Since it seems like there have been issues with competition results/a lot of mixed opinions on results for the past few competitions, I believe it would be cool if we had some competitions that were fully voted on by the community.
So like, there could be 3 types of competitions.
Type 1: Judge/Sponsor/Effect-House-Team-Judged competitions, where the EH team or specific competition judges will judge the results of a competition (like as we currently have.
Type 2: Top/Most Popular Effects win. I think what a lot of creators struggle with is that sometimes winners are based more off of simplicity, or the virality of an effect, but it’s often not mentioned in the guidelines so some will create things insanely advanced & technical, not really meant for virality. Maybe there could be specific contests where this is outlined and the criteria for winning?
Type 3: Community-Voted competitions. These would be competitions where we would either have a channel in discord, or the community forum, and would vote on effects. Maybe we could link an effect name and give our votes to it/have a certain number of votes?. We could also have a setup similar to the Feedback Requests channel (here in the community forum) where there’s a channel for each competition, and everyone posts maybe a maximum of 1-3 effects (max depends on the competition), and they share their effect links, a demo video, and the effect names. Then people can check them out, and click vote on the on the effects (exactly how we vote on feedback requests and the most voted get taken care of first). And then most voted filters wins.
I definitely agree that each of these options could have drawbacks or spam/cheating/unfair voting, and there’s likely still going to be some who are unhappy/disagree with results but I think a lot of the community would absolutely love to have something like this, as there would be a clearer decision factor. I also believe community voting could make it easier on the community managers/EH team who’s judging the competitions, as it would be easier to judge, or at least to find the most favorite filters. Maybe even if there was like, the top 50 voted on filters for a contest, and then the team judges from those top voted on filters. I’m not saying to have all contests judged like this, but maybe at least a trial few ones and see how it could go. A variety of different types of judging could be something that could help to satisfy a mix of everyone.
These are just ideas I’m trying to come up with to help. If anyone else has some ideas/inputs on how to do something like this, or ways/ideas that could both satisfy creators and be helpful for the community managers/EH team/beneficial for contest sponsors, feel free to add comments/opinions onto this!
Edit: Maybe some kind of blind voting could work? Someone mentioned about how it could turn into a popularity contest in some cases in the EH general chat/discord, which is definitely something to consider. But if there could be like a blind voting method, this could also be an option. 
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