March 11, 2009

• Xanga Debate Tournament

  EDIT: VOTING CLOSES AT 11:00 AM EDT!  3/12
   
  Xanga Debate Tournament 
  ROUND 1 – DAY 2
  Round 1-Should we be allowed to Mass Message with such ease? 
  

  Well the xanga debate tournament is in full swing people.
  Yesterday TheBigShowAtUD and saintvi hosted the first two debates.
  Today I have the honor of hosting the tournaments along with vanedave.

  Below are two opening statements and rebuttals.
  Please read the entire debate and then vote,
  not for the one with whom you agree,but for the one who, in your opinion,
  presents the strongest argument.
  Debaters were assigned both their topic and the stance they were to take,
  so the arguments presented are not necessarily their actual opinions.
  Debaters will remain anonymous.
  The first two rounds will be decided by public vote, only one per blogger please.
  
  The topic for this one:
  Should we be allowed to Mass Message with such ease? 

  Opening:
  3 Seed: (1) Mass Messaging (MM) is hated: there is an increasingly large contingent of bloggers who automatically delete—and sometimes even block—anyone who mass messages them. (2) MM is redundant: lots of xangans who mass message are losing friends and subscribers, and because the users deleted and/or blocked due to mass messaging belong to the group which most wants traffic, this completely defeats the purpose. (3) MM is hurtful,disrespectful: Have you ever gotten the bolded (1) next to your messages and been happy to have received mail from someone, only to open it and see it be mass? Doesn’t that feel like a betrayal, a let down? It is the promise of connection, of an interest in your person and expression shot down, and you are left feeling like just another number; which, to traffic whores, you are. (4) MM unnecessarily undermines Xanga’s unique qualities: Traffic-whoring creates a self-perpetuating parasite. Blogs and comments are written for pure footprint counts. It is a slap in the face of this community, something you’ll find nowhere else. There are far more legitimate channels for this; with mass messaging, the fine line between healthy self-promotion and spam is crossed.

  I do not propose that MM ought to be banned completely. However, it seems clear that some adjustment must be made. We are bloggers, we have things to say, and we are here to interact and learn, not to spend all our time and energy dealing with spam.

  14 seed: The topic of today’s debate is: “Should we be allowed to Mass Message with such ease?” My stance on this topic is: Yes. These are my reasons, 1)Mass Messaging enables Xanga as a whole to acknowledge an event (i.e the birthday of John), 2) Mass Messaging allows a Xanga user to make a statement to their friends, and subscribers, without using their blog, and 3) Mass Messaging allows a Xanga user to create the most hilarious kinds of drama.
  Better?

  Rebuttals:
  3 Seed: (1) John’s birthday was a lie; it was not even his birthday, it was Theo stirring up trouble as is his wont. Regardless, is John more loved through his users spamming and irritating each other or through receiving thoughtful personal messages? What about mass messaging is better for “acknowledging an event as a whole” than simply blogging? It only forces an event upon your users that they may not wish to have any part of. (2) What statement is so private it cannot be placed on a blog or pulse yet so public it ought to go to all one’s friends and subs? The main types of MM consist of the following: totally purposeless/intentionally annoying, impersonal audience-addressing messages, and blatant traffic-whoring. All of these are better not existing, as a blog, or as a pulse. The odds are high there is someone in your circle who hates mass messages; what statement is so important it’s worth spamming and losing friends and subs? (3) Here we are confronted with subjectivity. What is “most hilarious”? Which messages consist of this humor, and which don’t? Who considers drama hilarious? From a utilitarian standpoint, more users are negatively affected than positively so, and thus this must be rejected. At any rate, this is not an endorsement of humor/enjoyment, it is a weak excuse for spamming and trolling, an indulgence Xanga ought never endorse and which we should ask you to participate in elsewhere. The fact that mass messaging engenders drama is a stronger point for MM reform than against it.

  14 Seed: Point the first: Not all of a person’s friends and subsribers visit their site. I can attest to the fact (and I may get cyber-stoned for this), I don’t read all of the people I subscribe to. Therefore, if I had an important message that I needed ALL of my friends and subsribers to know (i.e. a username change, I will be leaving Xanga for a while, I will be leaving Xanga permanently (perish the thought!)), I would send them a message. Rather than go through my 200+ friends and send them each a personal message, I can write up the message, check the two boxes. And I’m done.
  Point the second: My response to your second rebuttal would very closely relate to my response to your first. Privacy is not a concern here. Any private information, most certainly should NOT be mass messaged. My point is that Mass Messaging allows for better communication. As I stated above, not every single person on a person’s friends list, subscriber’s list, etc. reads that person’s blog. However, they all read their messages. Case in point, into_the_lens (formerly baranorowen) changed her username, she sent an MM to everyone on her friend’s list announcing her name change, avoiding the confusion as to where baranorowen went.
  Point the third: I found the POOP MM, to be very fun. I found the LOVE MM to be very funny. Throughout that rash of MM’s, I laughed hilariously, deleted it, and moved on. You are very right, humor is subjective. I, personally, would laugh uproariously at something another person would find mildly amusing. Therefore, watching the drama on Xanga, to me, is quite entertaining. Which leads into another topic of, the misuse of the word drama…which I won’t address here. I don’t care to MM myself, but when I receive the MM’s I do get, I take them with a grain of salt, and keep a sense of humor throughout the whole issue.
  Thank you for this trading of idea’s.
  It is very…entertaining.

  • 11:39 pm
  • 49 Comments