Duplicate Nominations

This is a reoccurring question so I figured I'd answer it publicly.

Q: If you are a nominator, can you see what other people have nominated already? So that multiple people don't nominate the same game.

A:  People have wanted me to tell them when dupes happen, but that creates two problems. 1) People are generally slow to respond, so even within the 48 hour nominations period people will often fail to respond to messages within that time. 2) It creates a weird favoritism problem. If two people nominate the same thing, which one should be allowed to change their nomination and which one should be required to stay?  The person who gets to change their nomination is essentially getting to nominate two games because they get to change their vote while knowing they're not actually losing the original vote.

Then you have the idea of being able to see the list as is populates.  This creates an incentive for people to wait before they nominate their game and see what other people nominate first.  Except everyone will then want to do that.  The list of nominations trickles in more slowly as people engage in a weird game of chicken.  Right now people frontload the nominations and get them in as soon as they see the message, and I don't want to lose that.  Incentivizing people to backload nominations just increases the chance of each of them missing the deadline altogether and not getting to nominate something at all, which already happens to one or two people each time without me actively encouraging it.

In essence, I understand the gut reaction people may have that they're "wasting" their nomination, but they're ultimately getting exactly what they want.  It's just that other people happen to have wanted it, too.  Which is a good thing if you're hoping your game will ultimately win the popular vote.  In fact, duplicate nominations historically have a better than average chance of winning because they represent an underlying demand from the wider audience, such as the duplicate nominations for winning games Riven, Portal 2, DOOM 2016, Horizon Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda.

Ultimately I just don't really see a problem in the first place that really needs to be solved, and the solutions generally add more problems and confusion to the mix for everyone.