Hello,
Today we'll talk about something slightly different from the usual episodic coverage. Yes, I have not been very vocal till this point, but there is some sort of tourney going on between anime blogs in which I am partecipating as well.
The tourney itself is based on a bracket system with direct elimination matches between two different blogs (with one group phase in between). It is, using the words of the organizers, "a way for people to know more blogs to follow/read and a way to get advertising for smaller blogs".
While the tourney in itself is nothing really interesting, the drama that is generating around this little competition is a bit appalling and resembling what happened two years ago when I was still, but a mere reader.
Let's go in order and try to explain my ideas. Why is this tourney "not interesting"? There are multiple faults here, and all of them could have been fixed very easily by the organizers, but for some obscure reason they choose not to.
The first issue I see is the medium (software platform in this case) used to allow the voting. Yes, we're talking about the dreaded polldaddy standard account. This kind of poll account has no access to IP data of the voters, making the whole "let's cheat happily!" approach very feasible by both bloggers or even simple visitors who are cheering for a particular blog.
Let's make it clear now, I can safely say, as a software developer, that it's completely impossible for the organizer to know if a poll is rigged or not, or even WHO is rigging it in the first place. They have no access to enough data to judge and any decision would be based on mere whim.
The second issue is revolving around the very concept of popular vote that is very frail and indicate nearly nothing about the popularity of a particular blog. This is even more true if we consider the low level of total votes in each poll. Why is that?
How difficult it is for a single person to influence the results of a poll with 200-300 votes total? It's extremely easy for them to use a popular twitter account or facebook account (even with NO relation to the actual blog) in order to get additional votes that will make even the more influencial blog succumb to the pressure of unrelated (but completely legal) votes.
What kind of judgement could we do basing on the information that this tourney gives us? Nearly no decision can be made as all the polls are full of votes that simply shouldn't be there. For an example of what I mean try to look back at the match of two years ago between "My sword is unbelievably dull" and "Listless Ink".
The third and last issue is related to the seeding used for this tourney in order to prepare the full brackets. Judging from the organizer's words they set the matches to be fair based on a blog popularity dividing the blogs in "first round blogs", "second round blogs", "third round blogs", etc...
Nice idea, but the hilarious problem with it is that they choose wrongly the pattern to identify which blog belongs to each category. This way we get blogs with a massive following like Metanorn or Whiners.pro ending up butchering little blogs destroying the very meaning of "giving exposure to little blogs". At the same time we get nearly dead blogs (that maybe were famous years ago) in second or even third round.
I decided to partecipate in this tourney regardless of these downfalls because I was expecting to have funny discussions with friends and maybe get a bit of constructive criticism about my blog. Hey, I like talking with other people as you probably already know...:)
Well, let's just say that things never go as expected. The criticism voters (mostly fellow bloggers) raised was mainly related to design choices between different blogs using these as pillars to decide which blog is better. Judging a book by its cover, quite funny isn't it?
We even got some sarcastic posts from Whiners.pro, and I was left in wonder about WHY people were responding to him seriously, someone was even irritated. We all know Dark_Sage is never serious and his way of talking is also his "persona" on the internet.
It's like how I generally try to sign contracts with every bishoujo every single anime season. Even if it may sounds surprising to people who knows me, it's my internet personality, I don't go around poking random girls in real life asking them to become my Mahou Shoujos.
And you? What do you think about this tourney? Do you have any idea on how to improve it for the future? Who will win this tourney?
See you soon,
feal87