Funny or Die Caption Contest

Ah, Rotwang, you probably never saw the original comment by Westside slant,... more »

Ah, Rotwang, you probably never saw the original comment by Westside slant, in the blog post which started this topic, which is what that last part was about. His tone was kind of "those capitalist pigs just chase the dollar" so I was trying to match it by writing something super cynical back. I figured the only people who were going to read this thread would have read Westside slant's comment, which was in retrospect dumb, I should have quoted it or just not addressed it.

If I didn't care about users I wouldn't have read through all their questions/wishes and created this thread. I care about users more than the board of directors, for the record.

The first bit about how much it would take to really prevent cheating is true; that has nothing to do with users or the board. We know users don't want cheating, and we aren't encouraging cheating by any means, in fact you'll see that we don't even display comments by users who haven't verified their account. But you know as well as I do, cheating is pretty easy. It will happen one day on Comedy Whirled (I'm not wishing that on you, it's just inevitable) and if you come up with a way to really stop it, let me know.

Rotwang said:

While I agree with you that attempting to prevent multiple accounts is futile, your bottom paragraph is a completely idiotic thing to say.

You literally just said "we don't want to listen to our users, we just want to listen to our bosses."

You're like a referee saying "I don't care if the game is fair or not, or whether or not the crowd likes it, as long as my boss doesn't fire me."

Good luck with that philosophy. See how well that goes over with the crowd. There's a pile of dead or floundering sites that stuck to that value system.

See you on comedywhirled.com.

lyziwyg said:

I know that people with multiple accounts bum you out. The only barrier to entry to create multiple accounts is that you must have a unique email address for each.

Honestly, the more validation steps you take to prevent gaming, the more ways people will figure out how to game the system. That's just the internet. You guys talk about IP address tracking; do you know how easy it is to spoof an IP address? Any barrier to cheating gets taken down sooner or later, unless you are a financial services site or some other site where security is so important you have multiple levels of authentication.

Westsideslant was right when he said that multiple accounts only helps us--a higher registered user count, higher page views from all that logging out and logging in, more ads served. And our board of directors wants all those numbers to go up and we get a pat on the head when they do, and they never ever ask us if people are cheating when they vote. So there it is!