Weekly Vote & Drama-que!

[aggienaut]

   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.

Comments

Re: Other Side

[supremegoddess1.livejournal.com]

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.

Re: Other Side

[hardvice.livejournal.com]

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

She always glosses over that part.

Re: Other Side

[theafaye.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.