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1 hour ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

But then of course on Christmas Eve Goldy messaged and said the guys had talked it over and they wanted him to ask me if I could please not participate in 2019 because I was ruining the integrity of their spreadsheet with all my shitty goat metal.

Haha I never knew this (or I just forgot) but funnily enough Snyde sent me a similar PM around that time basically saying the same thing. To his credit, he was cordial about it, from what I remember, but the message was clear. Ya'll are not wanted! lol.

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1 hour ago, SurgicalBrute said:

This is the top ten as of today

Wormrot Hiss
Messa Close
Immolation Acts of God
Imperial Triumphant Spirit of Ecstasy
Desolate Shrine Fires of the Dying World
The Antichrist Imperium Volume III: Satan in His Original Glory
Worm Bluenothing
Aeviterne The Ailing Facade
Artificial Brain Artificial Brain
Tomb Mold Aperture of Body

 

The other big issue is that it doesn't account for any kind of response bias. If you look at the scores, way too many seem to be in the 5-to-7 range...i.e average. Now it's possible those scores reflect the feelings of the voter, but there is such a thing as Neutral Responding Bias where people who aren't sure what to say will just choose neutral response the the question

That was my biggest problem with the whole thing and also their main problem with me and my rating system. To them 5 meant average and they felt most records are average. 6 meant better than average and only a very small percentage of very special albums to them were ever scored better than a 6. To me an "average" album was like a 6.5 or a 7 because if it's not at least that good I'm probably not even gonna wanna bother listening to the whole thing. Better than average gets you into the mid 7's minimum or maybe even 8 in my mind and then the really killer shit would get from the mid 8's up to 9 or somewhere up into the 9's for the best shit like Archgoat or somebody.

They didn't seem to feel that much of anything could ever possibly be worth a 9, so they really didn't use 9's. They all stuck with whole numbers (I used tenths) which meant they wouldn't even let themselves use the entire top 20% of their ratings scale. Most of those guys gave out at least 75% of their ratings as 5's or 6's. Maybe the top 10% of their scores would be 7's, and then maybe only their absolute top 2 or 3 albums for the entire year would warrant an 8. And then 10% of their scores were the lower scores, 1 - 4. So at the end of the year you had almost every decent to good album averaging out somewhere between a 5 and a 6. Hundreds of albums ended up with similar 5.45 averages which made it impossible to glean any info at all from the ratings.

To me a 5 or a 5.5  is not "average" 50% represents a failing grade. 50% equates to a piece of shit. If I made an album and asked you what you thought on a scale of 1 to 10 and you told me you thought it was a 5, I'd say thanks a lot, go fuck yourself. (with a smiile on my face of course) Even a 6 is a fairly shitty score reserved for albums you don't like or have major issues with as far as I'm concerned. Listenable, but not something I'd ever need to hear again.  While to them a 6 meant above average. To me anything I liked enough to consider buying would automatically start at the very least a 7 or 7.5 and I'd go up from there, which really pissed them off. But I mean in school a 65% was a barely passing grade, a D. No one thinks a D is good, D means poor. C/70% was average. I gave out tons of 8's to records I liked. Probably 30 of my 1,000 ratings were a 9 or above which they thought was reckless and wrong. I only bothered rating stuff I really didn't like when I thought it was the absolute worst of the prog/tech crap I despise like: Imperial Triumphant, Krallice, Artificial Brain, Pyhrron, Haken, Obscura, Archspire or some bullshit that I listened to all the way through just so I could give it a 0, or a .5 or something.

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50 minutes ago, KillaKukumba said:

There is also the people who always vote some bands high and some bands low, so NRB is really just a way of saying some people fit in between. But if one was to take all those considerations into account when tallying votes, on any subject, there would never be a definitive winner or loser because for every option ones considers an anomaly it can be explained. Unless there is actual evidence of up, neutral or down voting it's far better to ignore such things and accept that any vote is only as good as the numbers it creates and will only ever be a suggestive snapshot in time.

I had a big, long Whitenoise-esque reply all typed out, but honestly...it's a fucking music poll. So I'll leave it at this:

No, it's actually not saying some people just fit in between. It's saying, that like any bias, certain factors can put the accuracy of an answer into question.

Yes, you can take it into account, because statistics does just that when it measures accuracy and precision while analyzing data.

No, neither of those things actually stop anyone from declaring a winner or loser

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26 minutes ago, SurgicalBrute said:

I had a big, long Whitenoise-esque reply all typed out, but honestly...it's a fucking music poll. So I'll leave it at this:

No, it's actually not saying some people just fit in between. It's saying, that like any bias, certain factors can put the accuracy of an answer into question.

Yes, you can take it into account, because statistics does just that when it measures accuracy and precision while analyzing data.

No, neither of those things actually stop anyone from declaring a winner or loser

Leave it where you like, but if one is going to separate only one anomaly in an argument of many they'll never get a true answer. If arguments are to be included one can't simply include the arguments they prefer while ignoring others without justifying so in the results or those results become inaccurate. 

There is also a difference between declaring a winner or loser and having a definitive winner or loser.

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4 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

That was the whole problem with their stupid spreadsheet from go

Oh, the fucking spreadsheet. I had forgotten how dumb it was and how obsessed they were as if they could scientifically and objectively determine what was good and right.

Thanks again GG for fucking it over.

 

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I stopped by there recently but it's been months before that. I use my school district's Google account and currently use a work issued laptop so certain cites are blocked like porn (😆)and Reddit of all things. So, it's just not convenient and as I'm always saying, I'm pretty lazy. I switched programs this and year and  my class is in a community college so I'm not on a public school work PC so I actually can go to Vortex now but haven't bothered much. I used to check in on their top 10. I'll prolly do that towards the end of the year to see what stuff on their list I've missed. 

Also, I couldn't get into rating albums constantly. I got on with a few them OK but overall found it an insular, rather snark good ole boy's club. Never really felt the vibe. 

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55 minutes ago, JorKid said:

Actually that top 10 isn't that bad except for stuff like IT, which makes me angry to listen to, but not in a good way.  Also can't stand Artificial Brain, no Pyhrron.  But I do love me some Demilich, a bunch of Meshuggah and the occassional Archspire.  Go figure.

It's not that their current top 10 is so terrible on its face. Now don't get me wrong, I certainly think it's pretty fucking bad, (I have over 200 metal albums released in 2022, but I don't have any of those top 10 albums, not a single one) but yeah I suppose it could have been even a bit worse. The way I see it the real problem is just that it's only so bad by comparison when you look at some of the truly wonderful albums that came out this year that could have been in their top 10, but are sadly nowhere to be found. I only saw their top 10, but I'm confident that none of my top 50 would even be on their radar.

That said, clearly we all have very different tastes, so one man's treasure is another man's shit show and all that. Obviously I have drastically different taste in music than those guys which is why I was happy to drop out of their experiment when asked. We're long past the point now where just saying you're into "metal" conveys basically nothing without asking at least 10 more clariifying questions. For example look at the OP of this very thread's 100 greatest "metal" albums list he posted a few months back. I read it 5 at a time as he posted them, and when he was done I could only conclude that one of us must simply be living in a completely alternate but parallel universe from the other.

The universe of metal has turned into an apples and oranges type of thing the last decade or two, where it's become almost impossible at times to see how the crap they listen to has anything in common or could in any way be construed to be the same genre as the crap I listen to.

 

52 minutes ago, KillaKukumba said:

Leave it where you like, but if one is going to separate only one anomaly in an argument of many they'll never get a true answer. If arguments are to be included one can't simply include the arguments they prefer while ignoring others without justifying so in the results or those results become inaccurate. 

There is also a difference between declaring a winner or loser and having a definitive winner or loser.

I read that 5 times, and while I do understand all the individual words, I still have no idea what you were trying to say. And could there ever really be such a thing as a definitive winner or loser when it comes to people rating art, which is entirely subjective? 

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6 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

 

But then of course on Christmas Eve Goldy messaged and said the guys had talked it over and they wanted him to ask me if I could please not participate in 2019 because I was ruining the integrity of their spreadsheet with all my shitty goat metal. And that's the last time I ever went there. 

Seriously?  So they want a poll for best album but don't want people voting for stuff they don't like?  Man that is hilarious!

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40 minutes ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

I read that 5 times, and while I do understand all the individual words, I still have no idea what you were trying to say. And could there ever really be such a thing as a definitive winner or loser when it comes to people rating art, which is entirely subjective? 

Depending on the parameters, of course there can. If the judging is purely done via personal preference then it's unlikely but not all polls, tallies, ratings are judge based purely on personal preference.

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6 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

Depending on the parameters, of course there can. If the judging is purely done via personal preference then it's unlikely but not all polls, tallies, ratings are judge based purely on personal preference.

Yeaah OK, but when it comes to music, and specifically to this group of guys we were talking about who are assigning numerical values to albums based on personal preference, what other metric could we/they possibly use to judge our music by besides personal preference? Isn't that really the only criteria that matters?

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8 hours ago, GoatmasterGeneral said:

Yeaah OK, but when it comes to music, and specifically to this group of guys we were talking about who are assigning numerical values to albums based on personal preference, what other metric could we/they possibly use to judge our music by besides personal preference? Isn't that really the only criteria that matters?

I agree with what you're saying, however there is people who do judge albums and claim they can work beyond personal preference. I don't agree with them, but pretty much every forum has people like what you describe and many of them will argue tooth and nail the merits of an album based on anything from technical abilities of players, to perfection of production, all to ignore the fact that they are still essentially judging it by their own personal preference.

On a previous forum I used to watch one guy review every album in a 500 word essay, mentioning everything from the technicality of the solo on track 3 to the chord progression at the 5 minute mark of track 7 to just how good or bad each player was compared to other people. But not one of his reviews every actually said whether he liked the album. There was another guy who listened to every album at double speed because he didn't have time to listen to the 3000 albums a year he'd review. Each one of them claimed their reviews deserved more merit than others. Each one claimed anyone who voted different to them was influencing the polls and it did eventually get to a point where both quit ranking albums because they believed every poll done was rigged.

 

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16 hours ago, KillaKukumba said:

Leave it where you like, but if one is going to separate only one anomaly in an argument of many they'll never get a true answer. If arguments are to be included one can't simply include the arguments they prefer while ignoring others without justifying so in the results or those results become inaccurate. 

There is also a difference between declaring a winner or loser and having a definitive winner or loser.

...and maybe you'd have a point, if it wasn't for the fact that you're completely overlooking the justification I gave in my first comment, simply for the sake of trying to be contrarian.

We can literally see how each person scores each album. The highest proportion of scores fall into the mid tier, 5-to-7 range. The very fact that this is happening supports the possibility that we're witnessing some degree of Neutral Response Bias...hence my bringing it up. Conversely, your counter point about Extreme Response Bias has no basis for inclusion in the discussion, because there's nothing happening in those scores to indicate it might be causing a significant enough impact to create inaccurate results

...and you're right...there is a difference between a winner and a definitive winner, but since playing semantics games seems to be your thing. The very fact that the Vortex is an opinion based poll, ranking a subjective form of media, using only an incredibly small sample of a population, precludes the very concept of a definitive winner.

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I think the major problem with the Vortex approach initially was that many of the main players involved were more interested in "shouting down" dissenting voices to what they thought was best than a legit reflection of what the community thought. That quickly devolved into one guy "tanking" a rating on a specific favorite of someone they didn't get along with. It got out of hand. Maybe the age of some of those involved initially played a part, but I think in the end it just turned into something a significant portion of the board just wanted no part of because of the way it was being administrated.

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1 hour ago, navybsn said:

I think the major problem with the Vortex approach initially was that many of the main players involved were more interested in "shouting down" dissenting voices to what they thought was best than a legit reflection of what the community thought. That quickly devolved into one guy "tanking" a rating on a specific favorite of someone they didn't get along with

Haha yes, I remember this now. I believe "Vortex whack-a-mole" was the term that was coined from this. 

God, I have a hard time even imagining being this petty.

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