The solution is irrelevant to this debate.
My opponent is offering a 'solution' to a problem that we are debating is even a problem in the first place (what he offers is not a solution, that organisation he is suggesting would already unofficially exist as the people voting if voting was truly essential). It is very important in debates to establish what it is that the debate is about, in this case Pro has spent easily 90% of his case debating about the solution when this entire debate is solely focused on whether or not the 'problem' is a problem.
What Pro asserts is that:
to allow a debate to dwindle in interest such that there is no member or moderator vote after the voting phase has reached its calendar end countdown is a shame and a disservice to both participants.
- Pro, Round 1 (R1).
This was actually the only words in R1 from Pro that truly expressed his side of the debate and touched on the topic. The entire remainder of R1 from Pro was addressing a way to supposedly stop debates ending in no-vote ties, it didn't actually explain why they shouldn't end that way.
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Rating, Competition and the Non-Forum crowd of this Website
A major would-be contention from Pro (based on the debate's description, written by him) is that while most of the website is pretty non-competitive and focused on the forums, those of us that wish to debate competitively are still relevant and our subculture needs to be assessed independent of the usual Forum-goer who couldn't care less whether or not debates are voted on. I don't challenge Pro on this, instead I challenge him on whether or not it truly is in the spirit of competition to artificially push for debates to end in non-ties, or to even stranger push for them to end in voted ties rather than no-vote ties.
You see, I firmly believe that not only is drawing people into debates part of the competition but that the website's Rating system and the way it evolved is going to be inescapable devalued and sabotaged if we as a culture begin voting purely for the sake of it and incentivising votes from people who otherwise would let debates remain unvoted.
Something that you may not know is that no-vote ties don't change Rating while voted ties do (they punish the higher rated debater and reward the lower-rated debater). The source for this is also the source where I prove that it was myself and the admin who conversed to achieve this early on in the Rating system's evolution.
Due to a thread and issue that I raised as it was in particular hurting me (I don't deny selfish motive), the admin was notified and sympathetic to the fact that no-vote ties should not hurt the higher ranked debater, the only punishment should be that neither gets to increase their Rating for the time spent doing it.
What we want to change is not to prevent punishing for ties, that's how ELO works and if you tied with a player that has much lower rating than you, you lose your rating and the other way around, but we want to kinda disable this when there are no votes, so it's simple as that.
A day later:
Okay, so I have changed the implementation to the one mentioned before, all forfeits OR no casted votes make the debate failed and prevent the rating change.
What this enabled was that situations where neither participated (all forfeited) rewarded only voters (as they got a vote that counts towards their voting medals) but not the debater who was lower-ranked, even though technically there is a voted-tie. This worked in tandem with the stagnancy of debate Rating in cases of no-vote ties such that ties only punished the higher ranked debater if it was a voted tie and this was both suggested by me and agreed on by many influential site members, evident mostly from the fact that there was 0 public backlash or issue about this change.
It is here that we must explore what competitive nature is and what indeed does separate the 'Debates' subculture of the site from the 'Forums' subculture. I believe that a simple dictionary definition wouldn't contextually suffice, we need something in an environment that involves communication and where the win-condition is based on the perception and actions people take as a result of one's words, namely marketing.
Generally, a market is called a place where sellers sell their goods and service in exchange for money. The market can differ on the basis of
products or services sold or on the basis of other factors like government regulation, taxes, legality of exchange, price ceiling, buyers
target, etc. and the simplest meaning od word competition is when two or more parties try to gain competitive gain or win over one another.
In competition when one party wins then automatically another party loses. By understanding the terms market and competition, we can deduce that market competition is where two or more companies or organization strive to gain profit by competing with one another using various tactics.
The reason I prefer this to a simple dictionary definition or even an explanation of debating itself, is that this website and the dynamics in formal debating are something extremely rare in the world (after all, this website was built upon the concept of debate.org, one of the only site of its kind ever until recent times when Debate Island, Edeb8 and Debate Art showed up.
There isn't enough data or formal analysis of the nature of online competitive debating to give you a contextual definition of how competition works, the reason I compare it to marketing is that persuasion and profit (via Rating) are extremely justifiable parallels to qualify this applying to formal debating, which Pro agrees is a separate subculture from the casual Forums type of debating.
Debaters enter the arena to use their powers of persuasion in order to profit with Rating at the end of it (or at least lessons learned). Pro argues that one gains no lesson when no one votes, however Con retorts this completely arguing that the very nature of competitive debating is that every single thing you earn is down to you and your ability to market both your debate and your case within that debate. If no one even wants to read the debate because the topic is too niche or boring, that's your fault and you should do better 'market research' on the voters if you want to sufficiently garner the profit of Rating. If no-one votes because your particular case was too boring and unentertaining to read, that is also your fault. The only case where perhaps it really is unfair is when it is due to your opponent being very drawn out in length, and dull in tone that the readers give up. In this case, you should simply learn to steer clear of that opponent if they can be avoided and to invest less effort into debates with them perhaps, as they're clearly going to push away anyone voting if this consistently occurs with debates that they participate in.
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Whether carrot, stick or 'we just gotta do it' mantra is used, the motive behind voting in Pro's solution highlights a flawed concept of purpose in this website and what it stands for.
Along the lines of the previous section, where I compare DART's formal debating to competitive marketing, I would like to raise a scenario to the readers of this debate:
Two products or services lie before you, two marketers try to sell them to you and you are asked what you decided. You answer 'I am unconvinced by both and frankly, I don't care at all about this product and don't feel like I am equipped to judge who even marketed it better, at this moment in time.'
In a horrified reply, Fauxlaw (Pro) yells 'you are corrupt, in fact when only one person decides it's also corrupt! We need more deciders on who persuaded better and you ought to do it, it's your duty!'
You get frightened, the cult of Debate Rescue Volunteers chants 'vote! vote! vote! vote!' it quietens your resistance, slowly you declare one the winner and force yourself to concoct a reasonable enough justification for it, just to shut the chanters up and lessen the impact peer pressure and stigma against you. What would that mean had happened to the overall ecosystem of debate votes?
It would mean that the average quality would be reducing, not increasing. If people want to vote, let them and indeed encourage them if they're only not voting out of lack of effort. Nonetheless, we need to respect that it's not out of a duty or severe social pressure on them to vote that they should vote, it's out of their love for the debate topic and the case presented by the winner.
People come to this website of their own free will, it's not their job to judge debates and in fact, it's not even remotely their duty to even once open the 'Debates' section of the website. This is a leisurely pastime and some of us get our 'kicks' by being more competitive and it's our duty to market those debates and appeal to the select few who are willing to vote, it's not up to the voters to artificially, out of peer-pressured loyalty and cult-like mantra, add low quality votes in order to compensate for the lack of appeal that the debates and/or debaters have.
I'll leave it at that for now, I will use more sources and solid info in Round 2, this was more me explaining stuff. I hope that you enjoyed.
Ok thanks.
I posted my R1, if you wanted to read and didn't have notifications for this.
A very good plan, I see no flaws.
RM, welcome to the debate. Thanks for accepting. I did not mention it in description, but I'm not imposing a round waiver. I've specified 3 rounds and we will debate 3 rounds. I find the other an absurd game. I'm not even a sure I would oppose new argument in round 3. I did not mention that either, but in this instance, I'm actually debating with the hope in mind of changing policy relative to the no-vote condition. Any particular thoughts you have on protocol for the debate, I'll entertain them. Best wished for a lively debate
AS RM has accepted the debate, and you did not, we'll let RM determine what may be easiest and by what justifications. This debate was not initiated as a whimsical exercise, but as a serious [to me] issue of the general lack of sufficient voting. I did not mention in description that debates with just one vote are at least 4:1 the number of no votes. That makes the issue a 15% matter. Not sure if I'll entertain the one-vote dilemma. However, to your point, until A.I. can demonstrate a facility with paronomasia, or other literary devices, let alone pure nuance of language, and not just capability of syntax and grammar, I'll opt for a human judge, thanks.
The easiest way is to implement an AI who fairly judges all the debates, and if voting is mandatory the quality will go down.