The results are out, and they seem to say that people need to be ruled

I recently mentioned that I entered a story in a Sixfold contest, the literary journal that picks its stories through reader voting rather than a board. I finished in the middle. I didn't even get out of round one.

I actually happen to have read the top three stories that won. They were assigned to me during the final round of voting. I didn't vote very high for two of them, including the winner, which I thought was pretty weak. The second place story was awful. The third place story is okay. If I had been on an editorial board and they had picked the two top stories over some of the other, better entries I saw, I'd have quit the magazine. It's a little hard to tell, because not everybody lets their names go into the final voting list, but I don't see any of the stories I actually liked during voting anywhere near the top. So I think my preferences just don't match the magazine's. I honestly don't think most of the stories they picked as the winners would make it through a halfway decent literary magazine with an editorial board.

As far as the feedback I got on my story from the voters goes, the funniest feedback I got was from one reader who said she gave my story a high vote. But she actually put my story fifth out of six in the first round. That means she was confused about how the ranking works: one is the highest and six is the lowest. She meant to put me second, but she put me next-to-last. Her misunderstanding might have been enough to knock me out after round one. Overall, out of the six votes I got in round one, I got three second place votes, two fifth, one of which was by mistake, and a fourth place vote. The other person who put me in fifth wrote this: " I found the presentation of Jenna as a ‘hypocrite’ for being a powerful woman, but also having emotions, quite problematic. It wasn’t clear enough to me whether this was an intentional comment on the catch 22 of being a powerful woman or not, but it definitely struck me a little incongruous with the overall effect that I think you were trying to create." I don't know what to tell you, dude. It's a first-person story with an obviously flawed narrator, and I found it incredibly clear that you shouldn't take his attitude as the attitude of the story. If you don't get that it's satire after the uber-absurd ending, I don't know how to help you.

Overall, I'm sorry to say that Sixfold's voting process does not seem to work better than a board. There were, like there are with most journals, a lot of bad stories submitted, and each of those bad writers got a vote. The results are sad to me, because I really think it's a great idea to try. I wonder if more journals tried it, if there'd be a place where it worked better. I think the problem with this particular journal, based on the stories I read, is that the taste of the people submitting is rather sentimental. There were a lot of stories where the whole story was a series of sad events resolved with a sudden happy ending that referred to the title, which is kind of a bush league writing tactic. But I can imagine a community forming that has a different taste. If other journals did this, I think you might see identifiable styles emerge from those communities. Sixfold's idea is solid, it just so happens that the writers who submitted, at least in the contest I entered, don't seem to really like sophisticated stories, based on what I read and what I see the readers chose. I'd like to see other journals that try this idea, but with a grass-roots push for a particular aesthetic at the same time. I would describe Sixfold's aesthetic as "ninth-grade girl who's watched a lot of Hallmark Channel."

I'm really kind of sad. Not that I didn't do well. I mean, I wish I'd done better, mostly so it didn't seem so much like I'm just questioning the results now because I didn't do well. But I sort of thought, after reading the stories I saw during voting, that this wasn't my audience. I just really hoped that readers voting would lead to better work getting selected. I wanted to believe in democracy. But it turns out that, as the Internet proves every day, the masses quite often aren't very discerning.