J'Accuse Ms. Nichols
Co-blogger Max Power tipped me off to the odd number of votes for Ms. Shannon Elizabeth Nichols' blog on the ABA Top 100 Blawgs vote thing. E.g., her total votes given an average of 100 visits per day according to Sitemeter, the fact that her total votes is twice as much as ATL, where she posted a while ago until the commenters ran her out of town, etc. This is a silly thing, but it sucks to be cheated out of a win by a voting program. What BS.
posted by Armen Adzhemyan at 11:39 AM
11 Comments:
Second place is the first winner!
Ugh. What a CHEATER!
Hey guys. I'm a fan of Sharon (not Shannon, as you so kindly named her), and I was surprised by a recent accusation in the comments in her blog.
I wonder how you get away with these accusations. As I mentioned to some anonymous person (Who sounded very sour. Surely not an author here, right?), Sharon has a MASSIVE fanbase in her facebook group. That, combined with her (relatively small, as you mentioned) blog traffic could easily make up for the difference in votes.
Welcome to the 21st century. These votes are nothing more than popularity contests. Sharon is an incredibly popular person. Cry me a river.
Meh. This is starting to feel like BLB all over again. If that's the game, it's not worth winning. At all. As DZ would say. Confidently.
Calm down IceFisher. Armen just pointed out that it's pretty odd that a lightly trafficked student blog would have almost twice as many votes as the most popular law blog on the internet (Above the Law) (and four times as many votes as sites that have thousands of visitors a day), and that in the past couple days her blog received more votes than all the other student blogs combined, even though voting has been open for weeks. He reached the only reasonable conclusion, which is that someone was using a voting program, which is pretty easy to do (he didn't say sharon was the one doing this).
Turns out there may be a different explanation, which is that folks from a Facebook group are voting. I'm not quite sure why anyone who is not a law student would bother voting in a law student blog contest (most law students wouldn't bother), and for a blog they don't even read at that, but so it goes. Sucks for Armen because he's put a ton of work into this blog over the past few years and deserves the accolades, and all his votes were from law students and based solely on this blog. But it looks like there aren't any shenanigans, and I'm pretty sure Armen will get over it.
So that was a fun controversy.
You're right, I was unnecessarily rude there. I apologize to anyone I offended. But frankly, when you make the blog title "I accuse Ms. Nichols", what do you expect people to think is going to happen?
Armen seems to be openly accusing Sharon of cheating. Is such a thing really justified?
Is there any reason I shouldn't point out the problems with this?
Accusing Armen of saying something unjustified is like accusing someone of breathing.
Anyway, i don't think you were really rude or anything. But Armen had reason to wonder, you pointed out a plausible explanation, and that's that.
You know what? I think "cheating by Facebook" is still cheating. If these people don't actually read these blogs, then they really shouldn't be voting.
I don't really see that much of a difference between voting repeatedly and getting a bunch of unknown rubes to do it for you.
Armen, stop being such an attention-seeking sore loser.
Well, at least we can take solace in the fact that we pretty much rocked a lot of the general news categories in vote count, including the Volokh Conspiracy so far (*knock on wood*).
And our vote count seems much more related to readership than that BS 2000+ vote count.
So . . . does anyone know how we jumped up to 1797 votes so late in the game? That's pretty badass, but still wasn't enough to oust Ms. Nichols' powerful facebook entourage.
But I do take pride in the fact that ATL only mustered a measly 1486 votes.
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