There’s currently a big debate surrounding the Hugo awards. The last Worldcon happened in Chengdu (China), and as always there’s nominations for the Hugos. This time, however, people were looking at the results and noticing some strange things. As a sinologist, I would call this “statistics with Chinese characteristics” - statistics that need to fit a certain (political and desired) reality and not reflect, you know, actual votes. Others call it the Li Keqiang Index (克強指數). Cora Buhlert has a summary and timeline of the full shitstorm, Polygon summarizes the mess.

Whatever the reason is for these results, I only knew of the shitstorm by chance via my trusty RSS feeds. Then someone pointed out “Oh, it’s all over Bluesky”. Even though I have an account there, I barely use it - professionally, I spend my time on Mastodon. I missed the whole thing.

A couple of years ago, whenever something big was happening in some niche or sphere or region, you knew it thanks to Twitter (RIP). Heated niche debates could go viral around the globe. Now, there’s a platform or a Discord server for every taste, and X is a dumpster fire. The shitstorms are elsewhere.

The Chengdu Hugos reflect bigger changes how we engage with platforms and the Internet in general. I wrote about some of these recently; my former colleagues summarized this fragmentation much better than I can in a recent article and podcast episode, aptly titled “Niemand weiss mehr, was online wirklich vor sich geht” (“No-one knows anymore what’s going on online”).

The podcast episode: “Ist das Internet kaputt?”

Image source: “a woman standing on a hill and watching a shitstorm from far away. The shitstorm is brown and looks like a tornado made of shit”, Nightcafe/Crystal Clear XL.

Last modified on 2024-01-27