site itself. I love it! I love how good the posts are looking, how well integrated the sleeves and playlists are in the posts. Alan and Steve have done an absolutely fantastic job of building a polling site that works and integrating it with the other things I do. It gives us all a great resource for doing music based polling and building a community around it.
The increased use of Curated Groups has been fantastic and something which should continue well beyond the Charity poll IMO.
I like the flexibility the plug-in gives me to extend matches until they get a certain number of votes, or to keep tied matches open to get a definite result.
I really like the possibilities the plug-in offers to do things which break away from the standard issue group-of-four format, even though I’ve not done that yet.
I think it’s great that the comments allow longer-form commentary and that I can keep substantial posts sticky.
On a personal level, I’m spending less time on my own Twitter, which is good, as Twitter isn’t that healthy for me.
We’ve got a solid core of participants and I hugely appreciate their efforts to make this strange new version of the People’s Pop Poll work.
The issue of hives, bots, etc is no longer a problem.
And finally, I wanted to at least find out how the polls work away from Twitter. Whatever I decide happens next, I’m deciding it from a base of actual evidence. It’s always good to try stuff!
WHAT’S NOT WORKING
Obviously the big issue here for me personally is the time and work one, outlined above. But assume that magically I was able to spend half the time I do on the polls. Are they working away from Twitter?
The short answer is: not brilliantly, in the format we’ve been used to. There are things Twitter enables which turn out to be extremely difficult to replace.
As I’ve always said there are two points to the polls – discovery and fun. Discovery – people get to find new songs. Fun – we get to see together which songs win and argue about it.
Both of these rely on engagement, and so the level of engagement matters.
Discovery is holding up OK – we have a terrific crop of songs and there are a lot of new favourites to find. I haven’t worked out how best to run Golden Beats in the new format but it’s a solvable problem.
Obviously the more people who take part the more likely it is your special song will find someone who loves it, but I think most (say 80%) of the people who were using the polls for discovery are still on board, if you take “average voting level in a Golden Beat match” as a yardstick.
(That aside, the level of overall participation is way less than it was on Twitter, obviously, and I was expecting that. I’ll be honest, it’s lower than I’d hoped by about ?, but also this is a 21st century poll with a lot of obscurities, so I should probably have calibrated a little lower! This is a platform popularity issue – it would be similar on eg Mastodon I think even if there wouldn’t be the format shock.)
Discovery is only one half of the polls, though – the fun half is a lot trickier. I’m not using “fun” just in the sense of “is this an enjoyable thing to be doing”, I’m specifically talking about the game part.
I think the biggest casualty of the move, personally, is tension. Close matches don’t feel close. Twitter brought a lot of people, but the real benefit it had is that it brought them together at the same time. There’s no urgency to the new site, no real attempts to shift close matches, and no discussion about the actual OUTCOMES of the matches, just some conversation about the music itself.
Now, conversation about the music itself is the heart of what I want to do! Without it you end up like Music Twitter in general, just endlessly listing the same LPs like you’re rearranging the shelves of your garden shed.
But the tension is what makes the polls feel like a game, or an event, and what encourages people to bring new participants in. The game is a skeleton to hang music discovery on, but t’s a very necessary skeleton. And the move has taught me how much that mattered in terms of my own motivation and keeping the community going.
The other big issue – which is tied up with this – is a format one.
The format of the polls is based on the limitations of Twitter polls – four options at a time, one choice only, a set duration. We refined that into a structure that worked very well.
The Charity Crusher is locked into that structure because of the Curated Groups, but it’s very ill suited to the blog format, which continually pushes content down and makes it harder to recover and boost. Twitter gives you a lot more control of the “now” of the poll – you can shift focus easily onto close matches, admin, etc. Which is where a lot of the tension and community engagement comes in.
A lot of the issues come from trying to recreate that format on the blog instead of trying to do something new.
Finally, the move away from Twitter is a bit of a fake so far. I have to promote new polls on there to get any traction – 70% of visits are via Twitter. (This promotional work adds to the sense of extra labour). On some level what we’ve been doing is only really possible using Twitter (directly or indirectly), and we wouldn’t be the only fun activity to find that this is the case. I hope it’s still possible to build a community off Twitter, but it always took a long time even in the web 1.0 era.
SO WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
I have several problems to solve.
- My poll workload needs to be lower
- The polls and discussion aren’t as fun (in a game sense)
- We’re trying to run a Twitter formatted poll away from Twitter.
- The polls are dependent on Twitter for the near to medium future.
But we also have the considerations that led us here in the first place, and some new opportunities.
- Twitter may work well for music polling (assuming polling isn’t deliberately broken at some point) but it’s a bad place owned by a guy with terrible intentions. Even if moving away permanently is much harder than I hoped, I don’t want to be tied to it.
- We have a sleek website designed for music conversation and polling to use as a foundation which can do a lot more than just groups of 4 Twitter polls (but which isn’t good for synchronous conversation).
We’re about ? of the way through the Modern poll, with the Ancient poll to come and two excellent topics (2015 and Late Work) on the slate.
Here’s what I think are the options. The first is more or less the status quo. Not keen on this.
- KEEP GOING: Run the Modern and Ancient polls on the new site, then work out how best to do the 2015 and Late Work ones. Solve the workload problem by simply doing it all slower (2-3 polls daily, not 5). Accept the shift in discussion away from “game+music” to just “music”.
The next two are ‘nuclear options’ – basically saying, the move was a mistake, scrap it, and either carrying on or finishing the polls. Even less keen on these.
- PERMANENT TWITTER RETURN: Basically go back to where we were earlier this year and if Twitter dies we call it a day.
- LET IT GO: Call it a day anyway but in a controlled way. Run the Ancient and Modern poll then move into the all-Pollhalla final tournament.
The next one is basically back to where we were in January. Not keen on this either but any solution which acknowledges a need for Twitter probably involves at least looking at Mastodon or Bluesky too.
- SECRET THIRD THING: Look for an alternative platform (Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit) for Twitter-style polling once the A&M polls are done.
And finally the ‘retrenchment’ options. Run the current polls on Twitter, and in the meantime work out what format takes advantage of the new site, and either switch the polls to it or run them in parallel with it.
- TEMPORARY TWITTER RETURN: Run the Ancient poll (and potentially finish the Modern one) on Twitter, where the format works. Meanwhile work out a more blog-friendly format which would suit future themed nominations-based events and move back to the new site to implement it for the 2015 poll.
- HYBRID/BEST OF BOTH WORLDS: Return to Twitter for tournament-style polling at a smaller scale and simultaneously use the PP website to do discovery and fun games more suited to it (eg “league” rather than “tournament” games, LP-based polls, slower all-discovery polls, etc.)
All the options which involve Twitter would mean less polling than we did before – probably a permanent shift down from 6-8 daily polls to 4-5.
What do I think? My gut instinct says 6 – the hybrid approach, keeping the old spirit intact while building something new with the new architecture. But I’m also aware this feels like having my cake and eating it. I don’t want to be really hasty about it, and I’d love to know what other people think too and what options I might not have considered!
Finally, thanks again to Alan and Steve for building something awesome which gives us these possibilities, and to the people who’ve come over (or returned from exile) and valiantly helped the Pop Polls survive outside their natural habitat!
Gah! I didn’t want to be first but I’m just sitting here waiting for a 2 p.m. meeting so here goes.
My gut reaction went 5/6 too.
If this takes too much time /work you’re gonna blow it all up anyway, so if its unsustainable, its unsustainable.
I’m delighted we’ve got 100 voters (I was definitely on the I love this thing so much I’m going down with the ship if I’m the last man on it) and so glad thats not the case. But that number seems destined ro shrink faster than it grows as people get busy with life…..Discovery of the polls themselves is just…..harder.
So the site is beautiful but…….Stupid twitter. It just…..works.
I could live with a smaller number of polls easily (sometimes I get in the weeds if but this seems doable).
Maybe almost flip the way it is now. Polls back to twitter, fun side /related polls on the site for the hardcores and those who are off twitter to allow that participation, keep your eyes peeled for “the next twitter” (I *almost * got a bluesky invite last week, can’t be too long)
To, summarize I’d be outsized sad to lose the polls, this works, but yeah, not as well, please keep your sanity and family, Tom!
I don’t have anything substantive to saw other than that I really enjoy the Poll and would hate to see it go away, but just wanted to show my support and say I’m happy to do whatever helps, including more support on Patreon if necessary.
OK,
Firstly, i agree that the new site looks great: good things have been done already to improve conversation and engagement and it’s improving all the time (my notifications worked today!), so i’m sure ongoing bugs will be ironed out in time. i would not want to throw it away, given how swish it is and how much effort has doubtless gone into it from all involved. i’m grateful to the work that everyone has done.
re issues, i do think you picked a hard poll to start with here: with a lot of obscurities and no underlying theme there was always likely to be less engagement but i agree that it feels less consequential. i actually think the things we’re missing about twitter are the stuff built into its DNA which encourage engagement – likes, retweets, memes, on-site notifications, stuff like that. it feels very shallow to say but the reason people go there is cos those things work.
i think there’s a good sized base of voters but i am reminded of forums i’ve been on that died – the problem was that they could not replenish themselves against people falling away and it’s a lot harder to hold on them when yr in competition with big platforms. but also, having an activity to organise around has kept plenty of small platforms going, so it’s not a terrible idea.
i agree that thinking laterally around how best to use the site and moving back to twitter in the meantime or concurrently in some way is probably the best thing to do. i’ve thought that perhaps it’d be a good thing to encourage more general music chat somewhere on the site but given that the issue is that yr already spending too much time on it that’s maybe not a good idea and more of a reflection that i would like the forums to rise from the ashes than a sensible or useful contribution.
personally, i have nothing to do all day and this is the group of music nerds whose company i enjoy the most on the internet, so i will absolutely cast the last vote and make the last dumb comment on whatever polls you do until you stop doing them.
I dunno if you’ve already had exposure to league-style stuff, but in case not, I had a pretty good time using musicleague.com. We had an active group chat on Messenger. I don’t know quite how that translates here – feel like we’d have to migrate to Discord or something (and then, you know, remember to check Discord).
I did a couple of “league” type games back in the LiveJournal (!) era – I think the strengths of this blog/poll format should suit them well enough without having to involve a group/messenger chat (not that I’ve anything against Discord et al but as you say it’s one more thing to check!). The hardest thing about them was hassling participants via email who were late with nominations etc – if most people have a Twitter account that makes it easier.
As a *reasonably* keen participant for nearly three years :), this (point 2) is the most disheartening thing for me. I have complete faith in Tom, and so desperately wanted to have the same level of belief that the community would follow en masse.
Within about a week, I had to drastically recalibrate all numerical assumptions. First there were the site teething issues, which probably destroyed my faith in a decent number of “casuals” coming over from Twitter. I had a DM from one *equally* :) keen long-term participant who said he probably wouldn’t, and that’s what finally shattered my illusions.
Then there was the decision to proceed with the Modern poll first. I understood the argument for it, and indeed all of my own picks for the CC are C21. But I thought this would probably have an adverse effect on voting numbers, at precisely the time when we were (well, I certainly was) reeling from the difficulties already experienced with transition.
Finally, the opening curated group was (YMMV) one of the strongest I’ve ever seen in those three years. Coming straight off a very popular year poll with an extremely high-quality closing stretch. And yet, the total number of votes was 203. This is what I mean by recalibration – I’m so used to the 200 figure being the minimum we want for something like Not in English, or a January year poll qualifier, or a world music group. I’d try to look at the percentages only, like you can on Twitter, but it’s harder to do that!
Basically I am also inclined towards options 5 and 6. I truly despise the guy – he’s one of the worst human beings I can think of and his sycophants are like a different species. But, just as I find it much easier than many of you to separate art from artist when voting, I find it difficult to envisage a future for meaningful pop polling without Twitter playing a part somewhere.
I’m sticking it out with my own Twitter challenges until the 21st-century project ends at Christmas. And by then it might be my own weariness rather than Some Arsehole that causes me to call it a day. I can very much relate to the workload issues, having created one or two things this year that seem great conceptually and then take up FAR too much offline prep time.
In conclusion, I echo all the thanks from everyone here and on there. I won’t stop polling until forced to. However, I have found the relationship between effort/discovery time and fun/reward much more lopsided this month.
Yeah this is all fair – I was hoping for about half the level of participation, and we’ve netted out at probably 1/3. For me, not a deal breaker in itself. I would rather do something fun for 100 people than less fun for 400, but porting a Twitter poll format over to a blog turns out not to be that. And like you say when you’re used to 200 votes minimum, 200 votes maximum feels wrong.
Now, that’s not to say that nothing with 80-100 voters is valid. The Golden Beats get 50-ish nominators and 100-150 voters and feel (to me at least) legit. What we’ve built is probably more suited to challenge type things than to large-scale polls – certainly what I am vaguely starting to have in mind for the blog events is quite challenge-y in nature…
this occurred to me too, the polls do seem to limp along a bit until they get to about 150 votes, it doesn’t feel like they’ve gotten going properly
also, it has to be said that half the time the result isn’t very tense because it’s telling me that i haven’t voted and i don’t know what the scores are. i will confess to voting twice on at least one occasion just to find out what’s going on : )
Well, it might be that we’ve burned enough Twitter bridges that lower votes over there would be the norm for a while too.
I was fine with n=100 as a baseline, down from n=200 as my preferred Twitter poll baseline. But standard attrition as the polls mount up meant even 100 was a stretch pretty quickly.
i think a lot of this was going to quite low engagement anyway, there are some days with very low name recognition. but if yr starting off with 2015, idk how much better that will be either : )
Bear in mind that the dif between sites is way less for me than for most since the game – for me – has always been the discovery and conversation. I do miss particular people, too many to name but e.g. Holly Boson, LZM, Gabriel, Felipe, the Dutch posters, Elizabeth Sandifer, Nick Dastoor, Ava Foxtrot, various ex-Jukeboxers, etc. etc. (Some may be here under dif names or not posting enough.) I miss lunacies like the Weird Al thread. I miss that the new site isn’t open to the world in the way that Twitter can be. I thought the fact of the Morgan Wallen nom was a good thing, even if the song wasn’t.
But this isn’t about what works, really. I think there has to be a HARD NO ON TWITTER, at least after the Crushers. The problem isn’t so much that Musk is a bad person and I don’t want to support him. It’s that he said he was going to kill polls on April 15 for nonpayers. To me, that was a Chris-beating-up-Rihanna moment. After that you don’t go back. It can always happen again, and despite his not killing the polls after all, the threat is there. We shouldn’t have to live with that. (The analogy to Chris is not perfect, since addicts/ragers like Chris can and do recover, even if Chris himself never makes it. Whereas for people like Musk and Trump the problem is character-deep and is not fixable.)
(What I’m saying is only incompatible with option 2, except there really does need to be a hard deadline for leaving Twitter.)
Oops, nice to be remembered here! For my part, not reallly following this poll has more to do with the amount of time I ended up spending on every qualifiers period and me needing to at least try to focus on doing work for grad school right now. I always planned on “making the move” and even if I wasn’t a regular commenter I have been reading Popular for almost a decade now so visiting FT isn’t really a stretch. I also didn’t nom anything because the charity poll works different, I kept meaning to look into how to do it but just ended up missing it. I still plan on returning, as the discovery part is a bit too fundamental to my music listening right now, it scracthes the itch that TSJ used to for me, and I hope it keeps running, wherever it goes to eventually.
What I will say is that the login system is still really weird on my end. When I try to log in with my usual FT account it doesn’t work very well on the other sites (popular seems to block it even) and when I try the twitter log in it logs out every time I leave the site. Nothing really site breaking but I feel like I should report it. (I also tried to edit this comment to avoid flooding the post and couldn’t do it, so here’s another thing lol)
As an “old timer” your account was only registered with FT. I’ve set your account to work on all 3 sites now.
I half-agree, I think. We know that at any time Musk (or a Musk-owned Twitter: but it’s unclear how far back he’s moving from day to day decisions, and I get the feeling product-level tinkering is the bit he enjoys) could completely break polls. So we have to have a failsafe option, which means I need to explore things like Mastodon and Bluesky a bit more.
My read on Musk is a bit different though. I think the “Bad person” element IS important, to the extent that he’s a ‘free speech ideologue’ (in practice only for right-wing speech) whose idea of what Twitter should feel like is ultimately inimical to the kind of small fun community we’re looking to build. Musk’s ideal Twitter doesn’t need a break point like him wrecking the polls to make the polls gradually less viable, and his direction of travel isn’t going to change, whether or not he makes specific decisions.
But it’s also the case that on the technical side, a lot of the things the anti-Musk people predicted haven’t happened. Twitter hasn’t collapsed, it hasn’t broken: back in October-January I assumed the people saying Twitter was on its last legs from an engineering standpoint were right, and was making plans partly based on that. (They may still be right, simply on a delayed timeframe. But they weren’t right about the imminence.)
Musk’s approach to the Twitter product so far has had a clear strategic direction – cut costs and increase subscriber revenues as a percentage of the income stream – and then from a tactical POV he’s generally been a “move fast and break stuff” guy: he announces or does a thing, then climbs back when it’s not working and does something else. For one example, the “login with Twitter” thing we do here was going to be impossible based on Musk announcements about developer access to the API, but isn’t. The banning of Substack was quickly reversed. Even with his beloved Twitter Blue user privileges, the initial “blue tick replies come first no matter what” move has been notably dialled back. (His strategic direction seems to be working from a cost-cutting perspective, but the subscriber revenue thing has been a public shitshow)
So it’s not that I think he’s bluffing with the polls exactly – there’s a 50/50 chance he will do SOMETHING stupid at some point – but I would bet whatever he does won’t be as drastic or as permanent as his “On April 15 I will…” announcement, which was itself an expansion of a December announcement he also didn’t follow through on. I’m not going to go into why his original announcement was stupid, cos everyone reading this knows, but my overall point is that Musk has a track record of announcing stupid things and not doing them, and of doing stupid things and going back on them – the big exception being the whole verification fiasco, which was much more central to his vision of the site than polling is.
My own nightmare scenario is that he implements a much more sensible thing, which is making STARTING polls a Twitter Blue privilege rather than voting in them. This would give me a genuine dilemma, not least because the account would have a mark of Cain bluetick :)
Slightly shamefully admitting that this post is what got me to log back into the site and do some real real voting but: some hybrid model seems like an interesting idea! I like the idea of [Charli XCX feat. Caroline Polachek & Chris Voice] new games/new formats that work better with the affordances and modularities of the new site, but of course that’s also work for you.
Personally, I don’t really care that much about the game aspect, maybe because most taste seems to differ quite a bit from the median voter and so my favourites often don’t get out of qualifying. So the lower amount of votes doesn’t bother me at all.
I also like that there are less polls each day. Sometimes it was starting to feel like work to keep up. Especially round 1 could be a bit of a chore: no new discoveries, discussion mostly done in qualifiers, still a lot of polls.
Having said that, the lack of interaction and discourse is a major drawback for me. I think that is part of the double edged sword that is Twitter: the instant dopamine hits that make it bad, also make it fun. (I concur that spending less time on Twitter as part of the move is a positive for me.) So that should get better.
But the main thing is that it is not sustainable. The new site already feels like it is much more work than Twitter (maybe that’s just the nicer layout), so I’m not surprised. I don’t favour a complete return to Twitter, because the site and business are just too unstable, so I think a hybrid approach would be best. I hope that with some optimization updating the site can be made less work and at the same time the user base can grow, so a complete switch to the site will be possible in the long term.
I don’t have much constructive or new to add to the discussion, but I do want to also explicitly say how much I appreciate the site design and all the other work that has gone into The Switch. Thanks, guys!
As more of a discovery-participant than a game-participant the poll experience has actually mostly improved for me, so I would not even mind the Keep Going option — but I agree that that is probably not sustainable in the current form for all the other reasons listed.
I am personally not keen on a return to Twitter, even in hybrid form. One thing that Musk *did* change permanently is that the third-party client I used no longer works, and that kind of spelled the end of Twitter for me. I’ve moved my social chatting to Mastodon and would love to see the Pop polls migrate to that platform, but in terms of eyeballs and growing the audience that’s probably still not worth the effort.
Whatever direction you end up heading in, I’ll happily try to stick with the Polls for as long as I can.
In my case, it just happens that I haven’t been working from home as much recently, which makes me significantly less likely to vote in the discovery-heavy polls, such the current one.
And although I’ve made some really great discoveries via these polls, I prefer the ones (eg 1985) where I know a good proportion of the songs already and thus the game element becomes more enjoyable – I’m not going to get as pleasurably outraged at some Turkish microhouse progressing as I would one of my long-standing bete noires (say, The National).
New site looks and works GREAT (yay Alan and Steve), after the early teething problems – which, yeah, might have put people off. But even without that, it’s still basically the first month of this place, and way too soon to assume current usage = max-ish usage. You’ve built so many interweb communities over the last few decades to assume it’s a dead-end already!
It’s true that the game is less fun, but maybe the conversations will be able to spark and spread in single-page form once people settle in – though the massive tributaries of eg the Weird Al thread (as cited by FK) are unlikely, and that’s definitely a function of twitter: I’m very happy to go to the PP page and listen / vote from there if I’m working at a desk, but absolutely won’t check in on each poll while I’m on the train, or the throne, and thus happen across someone else’s reaction to a record and find it creating a thought I would never have had otherwise, which I can blip into the eddies to either sink happily forgotten or bump another firing neuron of chit-chat.
To that end, I reckon the slower pace is definitely a positive from a UX / user-growth perspective, as well as being easier/happier for you – fewer polls per day mean more likely to check the threads again after voting. But easier/happier for you should always be the prime concern.
And if it dies, fuck it, we had a great time and you did a great thing. And you’ve walked away from so many interweb communities you built over the last few decades, when you weren’t getting the same juice out of them anymore, that you know sometimes it is a dead-end after all…
As a relative peoples_pop newcomer, I’ve loved the move to this site – easier to keep track of polls without having to trawl through the media tab all the time, and comment threads displayed in an actually readable format (I’m not sure Twitter *isn’t* on its last legs, from how long I spend trying to load all the replies to a tweet and staring at throbbers) (…I googled “what is the loading ring icon called”, they’re throbbers apparently).
I hoped I’d eventually be able to unfollow @peoples_pop and come straight here, as it takes up too much of my Twitter feed for a long-term follow anyway. But I could still do that and just bookmark the Twitter account, of course. (Or use a separate account to follow it, like it’s porn.)
Wait, I say “this site”, am I on a different site now? Somehow I have an avatar over here but not over there… I must have crossed over to avatarland
I’ve extended your account to work on all 3 sites now. When did you register BTW? I ask because I thought I had it working that recent registrations on any site automatically signed you up on all of them :-/
When I first went to the People’s Pop site it autofilled a password for me, so I guess not recently! I gather this site has Popular on it, which I used to read and vote on a few years ago, so I must have had an account here, and I guess it’s also an account there?
I’m not sure if I’m in the minority in following most things on FT via RSS – it means I arrive late to most discussions (which is not really different than how I operate on Twitter).
It sounds like some of the problem is the split between “here are the posts” and “here is the discussion”, which doesn’t happen on twitter – is there any way to get a third class of “the management would like to highlight / comment on this poll or comment” in a sidebar? I realise that a lot of that space is used for the rolling comments.
(also, and I realise that even asking this is not good news for someone, probably me and my failing faculties, would a glossary be a good idea? I don’t feel like I’ve stepped away for that long, and I have no idea wtf the Modern, the Ancient, the Late Work are?)
Yes some kind of intro/recap post would be a very good idea I think!
Basically, the current poll is an open-entry charity one like we did way back when for Refuge. This one had so many entries that I split it into two – ANCIENT (release date 1999 and earlier) and MODERN (release date 2000 and later).
The polls on the peoples-pop site have mostly been qualifiers for the Modern half. The qualifiers for the ancient half will start on Twitter imminently.
Late Work is the poll we’re doing AFTER the open-entry ones, the idea being that it’s tracks recorded in the 25th or later year of an artist’s career.
Sorry, that last bit sounds grumpier than I actually am!
I don’t have anything substantive to saw other than that I really enjoy the Poll and would hate to see it go away, but just wanted to show my support and say I’m happy to do whatever helps, including more support on Patreon if necessary.