aggienaut | Weekly Vote & Drama-que!

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Weekly Vote & Drama-que!

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!

[Poll #1359752]
See also my homegame entry: Dream Home

Recommendations
   As before, the standard of recommendations is not "what entries are well written enough that someone with a feeling of civic duty to vote for meritious idol entries will be impressed" but rather "what entries are good enough that the uninterested blog bystander (blogstander?) will find it a worthwhile read?" These two things are very different standards
   Every week idolists like to fall over themselves going on about how great EVERYONE was and its so hard to decide who NOT to vote for. I'll give it to you straight, I have the opposite problem. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of really great entries. If this was short story idol I'd be falling over myself to recommend Darkprism's entry. And on pure merit I think Alexpgp's entry is, as always, flawless -- but I can't honestly tell the uninterested reader that there's enough of interest to them in it to make it worth my recommending it to them (but if you're even slightly less than entirely uninterested, it really is a good entry).
   Basically, if you're bored and want to read some good entries, there are indeed a number of good entries. But you have to be in the mood for something more than five pages or an entry that might not interest you personally but is written impressively well.

   But I can recommend...
1. superhappytime's entry: The Best Thing...

Weekly Drama-Que
   Okay. I was wrong. I spoke too soon. I'll admit it.
   Last week I noted that there had heretofore been no drama of any note. Almost immediately after, shit started to go down.

   Someone posted on sf_drama urging people to vote for everyone but RM. And apparently readers of the community did indeed take the advice, and everyone else in idol rocketed up past rm. What's more, a lot of the SF Drama commenters seemed to recognize and dislike her from past dramatic episodes.
   Since then there has been some kvetching about what a deplorable occurance this was. I disagree.
   When feeling criticized, rm frequently notes that she believes people don't like her because she has a huge friends list that votes for her, and that this is fair (and the dislike unfounded) because her huge friends list really is only representative of that a lot of people outside of Idol like her writing. I completely agree with this sentiment (it helps that I have 451 friends-of so that reasoning allows me to feel awesome myself). However I disagree with the first part: in "why I don't like RM" I haven't really heard "because she has a big friends list that votes for her."
   But just like its totally fair for people to bring in people who like their writing outside idol to come vote for them, the flip side of that exact same coin is that it follows then that its totally fair for people who DISLIKE someone based on their writing outside idol to vote against them. Writing, or behaviour, apparently, and I think that's entirely legitimate. Apparently rm managed to make herself disliked by a large portion of the blogosphere by her past actions.
   One thing I've enjoyed about LJ Idol is all the existential discussions that it's caused people to have about what makes good writing, what deserves to be voted for. Really everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I think most people vote for writing that looks like any kind of good writing. As I've noted, I look for writing that would appeal to the casual reader of blogs -- I believe awareness of audience is fundamentally important. I think if "LJ Idol" aspires to be more than just a small backwater community, if it aspires to actually be, literally, LJ Idol, it is important that votes ARE allowed to be effected by people's influence (positive or negative) outside of the community itself. Additionally, being a citizen of the blogosphere is more than just being a good writer, and if someone has made enemies through a previous reign of banning/deletion/freezing-of-comments terror, I think thats a wholly legitimate reason to vote against them.

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So who do you have to screw to get a recommendation here? LOL

I think it's important to note that actually a "noble" (I don't know this person so I cannot comment on their true intentions) cause backfired last week. The post before it was edited either had a comment or an icon asking people to vote for

brightflashes and against

rm, but only when said person realised how badly this reflected on

brightflashes and how it put her in an uncomfortable spot, did they ask everyone to vote for everyone BUT

rm.

That said - it's Idol. To give an example: Belgium once sent a girl who couldn't sing 2 straight notes after one another to the European Song Festival (which is nothing more than a kitsch gathering where neighbouring countries vote for each other) ... the only reason said "singer" made it through the televoting was because a) the audience of the TV show was pretty low and b) she had called upon her church community to vote for her.

Since then when it's Wallonia's turn to send a singer to the Festival, they have a professional jury. Flanders, where the audience is large enough so that a church community will not have such a decisive influence, still does televoting.

Just a note.

Haha thats funny about the European Song Festival malarkey. She must have "posted the polls" in her church. ;D

Also (in re recs and constructive criticism), your paragraphs were too long :D

Edited 2009-03-05 18:17 (UTC)

I liked

superhapytime's entry this week, it helped me gain a little perspective.

I'm on the internet to lime. Drama takes away from that, because I'm stupid soft and don't like to see anyone upset/mocked/attacked.

Yeah. One of my friends jokingly referred to me as "the king of drama" the other day just on account of my weekly series here, But really, I do it because I think it actually helps to talk about things. When people are sitting around stewing they get entrenched and alienated from one another. So I've started doing this weekly airing out ot the LJ Idol laundry to kind of put it all out there.

My advice for everyone to avoid drama is: (a) don't presume that the unwritten rules you believe in should apply and be accepted by everyone. This is a source of much drama. (b) ESPECIALLY don't try to "enforce" your beliefs on others by means such as strongly worded diatribes to community entries or campaigns of terror involving makign someone's life hell by putting their info out there and encouraging people to contact them. Note that my opinions expressed in this entry are carefully frames as just an opinion.

Also, thanks. (=

I really, really think that your line "Apparently [info]rm managed to make herself disliked by a large portion of the blogosphere by her past actions."> doesn't come close to the entire story. If we are going to hew to the mantra of there being two sides to every story, then I feel compelled to point out that the particular section of the blogosphere complaining about getting banned from her journal and freezing comment threads were banned and frozen because of the incredible slurs and personal attacks they were throwing around in her journal as well as harassing other people commenting in her journal.

Duly noted. I don't actual know anything about that except what I'm gathering now. I will say, however, that it still fits under the category of "past actions" because one way or another those people came to dislike her (possibly before she had to ban/delete/freeze them then). Thanks for the heads up on that though.

Edited 2009-03-05 19:01 (UTC)

I do it because I think it actually helps to talk about things.

I recognise that. :-)

So it's okay for these folks to hate her and try to get her voted out of something that doesn't have anything to do with them because she banned them due to the fact they were calling her names like tranny faggot because of her user icon? Are you serious?

If its true its entirely because of her icon well then thats deplorable. I have more faith in people than that, however, and I know from personal experience she can come off as self-righteous and condescending. And yes, if people in LJ dislike her and don't want her to be LJ Idol for reasons other than official entries to LJ Idol, I think its legitimate. If people want to call it Gary's Writing Contest Idol then maybe the situation would be different.

I witnessed that entire LJ Advisory board race up close and personal, and I can say there was an extreme amount of "deplorable" behavior happening then. The people who were banned weren't the ones trying to have discussion or banned because they had a different viewpoint or didn't like her tone. She bent over backwards trying to walk a line that allowed people who disagreed their voice in her journal. I think it is wrong to characterize it as a "reign of banning/deletion/freezing-of-comments terror." Banning people and freezing threads was an absolute last resort.

::nod::

Additionally it should be noted that my "reign of banning/deletion/freezing-of-comments terror" is in a paragraph that doesn't mention RM. I'm about to leave my house but I'll contemplate ways to further disconnect that comment from seeming to directly refer to her. Thanks for your feedback.

Wait...it's NOT a short story competition?!

FUCK!

I've been doin' it wrooooong...

Well, that's disheartening.

~*~

Oooh sexy evil cackle for the win!

A great deal of the drama-poop storm has to do with people having little understanding of past events. Most people who have a negative opinion or who criticize

rm for banning people were neither involved nor present way back when to know the whens and why of the whole story.

Myself included.

It is extremely frustrating to see people jump on the hate wagon when, really, they have no blessed idea what the heck is going on.

That is, IMO, the foundation of the LJ Idol drama over the past week or so. People love drama, they jump on the bandwagon, and poof! You have a poop storm based on very little other than, "Waaah, I don't like so-and-so, you shouldn't either." Which is pretty much what I saw happening during the LJ Advisory drama - and is something said dramamongers bragged about, as in 'it's all about the LULZ,' which was bandied about quite a bit last year. And that brand of poop is something I personally have neither time nor patience for.

She had the *audacity* to run for the position of LJ user rep against a known troll. The troll's supporters that came into her personal journal and were immensely derogatory towards her and her supporters are the ones that got banned.

Hopefully it will go through this time ...

I really should make it a point to write/post earlier (if I survive another week that is) because things like this are interesting ... I actually thought they were on the shortish side and didn't want to start a new one every other phrase.

LOL well that's exactly what she did :P

...except that it began with her deleting legitimate questions in the election community.

She always glosses over that part.

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.

Personally, I haven't had time to vote or keep up with LJ Idol since I dropped due to real life...Spring break started today, which is the reason I'm reading posts about it now...

I heard about the issue last week because Brightflashes is on my friends list, I however didn't hear about the ins and outs. Frankly, I don't think I once voted for rm when I was playing because her writing always seemed too stiff for me.

I think that getting people to vote for people other than a person is no different than pimping yourself, or getting your friends to pimp you out to folks. When you do that, you're asking them to vote for you and not someone else...when you ask your friends to pimp you too because you don't want to lose, you're obviously asking them not to vote for others because if they voted for everyone they'd just be adding numbers and keeping the vote ratios the same.

Incidently I was just thinking I really ought to read people's entries earlier (I usually wait till the poll is posted so I can just read and vote at the same time) so that my feedback can actually be useful. (=

That actually kind of occured to me as a potential LJ Idol "trick" someone might be doing -- if they lived in dorms or something where there were a number of other people with LJs about they could post a reminded to vote on some kind of physical bulletin board IRL and we'd have no way of figuring it out! O=

Exactly. Its all the same.

And you should always just vote for the people I recommend ;D

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.

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