Weekly Vote & Drama-que!

[emo_snal]

   It's that time of the week! LJ Idol polls are up, and that means its also time for my weekly drama-que (polls will be closed already by our usual time of Sat morning). So throw some OMG-weiners and WTF-burgers on the grill, crack open a nice cold can of STFU and pull up a chair!

Comments

Re: Other Side

[theafaye]

And *this* is why it's pointless trying to 'win' on the internet. There are always two sides and anyone who wasn't there right from the start can't really take a fair stance because it's all he said/she said. And even if everything's still available to read, that assumes that people not directly involved care enough to go and do the research.

I think emo_snal makes a lot of good points. Short of there being a list of criteria which individual voters are supposed to take into account (and how would you police that?), I've seen enough from individual people talking about how they vote to know that everyone looks for different things when judging whether an entry deserves a vote. This isn't a straightforward writing competition. It's "LJ Idol." As I just said on another post, for me, LJ is all about networking. Whether somebody can write well helps in that it makes their posts easier for me to read when getting to know them, but that's secondary to whether they're an interesting person I want to get to know better. Since networking is an aspect of LJ, how well someone is able to do that is bound to play a part in LJ Idol. And I'm not surprised that former/current actions come round to bite some people on the backside, whether that's felt to be fair or not.

So the answer to the question as to whether it's OK for someone to get a campaign up against a contestant due to past disagreements is yes. It's perfectly within the confines of the competition and I don't see what could be done to prevent it - Gary spends more than enough time running things as it is. Whether it's morally OK is a different question. Personally, I think it's rather petty to hold grudges like that and for people completely uninvolved to jump on the bandwagon seems daft to say the least. It's not behaviour I can understand. But at the same time, from what I've read, the people that are doing this feel justified in their behaviour. Whether others agree that that justification is fair is a different matter.

Re: Other Side

[hardvice]

Well, yeah, that, and I mean ... it's just common sense that people get to vote for or against whoever they like or dislike.

That's the nature of democracy. It's not really a fair and free vote if you tell people how they have to think or act, or what criteria they have to use, and it's really anti-democratic to suggest that someone's vote doesn't or shouldn't count because you don't like how they decided to cast it.

Yes, it's a writing competition. Yes, in an ideal world, everyone would read each and every entry and vote for the ones they found the most interesting, instead of voting for or against specific people.

That world does not exist. The best we can do with the one we have is try to ensure that each vote is free and unobstructed.