i personally didnt vote this year because i didnt see any of the animes listed

First of all, big thanks for making this happen.

As for the factors contributing to lower turnout, I think the following might have affected it:

• RCV voting system - it’s harder to understand than your typical voting system where you only cast one vote for your favorite show. It might be more fair overall, but people might have questions like:
  • does specifying the second, the third choice, and so on, affect the chances of my first choice winning?
  • if I didn’t watch all the nominated shows, should I include them in my ballot at all?
    I think instead of thinking this through, people might just decide that I don’t understand this system, I don’t want to think about it, so I will not vote at all
• in the nominations phase: not having a list to choose from, and having to come up with the nominees on your own. I think such list should include not just the titles but also posters to make the search easier (also needs to be mobile friendly)
• having to edit a markdown file by hand. It might be discouraging on a desktop computer but it’s straight up annoying on mobile devices, and I imagine that more than a half of the userbase uses their mobile phones to browse social media.
• as others already mentioned, the user interface of Lemmy doesn’t make it obvious where do you send a private message. Perhaps there’s some way to create a direct link, like https://ani.social/create_private_message/5000605 ? But that only works if someone is registered on ani.social. Anyway, if you plan to use private messages in some way again next year, I think it would be a good idea to explain how to send one (which would be challenging anyway, because each mobile client does it in its own way)

Sorry if it came out as overly critical. It wasn’t my intention. I know it’s hard to come up with a good solution that satisfies everyone and I’m grateful for all the work you’ve done.

Total turnout this year (~25 votes) was down quite a bit compared to last year (~90 votes).

Damn, that’s very low. I figured it’d be higher, given the amount of upvotes.

The private-message voting system was new, and I don’t think it seems like it was popular.

Yeah, it wasn’t great tbh. The whole markdown list was a bit tedious. Can’t do it on a phone well either. But also, I find private messaging very unintuitive on Lemmy. I opened my laptop to fill it out, but it took a while before I found the chat thing (in the notifications area apparently).

I found it interesting that Maomao absolutely ran away with the voting for best Voice Acting, but she didn’t even make the nomination list for best character. In fact, Shisui received more nominations than Maomao for best character.

I think Maomao is great, but I think Shisui meant more for this season than Maomao did.

Yeah not going to lie the private message thing was pretty brutal. Filling out the template on mobile takes a good amount of effort. I also think ranked choice may discourage some from voting since people may not know each of the choices very well.

Thanks for hosting again this year and trying things out though.

May I trouble you to update this post to show the top 3 nominees for each category, along with their final vote count?

Stremio+real debrid

Apocalypse Hotel, the overall winner, is available on Crunchyroll (at least in the US, it can vary by market). Honestly, if you are in the US, most of these are going to be on Crunchyroll I think. CR are continuing their “take over all the things” arc within this niche. So, if you only subscribe to one service, it should be the one (unless you just sail the high seas). Other places you find some quality titles from time to time would be Netflix, HiDive, Amazon Prime, or Disney+.