Well, first off, remember that it’s Farkers doing the voting 🙂
Second, perhaps the only way to get a fair “contest” (and I use the word “contest” very loosely here, because it really is only an exhibition) is to have a blind voting period before you announce a ‘winner’, which is undoubtedly far too much work for a simple Fark thread.
My ideal contest site would work something like this:
People who are qualified voters (i.e. there’s some requirement, no matter how loose) are presented with a randomized set of images from the contest that they score by some criteria (conformance to theme, technical merit, artistic merit, whatever else) and the scores are averaged/weighted to produce a single number. This helps alleviate the ‘earlier pics score better’ or ‘viewer fatigue’ issues.
It’s not easy to run a true contest, which is why I tend to use the word ‘exhibition’ a lot.
That said, this is run for fun and we need to keep that in mind. I look at my 33 or so votes in this last contest not as 10th place, but as “Hey, 33 people liked my stuff enough to vote! Cool!
