The banana republic that is ComedyCentral.com

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 14th, 2009

Have you noticed the vote totals on ComedyCentral.com’s Comedy Showdown? They swing wildly. The Female Half was logging on regularly to watch clips and vote for a friend here and there. Some of the contestants would surge. Nothing extraordinary there– a radio appearance, a high-profile shot on a television showcase, maybe a large theater show.

But then she noticed that some of the contestants started to lose votes.

What is up wit dat?

We’re not a big fan of online, interactive polls that determine the winner of this or that. Because we’ve faired poorly on a handful of such competitions? No. Not really. We have, to be sure, been massacred whenever we’ve found ourselves at the mercy of internet voters, but we never actually expected to do well in the first place. So it’s not that.

We just think that, at the very least, when you open things up to interactivity (using the wonders of the WWW!) and you leave it up to the fans and viewers to choose their favorites, you should at least try to create the illusion that the folks on the backend of the website know what they’re doing and there’s no hanky-panky. Elsewise, the folks who vote will think they’re wasting their time. (Oh, certainly, a lot of the core audience have nothing but gobs of time– as they’re not employed or anything, or their trying to avoid studying or, in rare cases, they’re avoiding their boss– but some folks take offense at having their time utterly flushed down the cyber toilet due to some sort of “voter irregularities.”)

And, since they’ve been conducting such cyber-plebiscites for about five years or so (an eternity in internet years!), you would think these people would either have figured out a way to make them totally legit… or refused to conduct such farces in the first place. Surely there has to be a better way of using the website, the internet, this interactivity nonsense in an exciting yet responsible way.

Is the bloom off the interactivity rose? Perhaps.

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