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Comment by credo | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to Swarmation

I'm curious on as to what other developers think of these contests. Yesterday, I got several emails and saw several tweets suggesting that I vote for a local startup. They pulled in a lot of votes and seemed to be leading at one point.

I'm assuming that several other contestants also benefited from similar voting campaigns.

I didn't look at any of the entries and I generally wouldn't take part in these contests. However, I'm curious to know whether other HNers look at these things as (a) sham contests, or as (b) real contests where the best product wins or as (c) contests that are a legitimate test of marketing skills or (d) just a harmless fun activity

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When I heard that public voting was a 50% component of every category, I wasn't too happy.

There's a huge number of problems with that. Obviously, people can try to get all their friends to give them 5 stars across the board.

Also, I'd guess that the first couple votes have a huge impact on the rest of the votes because the voting page had the previous votes right below it. I'd guess that people are unlikely to stray too far from the other votes they see due to subconscious groupthink. I'm not sure if the judges also saw the votes on their voting page, but if so, that might have seriously impacted the outcome.

I would have preferred to see one popularity category decided by public voting, with the rest solely decided by judges.

But I'm not that mad. I wasn't really expecting to win a category, and most of the value came from learning node and being forced to get a whole lot done in 48 hours. And the winners seemed reasonable.

Not only was the public voting a big factor, it was also greatly affected by preliminary results being published two days before the voting ended. That had a big impact on subsequent voting. The teams on top started getting a lot of "competitive votes", i.e. people voting one star all-round to favor other projects.

This kind of behavior really soured the spirit of the voting. I wish the organizers had thought twice before publishing the results ahead of time.

Other than that, big props to the organizers. Everything about this competition was well organized and well ran. So many awesome projects came out of it. I'm so glad I could be a part of it.

Full disclosure: I was in the Swarmation team.

(e) - great learning opportunity to focus, hunker-down and do an initial spike in a new tech. (i was team pants-pants-evolution)

(d) just a harmless fun activity (and great way to showcase and learn a new technology)

They did their best to make it fun, fair, and exciting:

http://nodeknockout.com/judging

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