I feel some desire to flag: in the pre-FTX-collapse world, I'd have definitely wanted these prizes to be significantly larger, to more reflect the actual effort and value. My sense is that even pre-FTX, there was enough money around that that'd be reasonable.
But, it's admittedly a bit tricky/confusing because many of the authors are already working fulltime at an org that makes space for them to write, so, well, this is more like a nice bonus on top of them already getting paid, and I'm not sure how rewarding the prizes actually are.
But there are at least some new top authors each year who aren't already getting paid that way. Not sure how to balance tjhe various considerations.
If you received a prize, please fill out your payment contact email and PayPal.
A'ight, one final 2021 Review Roundup post – awarding prizes. I had a week to look over the results. The primary way I ranked posts was by a weighted score, which gave 1000+ karma users 3x the voting weight. Here was the distribution of votes:
I basically see two strong outlier posts at the top of the ranking, followed by a cluster of 6-7 posts, followed by a smooth tail of posts that were pretty good without any clear cutoff.
Post Prizes
Gold Prize Posts
Two posts stood noticeably out above all the others, which I'm awarding $800 to.
Silver Prize Posts
And the second (eyeballed) cluster of posts, each getting $600, is:
Bronze Prize Posts
Although there's not a clear clustering after this point, when I eyeball how important the next several posts were, it seems to me appropriate to give $400 to each of:
Honorable Mentions
This final group has the most arbitrary cutoff at all, and includes some judgment calls about how many medium or strong votes it had, among 1000+ karma users, and in some edge cases my own subjective guess of how important it was.
These authors each get $100 per post.
Honorable-est Mention
I... choose to wield my dictatorial power of the review process to refuse to give Elephant seal 2 a prize, even it landed a respectably high "rank 39" in the weighted vote totals. But, it sure does seem like it deserves an Honorable-ish mention anyway for all of people's love for it. I also quite liked Coafos' review of Elephant Seal 2, which was also the second-highest-karma-review. But which I also use my dictatorial powers to refuse to give a prize to.
Fight me.
Prize Totals
When you add all that up, here are the prize totals. Reminder, if you received a prize, please fill out your payment contact email and PayPal so we can pay you.