As Peter noted, while CEA provides funding for the prizes, only two of the six voters work for CEA. I’m one of those two, and I vote according to a personal standard that doesn’t have anything to do with “what CEA wants”, and is more related to some combination of “average utility per reader” + “sets a good example for how to write good Forum posts” + “other minor factors too numerous to list”.
One note on upvotes: They correlate heavily with “number of people who read something”. If posts A and B are equally high-quality, and post B is shared in a bunch of large Facebook groups, B will almost certainly get more upvotes, but that doesn’t mean it was more useful to the average reader. (I don’t think any kind of voting metric should be the sole standard for the Prize, but if we were thinking about such metrics, we could look for something like “among posts with 100+ unique visitors, which had the highest karma-to-visitor ratio?”)
As Peter noted, while CEA provides funding for the prizes, only two of the six voters work for CEA. I’m one of those two, and I vote according to a personal standard that doesn’t have anything to do with “what CEA wants”, and is more related to some combination of “average utility per reader” + “sets a good example for how to write good Forum posts” + “other minor factors too numerous to list”.
One note on upvotes: They correlate heavily with “number of people who read something”. If posts A and B are equally high-quality, and post B is shared in a bunch of large Facebook groups, B will almost certainly get more upvotes, but that doesn’t mean it was more useful to the average reader. (I don’t think any kind of voting metric should be the sole standard for the Prize, but if we were thinking about such metrics, we could look for something like “among posts with 100+ unique visitors, which had the highest karma-to-visitor ratio?”)
Thanks for your response. I was under a false impression. My apologies for the mistake.