Chengdu worldcon voting fiasco

[Jubal]

It strikes me that the Hugos is probably a perfect problem case for this sort of thing: it has a big enough base of voters and cultural impact to carry prestige, but small enough that it doesn't take immense numbers of votes to swing results. Its voting base is also probably disproportionately composed of people who are genuinely clever enough to have a go at such a thing, but also who know that and less accurately believe themselves to be smart enough to get away with it. It's international which may reduce legal repercussions for tampering with the voting too.

[Rob_Haines]

The Hugos are also located at a culture war pivot point between a (predominantly conservative) old guard who want speculative fiction to return to the unexamined tropes of the Golden Age, and the rest of us who want the genre to be a vast, diverse exploration of the wider imagination rather than stories viewed through a single cultural lens.

Most of the Hugo meddling has been fundamentally a result of the Sad/Rabid Puppies movements, trying to drag an otherwise forward-looking con membership backwards.

[Jubal]

I'm not sure it's solely that, though I don't think you're wrong in broad terms. Partly I think there's a more awkward variance between puppyist types and people with weirder and more individual hobby-horses, but also I think there's other actors in the pool as well now, not least all the stuff that happened in Chengdu which I think is more attributable to Chinese than Western brands of reactionary politics.

[Rob_Haines]

I think that's fair. As you say, there's a degree of vulnerability to the Hugos, due to the high value vs low cost of influencing, that makes them a wide-scope target for attempts at abuse.