To vote or not to vote? That is the question.
I’m sure some of you are aware of the aniblog tourney that’s currently underway. As a non-participant, I feel the need to express my thoughts about it, because I know that it’ll affect my status and outlook in aniblogging.
I know that Scamp started the second tournament with good intentions. Aside from letting anibloggers connect with each other, the tourney also lets active readers find the good blogs that they might want to subscribe and follow. However, the idea that people would only connect, gather, and check out blogs they don’t read or know just because there’s a aniblog battle royale going on wouldn’t sit well for some. I mean, would I heedlessly subscribe to a blog just because it destroyed We Remember Love or Random Curiosity by the sheer amount of votes they got? Of course not.
I also know that he went from hell and back trying to make that tournament bracket before he started calling for votes. It was literally a smorgasbord of content-rich links, some of them famous blogs that participated in the first tourney. Trying to make a bracket that lets every blog compete in equal ground is hard, let alone think that said blogs will compete fair and square. There are some that try, though, and I admire them for that.
This is where the dirty part comes in. The participating authors of each blog try to appeal and convince people to give their votes for them. There’s nothing really wrong about this, and I honestly don’t think it’s a bad thing. You can do shameless plugging on other sites, write blog posts that advertise your blog, personally talk to other readers for their vote, and be everywhere so people can notice you. Now, plugging for your blog isn’t bad, but it does make it seem that you’re literally begging for votes if you do it very frequently. If you want people to vote for your blog more, you need to build a solid list of good blog posts, or alternatively, write guest blog posts on other, more famous blogs. That way, people would vote you for what you are as a blogger, not because you just asked them to vote for you.
There were also blogs that wrote potshot posts about the blogs they faced[1]. I know that some bloggers did it in jest so I took every one of them with a grain of salt. But is this necessary? Call me serious or whatever, but I think throwing dirt at a blog doesn’t improve your blog’s disposition to other people. Sure, you’re confident enough that you’ll rake enough votes, that’s why you’re simply throwing potshots at the other blog. But I tell you, it’s in bad taste.
And then, there’s vote rigging. I don’t know how or why some of them do this, but this is simply ridiculous. I won’t talk about CSW’s incident here, but if the allegations are true, then it’s a prime example of what people shouldn’t do. Doing it makes people see you in a bad perspective rather than a good one.
As for my own standing on this event, I’m actually glad that I’m not participating in it because it saves me the trouble of having to deal with underhand potshots and other unruly things you usually see in aniblog tourneys. This also means I plan on keeping my current standing outside the tourney, which is not to vote and simply watch it from afar. I may not get readership, but it’s fine. I just want my personal space to be a place of discussion about topics that I want to get across.
Footnotes
- No offense intended for this example citation, Draggle-kun. [↩]
Interesting stuff.
People seem to have radically different motivations for participating in this. Many, many say they want constructive criticism so they can improve their blogs (I guess this goes specially for younger blogs). Personally, I’m not much for changing the way I do things, so my main motivation is more exposure..not to rope in people that usually wouldn’t read my blog, but to have people that would usually read my blog but just haven’t come across it yet to finally find it..
I enjoy the potshot thing, if it’s done well (e.g. draggle, baka-raptor). That said, I’m not a confrontational person so I’d only do it if my opponent were a blogger I knew well (because I know they’d understand my intentions were not hostile). And I don’t think I’ll get to face a friend’s blog at all so the world will be denied a taste of my potshooting skillz~
I couldn’t agree more. I love the concept of the tournament, mainly because of the opportunity it presents for writers to meet and interact with one another. That said, I’m disappointed in the number of people who are begging for votes, especially those who are criticizing their opponents (even jokingly) in doing so. In fact, I don’t like the idea of making a “tournament post” whatsoever; the entire point is for people to discover new sites and judge them based on their everyday content, not some aggressive appeal.
Not everyone is like that, of course. I’m more than happy to promote my opponent at every chance, and I’m far from alone in doing so. Events like this are guaranteed a modicum of drama, but it’s nice to see that some people are just going about their business.
Ultimately, it’s a contest with no real prize, so pandering and vote-rigging are useless. The true benefit to the tournament is the possibility of new friendships and increased traffic, and both of those are best obtained by staying true to your content. All the other nonsense is irrelevant.
No offense taken. I’m honored to be the prime, defining example of the art of the potshot! You should look forward to my next post coming out in half an hour as well!
I think it’s a good thing that people ask their readers to vote for them. I mean, how else would people even know that the tourney is happening, and go look at other blogs? Otherwise the only people voting would be other bloggers, which kind of defeats the purpose.
As for potshots, the normal “vote for me” posts do bore me to tears. I figure if you’re going to enter a tournament you may as well have fun with it. I try to make my potshots such that no one will actually believe them. My only regret is that no one has taken potshots at me yet.
I wanted to go up against Baka Raptor but it is not to be.
Enjoy your time in the potshooting limelight..raptor will get on it soon enough
Yes, I can’t wait!
It’s old rule of “write something you’d want to read.” Normal vote-for-me posts are lame. The only matches anyone looks forward to are the ones with bloggers who are going to be creative. Potshots aren’t the only way to go about it; they just closely associated with voting in general and have a proven track record from the last tournament. Anyone who doesn’t like it should think of new ways to be creative. I can’t be the only trendsetter around here.
For example, Marow’s singing was totally awesome. Either way, as long as the writers and the readers are all having fun, who cares what you write?
Given the outcome of the tournament, I guess I can see it was circle jerking to a certain extent although the creators don’t intend on doing that. Yeah, mudslining is probably not the fairest way to do as it drastically effect the results of the voting… but so does begging for votes on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and such, leading to an unfair advantage. Yeah, both of these things kind of make the tournament counterproductive in a way. Although readers will check blogs and might subscribe to them, what I mention above doesn’t really do much in helping others.
Since blogging and writing is a learning process, people are better off giving constructive criticism to improve… but Feal87 made some great points about the whole thing including the ineffectiveness of the voting system.
I think one of the peripheral benefits of the “plug” is that, ideally, it should expand the “circle jerk” by letting “regular” readers know about the tourney > thus leading to them discovering new blogs. How much does this happen? Well, it’s hard to say for sure, but I do know from the past tourney that subscribe rates did go up for many blogs in the tourney. Of course, how you go about stumping for votes, a simple informative post without plugging could be just as effective as letting readers know about it.
potshot is fun!
and whenever I came across a new blog (which I did a lot in round 1) who writes a “vote for me” post, I quickly vote for his/her/their opponent. If they both do the same shit, then only I’ll take a closer look at each of their post and conclude who should I vote for based on my preference in their writing style.
I wasn’t in the first tourney and quite surprise that I end up not in Round 1 but Round 2 of the tourney. I know I don’t have the slightest chance of winning (especially now because the percentage is down to 33% instead of 50/50) but if I could expose my blog for new readership, that would be great.
The tourney is for introducing new blogs as well as rake up readership. Not to mention that it is all for fun. All is good imo
ajthefourth has a great point and a very valid stance, but unfortunately, I can’t agree with all of it. The tourney’s intentions were noble—bring exposure to blogs, especially those blogs that are good. If exposure is the main point (and not critique), then I feel like all the blogs should strive toward that goal. Personally, in the last tourney, I tried hard to get the most I can out of the tourney in exposure terms. And to do so, that means going as far as I can. Strategies, deep connections, campaigning… etc. etc. (You can find a few posts and comments by me and others on it probably.)
Another point. If the blogger is as much part of the blog as the posts are, then the social interactions of the blogger should count as well. Rallying votes is a gauge on the “likability” of the blogger. (“Likability” is too loose here, and often more instead, social media use.) In other words, although not necessarily an indicator for the quality of posts, campaigning does show off another quality of a good blog—the author.
My feelings on CSW remains pretty much the same as when the drama went down. Their disqualification was based on an arbitrary rule stated after the fact and iffy evidence. That seems awfully unfair. If the allegations of what they did was true—posting the link in a tv stream he’s popular in—then they appear bad mostly because the mods branded (again, arbitrarily and in hindsight) that that was considered cheating.
On potshots, it’s a taste/distaste thing for me, but I’m not above it.
Oh, forgot to mention this. But nice little jab at the ones who beat WRL and RC last tourney. Of course. Very classy.
re: Exposure – For me, it’s worked wonders. Even if you subscribed to all of the decent blogs in round one, you’d probably be stuffing your RSS reader to overflowing pretty soon. I know that Mushyrulez, my opponent in round one, and I now read and comment on each other’s blogs, and that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
re: CSW – nobody was 100% in the right there. If CSW was completely innocent and didn’t do anything shady to get those votes, then they hurt themselves by reacting in a piss-poor way in the comments. The tourney staff looked like they were imposing arbitrary restrictions, and CSW made themselves look like exactly the kind of people who’d do something shady.
And what’s “shady?” I think the answer is pretty simple when it comes to campaigning, pot-shots, and everything else: The explicit mission of the tourney is exposure, and with that comes an implicit spirit, which is to get the english aniblogosphere hobbyists together and have a big fat metaphorical circlejerk. So if what you do is in the spirit of that… I say fire away. Certain people aren’t doing that at all, which is fine for them but overall (IMO) not in keeping with the spirit of the whole operation. Also, what Baka-Raptor said, at least be entertaining, otherwise it’s a chore for the rest of us.