Sometimes Voting is a Bad Idea

Years ago I joined a writing site.  It was for books and short stories.   There was a competition and we were to submit work of at least 5k which could either be a short story or chapters in a novel.

There’s no problem so far.

Here’s where it gets bumpy.

The owners decided to have the writers vote on the various submissions.

As soon as I saw that invite I contacted them and explained that:

1.  How can you ask a person in a competition to vote for the ‘other guy’?

2. How can you prevent false votes; i.e. people creating duals and using proxies to log on so as to push a particular item?

3. What if the worst piece of crap wins?

THE PAST

The reason for 3. above is due to a little event that happened at the supermarket.

I am slightly changing some facts, and keeping it all PG.

There was a drink being introduced and people were asked to vote for a name.    There were no names already picked, it was all open.   The computer was there, and all we had to do was type in our suggestion.

I was chuckling with a friend of mine about it, and he, just as mischievous as I am, (in fact if we had been younger our parents would have forbidden us to play together since we tended to enhance each other’s troublesome nature), submitted the name “Snot.”

I am cracking up, this is so funny, and we laughed out of the place.

The names were online, and people could vote, so of course, we’d vote, use a couple of proxies to push the vote above ‘2’.

However, we hadn’t realised that we had a lot of ‘kin’ on line who would see the name, crack up, and start to vote.

Snot had like 10x more votes than anything else.  We were calling people, telling them about it, they were cracking up, they were voting, and we were having a grand time.

“Let me have a Snot!”   “Two Snots Please!”

Whoever was the genius behind the ‘voting scheme’ probably got fired.

The site went down, came back up with ten boring average names.  No Snot.

BACK TO THE WRITING SITE

So I explained my Snot story to the owner, who wasted key strokes telling me what wasn’t going to happen, when, of course, it did happen.

The worst piece of badly written almost plagiarised version of Eclipse had 10x the votes of other items.

The owners were not going to publish that.  Not ever.  And they went to select a more reasonable item.  Of course the so called writer began to complain, and was posting like a deamon and I said to the owner, “Tell him that he has been caught using Proxies to vote”.  The owner asked me; “What is that..”

I knew the owner was completely at sea.

Anyway, he did post that, and the ‘writer’ shut up and left.

Sometimes voting is a very bad idea.