Questionable Recalibration
Greetings, crickets and trolls. Welcome to another edition of the Friday Q&A. Each week, I take a look at issues facing the Photoshoppers of Fark.com. Occasionally, those issues even have to do with Photoshop. It doesn't happen often, but such was the case when I broke the story of Best vs Funny. The much ballyhooed new voting system was implemented last month, amid many more jeers than cheers. Let's take a look at all the good it's done for us, shall we?
Q: Which is more important, Best or Funny?
A: I could go on here about the importance of laughter and making people smile, but it doesn't really matter. Skill is clearly more important, now that the Leaderboard is tossing out all votes for "Funniest" and counting only "Best." As a comment from i-dig a couple weeks back will explain, the Leaderboard had previously been counting both "Best" and "Funniest" and adding them up to get a completely different list of winners than you would see in the actual Fark thread. After petitioning the Powers that Be for a redress of this issue, i-dig explained that the Leaderboard now unfortunately only counts Best votes. 100, or even 1000 Funny votes do not equal even one Best vote.
Q: Is Fark a serious Photoshopping site now?
A: On the surface it would appear so, at least for historical purposes. Future generations of PSers will ponder over exactly what this quaint idea of laughter even was. Some sort of involuntary vocal outburst triggered by absurdity? What point did it serve, they will wonder. Why did we make these so-called jokes? Is the element of humor destined to become a vestigial part of the human consciousness?
Q: Aren't Fark contests about making people laugh?
A: They're about making people waste time. Bored people entertaining other bored people, artists competing for scraps of attention from a fickle audience. Whether you make someone pause and admire the brilliance of your work, or the absurdity, the results for the viewer are the same: a few seconds closer to the end of the work day, or diversion from the horrors of family life.
That's all for this time, gentle reader. Thanks for stopping by. Kudos to Drew for making Fark a serious Photoshopping site for serious Photoshop business. Now the kids can play around and spill juice on the carpet in their Funniest section, and the people who take themselves and their skills very seriously can be safely walled-off in the Best section. Segregation for everyone! This is probably not the best way to end a column during Black History Month. Oh well, fuck it.
Stay tuned for more racial insensitivity from the Doctor!
Friday, February 10, 2012
Friday Q&A
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4 comments:
Actually you have these reversed. The Leaderboard is the app created by HoboSong that lives on the misfitsquirrels domain. It only ever counted "Best" when the switch was made because the complexity of counting "Best" AND "Funny" without double-counting votes is impossible (without Fark source code).
The Fark PS Browser (on Fark) created by Mike originally combined the "Best" and "Funny" scores - despite overlap and double-counting where folk chose both options. That was changed to counting "Best" only. That was not what I requested, but it appears to be what we are stuck with. IMHO, if we are to be 'stuck' with counting 1 category, that should be "Funny" - not ideal either but truer to the nature of Fark. Not happy with system, they know that. IMHO, they should be honest and just remove the "contest" label and make them "Photoshop Threads" because no contest is counted the way they count votes.
Maybe at the Vegas Fark Convention in March some Fark PSer can advocate for either making buttons Best OR Funny - one option per vote (my actual request & resolution) or rolling the system back for Photoshop threads. Won't be me - I blew all my dough this year on a very expensive but necessary surgery.
Shouldn't you be recuperating? Seriously though, I couldn't be happier to hear from you. Congrats on the surgery, I knew you could do it. Here's hoping it helps to ease your condition.
Thanks for the correction. Being factual is hard, I may just go back to bashing TSZ.
I am recuperating. I saw this error early in the week but was too tired and sick to address it. Now that I'm still alive and neither sick nor tired, I could address it. Not really earth shattering is it? Probably not even worth mentioning. Lets blame the drugs.
I managed to survive on Fark for 5 years with narly a peep of discontent and in the last 5 weeks I've laid into Drew and tonight told off a deletion-happy Moderator. I guess I'm just mad as Hell and not going to take it anymore. Oh... GRRRRRrrrr!!!!! Better.
I won't have to leave, I'll probably be banned soon.
Incidentally I have a hard time seeing your CAPTCHA words and forget about listening. Things are better, but brainstem still messed up. So I probably won't post much anymore.
Well, your contest was great. It was nice to see such an awesome turnout. They better not ban you, after all you've been through. I'd blog so angrily about it they wouldn't know what didn't hit them.
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