

Node.js Knockout Winners are ... - daleharvey
http://nodeknockout.posterous.com/and-the-winners-are

======
credo
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

~~~
jackowayed
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.

~~~
steadicat
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.

------
jmcnevin
Swarmation: AKA "You IDIOTS, move over HERE!"

Not that it isn't fun. :)

------
ugh
Congratulations! Swarmation [1] certainly is a deserved winner. The solo
winner is also awesome [2].

[1] <http://swarmation.com/>

[2] <http://rallarpojken.no.de/>

~~~
ollerac
Thank you :)

We're a little embarrassed by all the bugs popping up. I hope you guys check
back in a couple days when we have them all worked out.

And then we'll start making some improvements.

\- a swarmation dev

------
drtse4
The Umeboshi Server (<http://umeboshi-fireteam.no.de/>) is quite interesting,
nice idea.

