The Mediabistro bot-scandal has made the New York Times Freakonomics blog. (Congratulations, Kriston, Catherine!). Steven Dubner concludes:
1. The stakes don’t have to be very high for people to cheat.2. When no punishment exists for cheating, it’s pretty damn appealing.
3. We have been accused of stuffing a ballot box or two ourselves, although there were no bots involved (that I know of).
4. Can you please point me in the direction of the Diebold folks who rigged those machines? I would love to interview them
Question, though: did the cheating necessarily change the results? For a category like "Hottest DC Media Type", which dangerously approaches baseball statistics, the voting is probably going to end up telling us not, who is hottest, but who has the most friends who will vote for them. Don't get me wrong--Kriston and Catherine are very, very hot. One might argue that the results of the contest accidentally mirrored the actual truth of the matter. But there's no independent reason to believe that this will generally be true.
They won the bot contest for the same reason they probably would have won a straight vote: they had the most people trying to help them win. The real lesson here is that it's a good idea to be the kind of charming, hot person who easily acquires friends with powerful blogs. Or something.
"Very, very hot"? Really? Maybe by DC standards, wherein the jowly Fred Thompson is considered an Aqua Velvic master of seduction and hordes of media types throw themselves into conniptions at the slightest glimpse of Hilary Clinton's 60 year old figure. No doubt Kriston and Catherine are not unattractive, but let's reserve the word "hot" for those who are actually hot. It reminds me of my ex-roommate, who moved several years ago to DC after spending a year in NYC. When asked how she liked it in the Capitol city, she responded, "It's so much better than New York. Statistically, I'm much more attractive here."
"I think one should be cautious about attributing economic growth to any model, no matter how plausible the story behind it. Economies are mysterious things, and if we actually knew how to make them grow, we'd all be rich."
Wouldn't you say that common sense would tell anyone that all things being equal, public monies spent for improvements in our own infrastructure would yield real riches, compared with the... it's hard to even think of them as "riches," but the kinds of riches being created by, say, the military adventure in Iraq?
The model of TVA and the great public works of that time set the stage for the greatest rise in the standards of living of essentially all citizens that has ever been seen. And why wouldn't it?
Living in Chicago, it is easy to see how the major components of the area's transportation system are falling into ruins. Completely replacing the elevated lines, for example, would help millions, and would yield that sense of wellness we get from seeing things in a sound state. With what is being spent in Iraq, I'd bet the entire system could be redone in a few short years.
Do you think that such major public works projects, which provide plenty of great jobs (not incidentally) will sometime be in vogue again?
BTW, I thought you were great on C-Span the other morning. Well done! And if I may say so, you could definitely be the hottest journalist in Washington.
I don't think it works as a popularity contest, although maybe as a measure of how much the people who like you, like you.
I was standing right there (in that virtual Internet sense) watching the bot campaign, and we're talking less than ten people -- if lurkers were helping out, maybe a couple of dozen, but Unfogged's readership isn't colossal. What Kriston and Catherine had was more people cheating for them in an organized fashion than anyone else, but that was such a small absolute number that I wouldn't think you could extrapolate from 'how many people will cheat for you' to 'how many people like you'.
I do feel like we owe the MSM an apology -- the story seems to be getting around as an example of bad behavior by the media, when it was pure bloggy mischief.
To a certain extent, I would think that when the stakes are trivial and the result doesn't really matter at all, cheating would be more likely. Where one might feel guilty cheating to win a scholarship (depriving someone else of it) or an election, there's really no guilt associated with cheating to win a silly web-based popularity/beauty contest being run by a minor blog with no particular prize. It becomes a game...
sorry our bot-fu was so weak Megan. we didn't realize we were supposed to cheat, so we failed to make you win...
seriously, they used bots? wouldn't it have been slightly more legitimate to have a round robin of rock/paper/scissors at a party?