We have the winners!
Hi All
I have pleasant news, so let me not indulge in pleasant talk :)
The judges have given us the much-awaited, celebrated winners of the Quick-Tales contest, and we are keen on having some pomp-and-show around the annoucements too! So, we'll be letting the news out on the 18th of November, 2008 at Oxford Book Store, Barakhamba Road, New Delhi. We ( Read more... )
My story is one of the 134 shortlisted and, to my surprise, was one of the leaders when I last checked two days ago, with a mean score of around 8 and a median score of 10. Since I was busy with some project, I could not check my progress since yesterday. This morning, to my shock, I saw that my story -- in the last 48 hours -- had 18 instances of a rating of "1", while my "10" ratings remained constant at 30.
At the risk of sounding like a pompous ass, I find it intriguing that my story suddenly received so many "ones" and that my overall score has fallen from 8 to 6.99. As a citizen of a democratic country, I respect the fact that votes are subjective, and that one person's Ulysses can be another's The Secret. However, I do want to bring to your notice that, even if I am saying so, I see a disturbing trend. Are my ratings (and, by extension, those of other leaders) being manipulated by someone who has the time to do this?
An inherent flaw in any online public voting mechanism is this very problem: people can either raise their numbers or decrease others' ratings by simply creating an ID on the fly. While it is a great way for LiveJournal to increase its overall tally of registered users without much effort, I feel it is unfair for participants whose fate seems to depend upon the free time and a devious mind someone has.
Am I the only aggrieved party here? Maybe, maybe not. May I please request the editors and the administrators to find out what really happened.
I hope this issue is addressed sooner than later. Otherwise a contest as wonderful as this one would be tainted by the deeds of an asinine few.
Many thanks, indeed.
Cheers,
Sachin
Reply
The poll mechanism ensures that one LJ user can rate an entry only once and no more. If they do attempt to rate it the second time, their previous scoring is automatically discarded.
However, I have requested the tech team to look into this in the meanwhile. I'll get back to you on this!
I notice you've registered for the event too. Hope to see you there on tuesday then :)
manpreet
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But again, the purpose of this people's choice award is simply for Live Journal to increase its number of registered users, and I suppose it is achieving that. Who cares about the credibility of the award? :-)
Though I understand your anguish, I reckon it is impossible to correctly moderate online polls like these that are open to anyone with an account. Maybe restricting the voters to only the participants would have resulted in a more believable result - though, as we've already established, Live Journal was not really after credibility with this one.
Which is fine; they're giving away ten 'true' prizes. One marketing gimmick is perfectly acceptable :-)
Sharath
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You have made an interesting observation, but I disagree when you say that LiveJournal is not really after credibility with this one. In fact, it SHOULD be, if it isn't already.
Any award begins small, but becomes an aspiration only after ensuring consistent quality. One of the reasons that IIMs and IITs are the most aspirational institutes in India is because they admit only the best minds, not because they have two laptops per capita.
We could have disregarded the People's Choice if LiveJournal were sincere enough to admit that the only reason for People's Choice was to get several more IDs (non-functional though they may be) for market valuation purposes. However, since there was no such admission, we could safely assume that People' Choice should be as credible as the Jury's Award.
I could call up 25 of my friends and ask them to create IDs and mark me 10s, thus bringing my score back to where it was. But what purpose would that serve, apart from making my friends think I am some pesky AmWay-type salesman?
Nevertheless, I realise that I sound like a whiner. I must stop. :-)
Reply
although the poll has been closed, trust us, a winner is not going to be declared without looking into the matter..and am not so tech-smart, but our back-end team at LJ is going to make sure that no-body gets through on plain-deceit.
to add to Sharath's comment, LJ achieves nothing through non-functinal IDs. And of course, we'd like to have more of your friends/writers join us; make no qualms about accepting that you might have writer friends on other forums, and that we'd love to have them participate here too..but mainly, we intended this to be a fun, participatory thing through which members could interact and respond to each other's writing..it is unfair to let only the short-listed participants vote, leaving the rest of the community out!
We'll have a clear winner as soon as I hear from our tech-team,
sepia
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But I totally get what you're trying to say - it is fun and it is participatory. I personally have nothing against the idea, but it was a little painful to watch Sachin's pain :-)
My stories - well, they're still languishing at a median score of about 4, so it's sour grapes for me anyway!
Sharath
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aah, i see what u mean! by tomorrow evening, you may have a "true" reason to rejoice.. :)
keep in touch, and look forward to readin more from u,
sepiaverse
Reply
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