I'm really enjoying this contest process. However, I'm increasingly distracted by the comments which follow each piece and have been ignoring them to the best of my ability (until my own votes have been cast).
It's interesting to consider the psychological impact which these comments--particularly the first one following each submission--undoubtedly have upon voters, and this is the primary reason I've withheld my own observations and notes. In fact, the Pseudopod staff may wish to consider ways in which groupthink can be avoided in the future. Perhaps each piece could have a separate comments thread independent from the piece itself (which would be comment free).
I hope the tone of this post is not misunderstood. The comments are indeed often interesting and helpful. I just feel that they would be best separated from the submissions themselves.
This was something that had come up as a possible issue when the last contest round came up as well. The thing is, this is not an issue that has a right or wrong approach, it's a matter of the style of contest. All the flash fiction contests we ran here in the past allowed commenting, and all of them let individual members decide whether or not to read the comments and allow them to influence their own votes. That's the type of contest this is, and personally, I think it's part of what makes it worthwhile, and this belief is shared by the other members of the EA forum team (and, as far as I know, the EA editorial team).
This is the contest that this is, and it seems to be successful in its current format - it's the fourth iteration, after all, and its gotten more submissions each time round. I certainly think that we could do it other ways, but I personally don't see the need, nor do I want to (which isn't to say I'm trying to shut down discussion on this, just giving the perspective of one of the people involved running contests here, albeit not the person in charge of this particular one).
