Airmax's and Lunatic's plan to revitalize voting and debates

If airmax get's elected president, I have plans to kick start this website and enourage activity. With Airmax's help with outreach and marketing, I plan to help tackle the debate and voting side of things.

My hope for this will be to organize a group of like minded debaters- people who love to debate and want to see our community grow. Then we are going to just blast out high quality debates on centralized topics around current issues, like vaccine mandates, rittenhouse trial, Biden presidential decisions, pulling out of Afghanistan, Racism issues, etc etc. The idea will be to get as many of these debates into the challenge period and accepted as fast as possible. A trial run of a good 10-15 debates (this maybe over zealous at first, but we can play it by ear) that can be ready to advertise across different sites. The more people we get on board with this idea the faster we can on track a new onslaught of debaters to this fabulous website. 

Now voting is something I have always been passionate about. Getting people to debate is one thing, but expecting a half decent vote on your debate is another. This is something even DDO struggled with at times as well. On DDO I was part of several projects that had varying levels of success and would like to share some of the ideas that I have had in the past, and to what degree they have worked. I single handedly reformed how people voted on the website and was able to petition the mods to put enforce better guidelines with voting in general.

https://www.debate.org/forums/Debate.org/topic/83543#2364831 This thread resulting in a public vote being cast that ultimately reformed voting policies to require people to put in a significant effort.

Judge voting. I created judge voting. Not even kidding. That nifty mechanic you can enable here, came from DDO. That function was literally only there because I pushed it hard with the site developers. It was one of the few changes I was able to enforce when I was president of the website. https://www.debate.org/forums/Debate.org/topic/40173#1458499

Votes of the week: https://www.debate.org/forums/Debate.org/topic/32406#1216541 A project headed by airmax that was used to congratulate good voting practices that I helped head and participate.

I also formed several succesful voting initiatives. Most of these voting groups I have put together or participated in the past usually had some incentive or reward attached.

In 2012 I created a voters competition, where the individual with the most votes on debates would win a playstation 4. Mikal won this, and is actually how I got to know him in the first place.

I also participated and organized the DDO Voters Union headed by Donald.Keller.

This was one of the most succesful voting campaigns I participated in DDO's history.

Here is an example of how many votes we were able to generate in June of 2017: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14YZG8iDwfC7rHMezIOIegavf7iWurUT-kvtagJaw3jc/edit?usp=sharing The grand total was 68. Keep in mind these are high quality debate votes, votes with in depth explanation, not just 7 point wins awarded. We sifted through eligble votes before counting them towards whatever the prize was for the month. 

We would post threads for users to post debates they wanted to get votes on. Any quality debate submitted usually recieved votes from someone in our union: https://www.debate.org/forums/debate.org/topic/84420/1/

Airmax and BOT hosted the Raisor Rubles incentive program for voting, which was also hugely succesful though I do not have the google documents to showcase the stats from this initiative any longer.

All of the above should show that I have a decent history organizing and forming succesful voting initiatives. I have had a lot of experience with this in the past. I have several new ideas for this website. My goal will be to take it slow. I realize this community doesn't yield the same numbers DDO once had. That's okay. Change is a coming, and we will first have to work on getting people here. That said, I have found what an active community wants the most rather than tangible rewards, was a way to guarantee votes on their own debates. Each project initiative had this perk. People who participated in these debate voting groups could usually rely on unbiased votes from others in the group as well. The overarching idea is to vote more than you debate, and incentivize voting through knowledge that it's a pay it forward type of system. The more votes you cast, the more likely you are to get votes on your own debates. I am working with airmax on several ideas for new voting initiatives as we speak.

The rest is on you the community. Please vote airmax1227 for this election. We can accomplish so much for the site if you just let us prove what we can do. We have had so much experience in this field. I know and have seen airmax perform wonders as president and mod on DDO, and I know he will accomplish that here too. I am not saying I am unwilling to put this type of effort in if 3RU7AL becomes president. I have to see his initiative, see that he generally cares about site promotion as he says he does first. I don't want these efforts to go in vain. I know airmax has the work ethic though to help see these initiatives through however which is why I strongly encourage you to vote for airmax1227 today. 

Thankyou. 

One of my current working ideas for voting is a bit more small scale for now, until we can get a bigger user base. I want to run this as a multi-level marketing scheme without the scheme lol.

I would call this the DART voting membership. There would be something like 3 tiers to start with. 

Tier 1: You will be guaranteed get a minimum of 4 votes on your debates per month, and must cast 3 votes a month to retain this tier on any debate of your choosing. 

Tier 2: You will be guaranteed get a minimum of 3 votes on your debates per month, and must cast 2 votes a month to retain this tier on any debate of your choosing. 

Tier 3: You will be guaranteed get a minimum of 2 votes on your debates per month, and must cast 1 votes a month to retain this tier on any debate of your choosing.

Members part of these 3 tiers will personally have their debates advertised by myself. I will guarantee a vote on any debate of a member belonging to these tiers and will make sure to advertise your debate(s) until your voting qouta for your tier has been reached. The minimum does not neccesarily mean you won't recieve more votes by participating in this program.

This is one idea of a few I have. Obviously I don't want to get too over-zealous. This will be a trial and error process to determine which methods encourage community participation the most. If this idea doesn't work or doesn't appeal to users I will try other methods to encourage voting. I am in discussions with airmax about these various projects. This is just a taste of what I have planned when airmax is elected president. 

Can verify he will actually do this. He had something similar on DDO with voting efforts. 

I 100% this direction for the site. Even the most talented debaters get demotivated when nobody votes and the votes that are cast are written like by bots: that is to say, most votes are merely "FF" or some other short text with nothing to learn from. Making voting a big deal is absolutely the way to go.

Yes that is the idea! hoping we can have some fruitful efforts come from this for sure. 

High elo faceoff, relatively speaking, casual debate topic but 10k per side. If you're interested and really want to revamp voting, please do show up and vote. 

Remind me when its time to vote

It's an interesting concept. If you can both stay on topic and be interesting g to read, I would love to vote on it. We'll see

But don't feel compelled to moderate votes if your mates start whinging.

Otherwise there is no point in voting.

I don't vote biased like that

Haven't looked too much at debates for a while but y not advocate for an automatic filter that filters out like obviously low-effort votes?

Do you mean low-effort debates?

Zamn i see how it is...

I feel like too many debates follow the same “cookie cutter” topics, stuff like Atheism vs. Christianity, Abortion: Good or Bad, and Capitalism vs. Socialism.

Even the meme debates are getting stale. The question of “Is Water Wet?” has long overstayed its welcome as a meme topic. So has “X Food Item Should be in Category A”.

I think debate tournaments or even just a single debate organized by a third party utilizing topics of minimal but not zero importance would be great. I would love to see debates around the topic of things people are unironically passionate about but not polarizing like modern politics or religion. Maybe something like “Who is the best General in Military History?” or “What is the best gear setup in Minecraft?”

I just want to see debates being fun again.

It's ashame that whining and moaning aren't what the debate section is dedicated to or you'd be a pro at it, that's if you tried it at all anymore.

Do not confuse apathy for whining. I don’t care about debating if I’m not having fun doing it. I am simply suggesting an idea that may make debating and spectating more interesting for some users. If you legitimately enjoy debating right now (and the current most common topics), more power to you. I just have my own tastes in what is enjoyable, and you can have yours.

I prefer debates like what you mention as well mharman. 

For the new debate tournament we will start later this week, we are going to focus on social issues topics, current events, high school debate resolutions, bunch of exciting stuff we can use to get people googling us and wanting to participate in the discussion. You should sign up when the tournament comes up soon. Me and max are just finalizing the last details. 

Read and weep.

What you mention as well mharman, is probably way too niche for a lot of people.

So beforehand, can you be sure to provide a list of what mharman mentions as well?

???

I would suggest, that when debating,

Syntax and punctuation are vitally important,

Otherwise it is very easy to end up with mixed and confusing messages.

Yes

Maybe I will. If my work schedule allows for it, then it really depends on how motivated I feel to do it. Some days my motivation is just inconsistent.

Unusual topics can be niche, but there’s so many of them. Anyone can find a niche topic that they will be interested in. That’s why I think any unusual topics tourney will take off with a great force. I’m not against people debating what they want, I’m just saying that I find the most common topics to be uninteresting to me due to constantly seeing them. I’m sure many feel the same.

Wondering if I should host an unusual topics tourney myself.

For sure.