Look, my second point is really the main thing, here.
I don't think you understand why the voter turnout being low is a problem. You do realize the point of the ALAA is not the Ursa Majors, any more than the Oscars are not actually the point of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (a.k.a. AMPAS a.k.a. the Academy)? It's a case of the tail wagging the dog. The point of the Academy is to incentivize studio employees to not unionize to advance the art of motion pictures and preserve their history. The Oscars are just a fun thing they do annually to help inspire its members and promote it's message. Likewise, the important part of the Ursa Majors site is not the awards, it's the Recommended List. The awards are a fun little annual thing to help promote the list and encourage furries to use and contribute to it.
Now, the Academy originally did at least a little depend on money from Oscar ceremony broadcasting rights and advertisement sales, but it has since invested it's profits so that it doesn't really matter if only people who really want watch the show watch the show, it can afford to throw it's party for itself (and even fund a massively expensive museum that almost certainly will be a black hole for money). I mean, ABC is kind of screwed, but they hopefully didn't think of it as an investment when they bought the broadcast rights, and hopefully thought of it as their contribution to a worthy cause they could afford to throw money at. Hopefully.
The ALAA, on the other hand, is a small, amateur organization run by volunteers. The worrying thing about no one showing up to the "fun stuff" is that if they're not showing up for that, they're probably not showing up for the hard parts of actually maintaining the list, either as volunteers, contributors or through donations. Now, yes, our two non-voters in this comment section did complain about their favorites not winning or even being nominated, but the Suicide Squad fan doesn't seem to realize they can vote for nominees as well as winners, while the random YouTube guy fan didn't even get their choice on the Recommended List, so they kind of missed the point.
And that's the problem. Nobody fucking knows what's going on here. I'm repeating myself from the comment section on the actual Ursa Major announcement article, but it's a lot of complaining that nobody showed up to the party that nobody sent invitations out for. Now, this isn't entirely the ALAA's fault; the furry fandom has an aversion to self promotion which isn't entirely a bad thing, either. Modesty is a virtue. But, like, yeah, Sonious, you wrote a whole paragraph explaining you're really not upset Garrison won, but that was one paragraph in an article that can be (a bit unfairly) summarized as "Okay, guys, here's my plan to make sure Garrison NEVER WINS AGAIN!" (Also, just like to point out, it's beside the point, but still not convinced your plan would accomplish that, but whatever.) I mean, the problem is less that Garrison did anything underhanded or out of line, it's that nobody else did. Like, dronon doesn't even take credit for the Newsbyte archives he does. I mean, there's humility, and there's ... being invisible. Need to find a middle ground, here.
Also, it's also just kind of hard to self promote to such a fragmented group as the furry fandom. I mean, remember all those articles you guys did about what website was going to be the next FurAffinity, i.e. the website all furries were required to be a member of, and I was all like "guys, it's probably not going to be just another artsite" and you were all like "no, FurAffinity is losing ground because it sucks" and I was all like "yes, it is not a great site, but the truth is that you're looking for a better version of the same thing instead of what furries are actually looking for" and fast forward to now and I WAS RIGHT or at least more correct because furry was not looking for another artsite, and the truth is there is no longer "one" furry site to rule them all. You can just be a furry wherever, up to and including Twitter/YouTube/FaceBook/fucking Truth Social/plenty of other non-furry sites. (Also, let's be real, FurAffinity is still pretty big fish in the furry pond, if no longer the only fish.) The downside for the ALAA is, of course, holy shit, if you're a small organization with a small to non-existent self promotion budget (never mind your target audience, as already noted, kind of hates self promotion), where the fuck do you start? I don't know? You could go to conventions and press the flesh (you know what I mean), but, once again, which one? Because you don't have the manpower to go to all of them, or even the "big" ones (because, like FurAffinity, it's no longer just "well, Anthrocon's the ONE", it's just another big fish among a school).
And it's not like you can count on the media, because, well, we're it. And we do promote the Ursas. But the two major "furry media outlets" of Flayrah and Dogpatch aren't even that "big" of fish. Once again, most people are just learning about new stuff on social media algorithms and shit like that. You could possibly game that, if you knew how, but I hope nobody feels I'm judging them by saying I don't think most of the membership of the ALAA is really up on that. (I mean, I'm not.) And, going back to us, us and Patch, I mean, as Patch correctly pointed out, we're basically annual nominees thanks to the Magazine category, so any promotion of the Ursas in general has to be curtailed before it seems like a biased campaign for our organizations.
So, anyway, my point is changing the method of vote counting, if you'll forgive me a trite aphorism (I'm leading up to a punchline!) is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I mean, the Ursa Majors aren't a disaster, but the I think you're missing the real problem with your solution, and, in any case, the only assured winner is James Cameron, OH SNAP!
Look, my second point is really the main thing, here.
I don't think you understand why the voter turnout being low is a problem. You do realize the point of the ALAA is not the Ursa Majors, any more than the Oscars are not actually the point of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (a.k.a. AMPAS a.k.a. the Academy)? It's a case of the tail wagging the dog. The point of the Academy is
to incentivize studio employees to not unionizeto advance the art of motion pictures and preserve their history. The Oscars are just a fun thing they do annually to help inspire its members and promote it's message. Likewise, the important part of the Ursa Majors site is not the awards, it's the Recommended List. The awards are a fun little annual thing to help promote the list and encourage furries to use and contribute to it.Now, the Academy originally did at least a little depend on money from Oscar ceremony broadcasting rights and advertisement sales, but it has since invested it's profits so that it doesn't really matter if only people who really want watch the show watch the show, it can afford to throw it's party for itself (and even fund a massively expensive museum that almost certainly will be a black hole for money). I mean, ABC is kind of screwed, but they hopefully didn't think of it as an investment when they bought the broadcast rights, and hopefully thought of it as their contribution to a worthy cause they could afford to throw money at. Hopefully.
The ALAA, on the other hand, is a small, amateur organization run by volunteers. The worrying thing about no one showing up to the "fun stuff" is that if they're not showing up for that, they're probably not showing up for the hard parts of actually maintaining the list, either as volunteers, contributors or through donations. Now, yes, our two non-voters in this comment section did complain about their favorites not winning or even being nominated, but the Suicide Squad fan doesn't seem to realize they can vote for nominees as well as winners, while the random YouTube guy fan didn't even get their choice on the Recommended List, so they kind of missed the point.
And that's the problem. Nobody fucking knows what's going on here. I'm repeating myself from the comment section on the actual Ursa Major announcement article, but it's a lot of complaining that nobody showed up to the party that nobody sent invitations out for. Now, this isn't entirely the ALAA's fault; the furry fandom has an aversion to self promotion which isn't entirely a bad thing, either. Modesty is a virtue. But, like, yeah, Sonious, you wrote a whole paragraph explaining you're really not upset Garrison won, but that was one paragraph in an article that can be (a bit unfairly) summarized as "Okay, guys, here's my plan to make sure Garrison NEVER WINS AGAIN!" (Also, just like to point out, it's beside the point, but still not convinced your plan would accomplish that, but whatever.) I mean, the problem is less that Garrison did anything underhanded or out of line, it's that nobody else did. Like, dronon doesn't even take credit for the Newsbyte archives he does. I mean, there's humility, and there's ... being invisible. Need to find a middle ground, here.
Also, it's also just kind of hard to self promote to such a fragmented group as the furry fandom. I mean, remember all those articles you guys did about what website was going to be the next FurAffinity, i.e. the website all furries were required to be a member of, and I was all like "guys, it's probably not going to be just another artsite" and you were all like "no, FurAffinity is losing ground because it sucks" and I was all like "yes, it is not a great site, but the truth is that you're looking for a better version of the same thing instead of what furries are actually looking for" and fast forward to now and I WAS RIGHT or at least more correct because furry was not looking for another artsite, and the truth is there is no longer "one" furry site to rule them all. You can just be a furry wherever, up to and including Twitter/YouTube/FaceBook/fucking Truth Social/plenty of other non-furry sites. (Also, let's be real, FurAffinity is still pretty big fish in the furry pond, if no longer the only fish.) The downside for the ALAA is, of course, holy shit, if you're a small organization with a small to non-existent self promotion budget (never mind your target audience, as already noted, kind of hates self promotion), where the fuck do you start? I don't know? You could go to conventions and press the flesh (you know what I mean), but, once again, which one? Because you don't have the manpower to go to all of them, or even the "big" ones (because, like FurAffinity, it's no longer just "well, Anthrocon's the ONE", it's just another big fish among a school).
And it's not like you can count on the media, because, well, we're it. And we do promote the Ursas. But the two major "furry media outlets" of Flayrah and Dogpatch aren't even that "big" of fish. Once again, most people are just learning about new stuff on social media algorithms and shit like that. You could possibly game that, if you knew how, but I hope nobody feels I'm judging them by saying I don't think most of the membership of the ALAA is really up on that. (I mean, I'm not.) And, going back to us, us and Patch, I mean, as Patch correctly pointed out, we're basically annual nominees thanks to the Magazine category, so any promotion of the Ursas in general has to be curtailed before it seems like a biased campaign for our organizations.
So, anyway, my point is changing the method of vote counting, if you'll forgive me a trite aphorism (I'm leading up to a punchline!) is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I mean, the Ursa Majors aren't a disaster, but the I think you're missing the real problem with your solution, and, in any case, the only assured winner is James Cameron, OH SNAP!