First of all, big thanks for making this happen.

As for the factors contributing to lower turnout, I think the following might have affected it:

• RCV voting system - it’s harder to understand than your typical voting system where you only cast one vote for your favorite show. It might be more fair overall, but people might have questions like:
  • does specifying the second, the third choice, and so on, affect the chances of my first choice winning?
  • if I didn’t watch all the nominated shows, should I include them in my ballot at all?
    I think instead of thinking this through, people might just decide that I don’t understand this system, I don’t want to think about it, so I will not vote at all
• in the nominations phase: not having a list to choose from, and having to come up with the nominees on your own. I think such list should include not just the titles but also posters to make the search easier (also needs to be mobile friendly)
• having to edit a markdown file by hand. It might be discouraging on a desktop computer but it’s straight up annoying on mobile devices, and I imagine that more than a half of the userbase uses their mobile phones to browse social media.
• as others already mentioned, the user interface of Lemmy doesn’t make it obvious where do you send a private message. Perhaps there’s some way to create a direct link, like https://ani.social/create_private_message/5000605 ? But that only works if someone is registered on ani.social. Anyway, if you plan to use private messages in some way again next year, I think it would be a good idea to explain how to send one (which would be challenging anyway, because each mobile client does it in its own way)

Sorry if it came out as overly critical. It wasn’t my intention. I know it’s hard to come up with a good solution that satisfies everyone and I’m grateful for all the work you’ve done.