It's important to remember that when assessing quality of a judgment, time is a useless metric.
If you are being properly thorough, and preparing and delivering a judgment takes you 9 non-stop hours in total, it doesn't matter if you do it all in one go or distribute across several months. It's not like the 72 judging timeout means you should spend exactly 72 hours on your judging work.
If you're spending this many hours on judgment work, I'm actually worried about you! You don't have to overwork that hard just to keep things going! We're wannabe perfectionists here, but if you're this focused on a movie, you might as well make your own submission instead. Generally, it doesn't have to be so complicated that it needs insane amount of research. If the situation is so counter-intuitive, then the decision will also feel way too weird, and the community may not approve. Let alone the time it will take you to recover.
And of course one can deliver a rushed judgment even after several months. It's really easy, just ignore everything. And if the community is upset and disappointed as a result, congratulations, neither grace period is enough for you!
So yes, first and foremost, the key point here is the very culture of judging. 3 days won't guarantee the judgment is good. 1 hour won't guarantee the judgment is bad. What is important is taking due time on your own research, while hearing people out and addressing their concerns.
And there are a few things to say about audience feedback in general. The tier system meant that for
every single judgment we need to ask people to provide feedback on how entertained they are, to properly determine the tier. We can use votes and ratings of previous submissions, or of similar games, but feedback could still change over the years drastically while the movie is nearly the same. And there was a problem of people only giving positive feedback in the thread, and then only negative feedback in publication ratings. And also a problem of kinda wearing off, because a lot of submissions would sit there with little to no feedback and you have to repeatedly ask people to vote just to determine the tier. And then they don't have enough energy to participate in talks regarding site policies where community is meant to have a huge say. So the tier system was a lot of fun.
The class system greatly reduces hard dependency on viewer feedback for whatever is acceptable to Standard, because let's be real, the feedback focused system was unsustainable. And we're not
rejecting more, we're
accepting more, so people must be happy that we don't explicitly need as much feedback anymore.
But it's still important not to make people worry: "Hey so we don't matter anymore?". Even tho the overall trend feels like less people care about posting in submission threads lately (and I don't have the stats data over the years), it's still in our control if we want this trend to continue, or we want to encourage more people to participate somehow.
Giving everyone who's not instantly around, an opportunity to share their opinion and be heard, is important on the long run. It's how you deserve people's trust. And there are also viewer's expectations that
we're meant to meet with our decisions.
My own feeling of when enough time was given for feedback is usually several weeks, of course granted people are actually posting! But does this mean we want the grace period to be several weeks just
to make sure the judges remember to give people time? I don't think so. It shouldn't even depend on time at all. It should depend on experience and instinct,
instructions and training, basically culture.
And that in turn means, that we shouldn't be too hard on judges if they make a mistake. We should be helpful and nice, so they don't get overwhelmed either, because that job is too important to let people burn out. It's not like the site is collapsing and nothing can be helped even if a wrong decision goes through. We want it to be a learning curve, so we want to be encouraging and motivating.
In the end, the judgment timeout is about the human factor. It's about giving people freedom to participate even if they don't want to do it. It's about acknowledging that even after several months on the bench there may appear some revolutionary post that flips everything upside down. It's about realizing that we can't be waiting for it every time, because most of the time it doesn't happen. There are no guarantees, and there should be no punishment. If somebody is being repeatedly disappointing, we invest effort in trying to help that person fix the flaws. But if there's no damage caused, it's not a big deal. So we should stay balanced.
I haven't voted.
