Critical Eye: “Give us all your clicks so your biases can win meaningless shit.” – allkpop

allkpop recently started this “allkpop Fan Tournament” feature, which is basically a derivative of Ningin‘s “Kpop Idol-Off“, which is a derivative of every single fan voting bracket type thing done to generate page views. Soompi will probably copy this idea soon, and the derivative trifecta will be complete.

Our very first tournament will be decided by fan vote on who is the Best Male Dancer in Kpop. We narrowed it down to the 8 following names: Big Bang’s Taeyang, Jay Park, SHINee’s Taemin, Super Junior’s Eunhyuk, B2ST’s Lee Ki Kwang, TVXQ’s Yunho, Se7en, and Rain. We seeded them from 1 to 8 and matched them up accordingly in the bracket. Now, we know we may have omitted some talented dancers but the general consensus in the staff conversations were that these 8 are the best candidates.

The Tournament rules are simple, you vote for your favorite dancer in each matchup and the Winner advances to the next round. Round 1 ends on April 10th at 11:59PM EST and the next round will commence the following day on April 11th.

So basically this is a popularity contest meant to generate traffic for allkpop. The benefit for the people voting? Uh … none? At least Ningin gave out prizes.

The only thing people voting on allkpop’s tournament get is the satisfaction that their biases are in the top spot on a random poll. However, it’s essentially meaningless, since it’s nothing but a vote whoring competition that leads to throwaway results.

People can participate if they want, but the reality is that it’s not doing anything for anybody except allkpop.

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What would be a cool idea is for allkpop to use their platform to make a poll that would matter. As in, to establish something that could be a reference point for where the international fandom truly feels.

Perhaps if they could get all the international fandoms (through their forums) to cooperate and vote on these tournaments, it would actually get interesting. A measure of which idols have the most respect in the international community, determined by fans who are not their own. Of course, that would require being on good terms with these fandoms, which they aren’t for the most part, but you would think they could get them to go along with the idea simply based on the benefit of the publicity the said sites would gain from being involved in the process. Restrictions would be needed, naturally, perhaps something like all votes would be made public and they would be unable to vote for their own biases. Also, some type of electoral total would have to be assigned to each fandom based on their numbers (instead of just having individual users whore votes), but at the end of the day it should be a far more scientific and interesting result than the current clusterfuck.

If they could get it to the point of being respectable and objective, and therefore indicative of what the international community actually thinks, that could actually have a relevant impact on how Korean companies approach international waters or gauge what the international fans think of their groups.

Then again, setting such a thing up would be complicated as hell, much harder than just throwing up polls and figuring out which fanbase can organize the best vote whoring escapade.

Oh well.