I didn't know what the karma ordering meant and read the link. I see the itch boss said it was given - received with no mention of comments but that he may tweak it.
Thank you for showing that median can be more complex than a 50/50 split. It would be interesting if the jam results had the number of votes as a sort field.
Interesting topic indeed and still not solved in my book, haha.
If there were a fixed vote requirement then just like now with the median there's always going to be those who miss out by one vote and feel that life is unfair :/ (don't know how to visually type a protruding lower lip).
I'm not sure how effective it is to make it clearer about games in need of votes. I felt that the placement of that message in this jam was pretty good. One factor is just the number of entries. It's just not feasible for most people to play and rate every game. Which then leads back to the same problem, people know they can't rate all the games so they go for the option where they can get something in return - rate for rate. And I'm sure there's larger jams than this one which means being even more selective with one's time, either by rate for rate or by playing what is deemed to be popular in the hope that it will be good.
So, my summary is the more entries a jam has, the less chance it has of having a reasonably even spread of votes.