About a month later, the tournament finally comes to a close with Metanorn beating Whiners. Yeah, there is a lot of butt hurt there since the latter is complaining about how the tournament isn’t fair while the voters on both sides clearly took advantage of the loophole. I won’t focus on the final results since I want to share my thoughts about the event as a whole.
The main problem that the organizers still haven’t address despite banning the use of proxies and TOR is the multiple voting loopholes that everyone is screaming about. As mentioned in my editorial that criticized how the tournament is being run, it’s nearly impossible to prevent multiple voting. People who have access to multiple connections at work or home, smartphones or own virtual private servers can simply circumvent these protections and vote again. I feel that this will always happen with a popularity contest like this because some people just want to win badly. While the idea of registration might clamp down on this, people can just make multiple accounts from various IPs and still break through the protections.
Second off, the Aniblog Tourney has become more about popularity and design rather than on content. Considering the fierce competition with potshot posts and having friends and co-workers vote, it kind of defeats the purpose of promoting new blogs and getting feedback. The best thing for the blogosphere to do is to adopt the ABA format or leave the voting and reviewing to a group of people. This way, smaller and medium anime blogs can get showcased without going through this unneeded drama.
As it stands, if the Aniblog Tourney were to continue using the current format, I will just refuse to participate. From what I have experienced in the last two instances, it’s not worth the trouble for two or three days of increased hits, which doesn’t necessarily translate to increased readership. However, if they change it to become less of a competitive popularity test and more on celebrating good anime blogs, I will accept that.
Source: http://aniblogtourney.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/post-mortem/
