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Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there were the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns, which led Worldcon to change the award rules.

Then in 2023 there was the self-censorship incident for the Chengdu Worldcon (and also some question about the ballot for selection of Chengdu in the first place, I believe).

Now this.

The Hugos are really having a lot of trouble recently.

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The Sad Puppies were a response to the sorry state of Hugo voting, not the start of it. The Hugo process was designed (and to use that word at all is overstating things) for a world where there were enough independent SF magazines to both avoid groupthink and hopefully cover most of what was worth reading between them.

Hah. The WorldCon was designed to travel between cities and between continents to increase diversity of opinion. It doesn't need independent SF magazines to avoid "groupthink", it already has a world of diversity and the natural forcing function of the primary voters being attending members and attending members encouraging local memberships in addition to travellers.

That was as much a part of the controversy of the Chengdu WorldCon as any of the mistakes they made. The WorldCon was built to welcome that sort of diversity of opinion from an entirely under-represented part of the world in voting to that point. Even if the Chengdu WorldCon hadn't made silly mistakes it still would have angered a lot of people by how much it proved the Hugos actually aren't about "groupthink" and try to get a diversity of opinions.

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