One of the disingenuous things about SP4 is (from the initial things I've read from their organizers) they are pretending it's not a slate, but they intend to rank those top 10 recommendations from 1 to 10 so if their minions just so happen to pick the top 5...
That had crossed my mind as a possibility, which is partly why I say "if taken at face value". That would be an easy way to try to make it look like not a slate while actually making it a slate. I also think that the re-use of the Sad Puppies brand name says something. If they actually just wanted a recommended reading list, why use that name again, the name of the group that made this Hugo year what it was? The most obvious answer is that they think that the brand recognition will get them followers. I am guessing that the use of the name alone will draw anger from people who assume they are aiming to collude again, and even if they don't mean to suggest collusion, them using the brand name of a brand that has been known for selling crap sandwiches kind of implies that they're still going to be selling crap sandwiches, even if they say specifically that their sandwiches are 100% feces free.
If I were in their shoes, and trying to make it an actual recommended reading list I would do two things:
1. I would not use the same brand name.
2. I would implement some kind of technical solution to avoid the valid criticism of rank-ordering the 10 entries. Maybe set up a page so that, when it's loaded, would always load the same 10 stories in a list, but would list them in a random order so that every time someone loaded the page the order was completely arbitrary and different than the last time.
Chaos Horizon https://chaoshorizon.wordpress.com/ has done some analysis of this. IIRC they were in that 5x to 10x range to eliminate the Puppy influence we saw in the 2015 nominations. I'd have to go back and do some more reading here. I'm behind on their analysis. Unblinking, with your love of numbers, I think you'd dig that site if you're not already reading it.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing that. I'd think 5x-10x is plausible IF the Sad Puppy supporters numbers remain constant. If anti-colluders are trying to rally with larger numbers, I find it implausible that pro-colluders would not be aiming to rally their numbers too. Especially with this last year as such an effective proof that their strategy "works", if "work" is defined to mean getting specific works on the ballot even if they've got little chance of actually winning the rocket.