The Redditaisai feedback survey has been out for a week and has received a 77 responses. Thanks to all that responded: your feedback is invaluable to the success of future events.

I'd like to take the time to summarize and discuss much of the feedback made this year.

"I enjoyed the content presented at Redditaisai." - Average: 4.48, last year: 4.41. Delta: 0.07.

"I think Redditaisai was organized well." - Average: 4.11, last year: 3.92. Delta: 0.19.

"Redditaisai is fostering and supporting the western doujin scene." - Average: 4.38, last year: 4.23. Delta: 0.15.

Numerically speaking, it seems like we have improvements on all three fronts. In the comments there were several themes that definitely should be discussed publicly:

Growing Beyond Reddit

Originally this event was intended for the reddit community to come together and make many great things for the community. For last year, the number of submissions were pretty well kept, at 26 submissions across one day, you got maybe one filled page on the frontpage of the subreddit of submissions. However, this year, at nearly 60 submissions (>100% growth), the event started to seriously suffer from the effects of hosting the event on reddit. As with any content on reddit: new, flashy, and easily digestible content is preferred, and while the catalogue provided (however updated it was) helps, it doesn't resolve much of the problems presented by the platform.

We have had many people join reddit to participate in the event, meaning people of normally other Touhou communities, or lurkers from other platforms intentionally joined reddit to share their works. This begs the question of whether we should rescope the event from that of one for the reddit community to one for the western/global/online Touhou community as a whole.

This lead to me adding the question of "Where should Redditaisai 2018 take place?" to the feedback survey. Results are almost 50/50 split, with a slight favor for keeping it on reddit overall (by a margin 1 response). A small thing to mention is that there's a strong correlation between submitting a creation to the event and wanting it to be moved. I would like to openly discuss the merits of doing either option. If you feel strongly about it either way, I implore you to at least leave a comment in this thread.

Places to improve: Event organization

Lack of prepreparation - I, as the organizer, didn't do enough of it. Last year I did reminder and discussion threads leading up to the event, as a way to prod creators to say "Hey the event deadline is growing closer". Due to the low community response to each of these and my own work increasing over the past year, I neglected to do these. Should I bring these back?

Organizer Responsiveness - I claim full responsibility for this. Many of the posts were micromanaged by me, and only me. Some of which were never up to date, even after the event ended. This was a combination of the event stretching for a full 24 hours, having to deal with my own submission, and needing to sleep. While it doesn't do it justice, I deeply apologize on this front.

Lack of promotion and awareness

Sticky post didn't provide enough immediate information - Despite the sticky thread being plastered on the top of the subreddit since April, there were still active users of the subreddit who didn't know about the event until it started. I don't know how to improve intra-reddit promotion of the event

No non-reddit promotion of the event - This ties into the aforementioned "Growing Beyond Reddit" point. As the event was meant to be for solely the reddit community. I focused on only three venues of event promotion: reddit itself via the sticky threads, large social media outlets like Gensokyo Radio or the Touhou Project Facebook page (that one with 80k likes), and the individual creators sharing their works publicly via other venues. Some examples of the last were the public promotions for Fantasy Crescendo and NitorInc, which both got a lot of coverage on both Facebook and Twitter prior to the event, but many came back with comments like "plebbitaisai" or "Redditaisai, what's that? Haven't heard of it, probably isn't anything good." (looking at you, doujinstyle).

While I know of the issues now with the event, I don't want to make any jarring decisions on how the event is run without first passing it by the community first. I'll make a subcomment under this post for my own propositions on how we should move forward. If you feel you have alternative solutions, please feel free to comment.

While this isn't a competition in any sense, shoutout to NitorInc for being the single most mentioned favorite submission this year: found within 16/77 responses. Congratulations!

P.S. To the guy who sent 30 responses under the name of "d1ckn1gg3r" or similar names, please refrain from doing so in the future. You're not being funny, and it's not helping in any reasonable way. None of your responses were considered in any capacity.