This is something that I’ve dreaded writing ever since the SCP-6000 contest, when for the first time, we faced enough vote shenanigans on a kcon to warrant rebalancing votes.
Let’s rip off the bandaid: there was vote manipulation. This isn’t just about downvotes, this is about selectively downvoting and upvoting articles to push one over the other. Before I continue, we do not condone witch-hunting any user suspected of vote manipulation. A statement has already been provided to the Disciplinary Team with users the team feels deserve action with accompanying evidence. Your actions will not do anything but cause harm.
I bring this up because unlike 6kcon, where ultimately the winner remained the same and placements weren’t affected (despite how close it was), this is the first time that the adjusted votes altered the top five placements, not to mention affecting other articles further down the list. With how close the votes were this late into the contest, this is the first time that the contest shenanigans could have altered who won.
When vote adjustments were announced that they would be a thing back in 6kcon, I received some people questioning the decision (and at least one DM actively criticizing it). There were concerns that the SCP Wiki was moving away from the will of the people, that by changing votes, the wiki was now headed towards a path where staff would be the ones who decided the winner.
There is nothing I can offer you to guarantee that our judgments are bias-free. We made efforts to, yes, such as filtering votes through multiple steps and through each marshal’s judgments, until we were sure that something qualified as suspicious enough to qualify for adjustment. However, I am not naive enough to assume this is enough - nobody reading this statement knows my or my co-marshal’s thoughts at any given moment. All I can do is ask that you trust us when I say we went through multiple deliberations on what qualified and what didn’t.
Below are some points that have been brought up during the course of this contest:
Will there be disc action against the users whose votes were adjusted?
Currently, we have only identified five voters whose actions were so egregious that they needed to be sent to the Disciplinary Team. For the remaining users, initially, I had planned to send them messages informing them of what was considered shenanigans under current contest rules; however, the sheer complexity of the situation and the number of people involved made this unfeasible. There are no plans for actions to be taken against anyone other than the five mentioned.
How were you about to determine which votes needed to be adjusted?
There were multiple factors, including, but not limited to
- Openly admitting to wanting an article to win and downvoting a competitor within a similar vote range during the same timeframe
- Openly admitting that you enjoyed an article but did not believe it should win the contest
- Downvotes and upvotes coinciding with specific dates, such as when an article was poised to overtake another, or when a favored article was posted
- Joining the wiki and immediately upvoting/downvoting one of the three frontrunner articles with no other activity
- Inconsistency in voting, such as upvoting a translation and downvoting the original article Note that I have received important context that votes on translations are based on the quality of the translation, not of the original piece, so this specific quality will not be considered going forward
- Multiple changed votes, such as upvoting an article and downvoting or novoting another, and reversing the votes, especially when their ratings were close or done multiple times
Note that this is not an exhaustive list, but these were some of the bases for our criteria. Not every vote that might have fallen into one of these categories was deemed necessary to adjust: the context as to why they occurred was crucial for determination.
What about djkaktus?
It is an open secret that of everyone affected by the voting shenanigans, the one party who would have benefitted the most from them was djkaktus. However, it cannot be overstated that the Contest Marshals have not found any evidence that djkaktus was involved in any shenanigans. Although upvotes from users who participated in shenanigans were not removed from djkaktus’s entry, his entry’s popularity has other explanations for its rapid growth in accruing upvotes, such as aggressive marketing, a larger platform and social media presence than most authors, and individual events like a Reddit AMA thread. While these are advantages that this particular author had and can be considered unfair, and is something we can have further discussion later on, this is a statement specifically about the voting shenanigans, and on that front we can safely conclude that djkaktus played no part in the shenanigans that occurred.
What about international users?
This was a point that I mulled over many, many times during the writing of this post. First, we did not find any concrete evidence of a concentrated downvote effort against certain articles. Now, I cannot ignore the evidence that a non-insignificant number of adjusted votes came from users from international branches. That said, I cannot stress enough that we cannot assume a correlation. We could not find any firm evidence of a downvote brigade. Accusing a branch of performing an action committed by individuals without any concrete proof is not conducive to discussion nor inter-branch relations and only causes chaos - something that the official SCP Discord server has experienced. When users of the branch are able to highlight potentially exonerating explanations like the existence of polarizing discussions, the burden of proof lies with us to determine whether they truly committed downvote brigading. In that regard, we have not found any evidence on that front.
Why adjust?
There’s a case to be made that contest marshals are overstepping their boundaries here, and that they should be limited to only enforcing when contestants perform shenanigans against fellow contestants - that is, following the rules down to the letter and no more. However, it is our belief that this is unfair to the contestants who are the victims of vote manipulation if we allow this loophole to go through.
Anything else?
We would like to note that any user whose votes were deemed suitable for adjustment would have their downvotes voided specifically, not their upvotes. We felt it would be unfair to punish authors whose works were upvoted because we would not be able to determine intent for those nearly as easily. At the same time, we voided all the downvotes from these users as the fact that their voting had been deemed necessary to adjust made it difficult to approach any additional downvotes they had with good faith.
Kcons are meant to be celebrations for how far the site has come, and a celebration for encouraging more people to contribute to the site’s newest series. However, the culture of competition, especially driven by how neck-and-neck the frontrunners were in this contest, has fostered a sense that the main thing that matters is who wins and gets to set the stage for the upcoming series. This leads to the conclusion that there can only be one winner and that downvotes, which were once used to show not liking an article, have now been weaponized to try and push someone out of their placement so someone else can take it. It’s a mindset unhealthy for the site, but especially for the authors - to work for so long only to receive a downvote not because your story was flawed, but because someone else felt that as good as your story might have been, someone else’s is better, and rather than celebrate both entries, only one could survive.
Talking with several authors, it has become abundantly clear that faith in how kcons are run is eroding. Bad enough is there being one person who needs to be investigated by Disciplinary, to say nothing of five. Bad enough is the stress of writing for a contest with so many eyes, knowing there could always be someone who feels you don’t deserve to be above someone else, and will vote based on that. We had many, many ties appear in this contest, many placements determined by a single vote or more - individual votes matter. This is no longer a case where we can just ignore a few bad faith actors. This is a problem that has metastasized into something that genuinely affects placements, that can rob authors of their slots because someone decided they didn’t think something deserved to take that.
This is a practice only ends up hurting authors in the long run. And that’s what frustrates me most about this. I can tolerate having to put in extra effort into regulating contests. I very much remember how stressful 6kcon was, but I don’t regret us doing what we had to to maintain fairness. But when the problem is this egregious, when my attention is split between so many different people that I can’t guarantee that we’re able to fully rectify every issue that arises, and where people are genuinely becoming hurt by this, I draw the line.
While the contest committee and marshals are the ones to oversee contests, we would like to take the opportunity to field for thoughts on the state of contests, and especially kcons, both the recent one and those going forward. Because holy shit, do things need to change.