Netta Barzilai of Israel wins Eurovision Song Contest

[oberliner]

Israeli singer Netta Barzilai won the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest, the annual international singing competition that involves countries from Europe to Australia, on a night disrupted by an unexpected stage protest.

Barzilai, 25, won on Saturday with a quirky electronic dance entry inspired by the called "Toy," written and produced by Doron Medalie and Stav Beger. She won 529 points through a combination of votes from viewers and national judging panels.

It was the fourth time Israel has won the contest, now in its 63rd year. The winning nation must host the following year's contest, so Barzilai's victory means that Eurovision 2019 will be in Israel.

Barzilai thanked her fans Saturday in a video on Eurovision's Twitter account.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/12/entertainment/eurovision-winner-israel-netta-barzilai/index.html

[OnDoutside]

1. That was some load of shite, they should really go back to the jury only votes. The public vote

counts for 50% and is badly distorting the result. Cyprus and Austria had much better songs.

[DetlefK]

2. Yeah, it gets especially obvious with Eastern Europe. But there are solutions:

The eastern european countries tend to give each other the highest marks and it totally skews the results.

The ESC could for example go for a jury-only system (e.g. 3 judges per country). But that would lower public interest in the ESC.



A mathematically more solid way would be to simply discriminate:

e.g. In ski-jumping you get marks from 5 judges, but the best and the worst mark don't count.

In the ESC, you get 20 or so marks, one from each country. The ESC could make it so that for each competitor the two best and the two worst marks don't count for their overall score.



Data-discrimination isn't nice, but sometimes it's necessary when your data fluctuates too much because of possible bias.

[OnDoutside]

3. As it stands people are turning off because they can see that the voting is a joke. They should

narrow it down further and that's not a bad solution. I was thinking that they continue with the phone vote but they

1 Do a 1-12 in each country
2 Add all the points
3 Do a 1-12 of all those points
4 Treat the public vote as one final "country" so when all the countries have voted, the public vote is ONE 1-12 vote, rather than counting for 50% of the vote.

[oberliner]

4. Which song was your favorite?

[OnDoutside]

6. I think the Austrian one was the best but I liked the Norwegian and Danish ones as well. Unfortunate

ly the Irish one got a middling score. Ireland has had a great record in the competition over the years (7 wins which is the most of all the countries), but those who have been running it for the last decade have been all about the look rather than the song, so we've ended up with turkeys ... literally one year we had Dustin the Turkey "singing". That was our low point. The song this time was very good but the guy singing wasn't (being charitable) experienced enough. I thought the theme of the song would push it along further.

[oberliner]

7. Sadly none of these videos are available in my country

Must be blocked in the US.

[OnDoutside]

8. Sorry about that. Maybe a search on youtube yourself might bring them up ?

[grossproffit]

5. I love this song.