Got hits? Or maybe they've just got game
NOT long ago, the Web seemed on the brink of bringing true democracy to entertainment. Through the most-viewed, most-discussed and highest-rated lists of sites like YouTube and Technorati, every Web user was a mini-studio boss, casting his vote for what deserved to be seen and heard. Soon, the Web promised, showbiz bigwigs would no longer shove their wares down the throat of the entertainment consumer! With the click of a mouse, every man was a king, able to vote with his eyeballs and watch his favorites rise to the top.
It became an article of cultural faith that the most-viewed list and its ilk told you what your fellow citizens really wanted to see and hear. So great has this belief been that the power of user voting has become the central organizing principle of an entire genre of websites such as YouTube and Digg.
Well, sometimes newborn democracies become Poland or Argentina and sometimes they become Iraq, and the Web's system of government suddenly looks precariously balanced between those models. One element fueling the uncertainty is the popularity of a device called a refresher, downloadable for free from refresher.com, which allows people to set their browsers to constantly refresh a given page, driving up the page's viewer counts by the minute. And refreshers aren't the only way to game the system: In a host of other ways, it turns out, YouTube fans have learned tricks to manipulate online viewer ratings.
V-blogger: An article in Sunday's Calendar section about Web viewers referred to online video poster Blunty3000 as British-accented. He is Australian.
V-blogger: An article in last Sunday's Calendar section about Web viewers referred to online video poster Blunty3000 as British-accented. He is Australian.
At stake is nothing less than the reputations of the new era's first giants and the entire framework around which this new democracy has been constructed.
The first j'accuse in the current round appeared on the site in a video posted Oct. 23, by a v-blogger using the name Blunty3000. A British-accented Kevin Smith clone with trimmed beard and backward baseball cap, he begins, "The reason why a lot of YouTubers are talking about it is not because it's a new problem but because it's getting particularly bad at the moment. It's frustrating a lot of us who work to be entertaining in our videos and earn our viewers and earn our subscribers." Then Blunty3000 outlines the ways people can game the system, such as using refreshers and creating fake profiles to subscribe to one's profile, to push up one's placement in the all-important, holy of holies: the YouTube all-time-most-subscribed list.
