Ian On The Red Dot

DK’s response

I don’t usually respond to groundless accusations. But this time, it has involved too many parties and I think I need to clarify some stuff. Have to use my blog instead of the comment page as this is going to be a super long story.

Just a background on what happen yesterday. We were playing a joke on Jean, saying that any entries with her name would hit top 10 within a few hours. So I posted an article with Jean’s name on the title and asked Ridzuan to help pong that article. It was a joke and a one time incident. If anyone felt offended by this joke, I would like to take this chance to apologise to you.

But I’m utterly disappointed when I saw the blog article talking about the incident as if it always happen. Just because he saw it once, he wrote the article in a manner that it portray the incident as a everyday event among the regulars in ping.sg. I feel that the article is making groundless accusation, not just on me, but the regulars in ping.sg. Most of the regulars in ping.sg write excellent article and their blog entries deserve to be in the top 10 based on their own rights. By suggesting that ping.sg regulars pong each other’s entries in ping.sg is suggesting that the regulars gang up and cheat the system. I’m sorry to all the regulars in ping.sg that my one action causes you and your reputation to be tarnished.

And do note that all along, I mentioned ping.sg regulars. I did not use the word elite and don’t think anyone in the community should be called an elite. Ping.sg is a community. Everyone is free to signup ping.sg Everyone is allowed to join the gathering organised by ping.sg The details about gathering are all posted on forums and we do not bar anyone from attending. I think that it is very insulting to the entire community by saying that the regulars formed an elite group. That has never happen and will never happen.

The reason why the regulars often pong other regular’s entries is not because we are trying to knock down the non-regulars. We click the entries because over the time, we have become friends with each other and want to find out more about what our friends are doing. There is never the intention to knock down the non-regulars. I feel that this is a very unfair accusation made without any proof. So what do you expect the regulars to do? Not make friends with each other? Or not read about what our friend wrote in their blog?

There is never a barrier to prevent anyone to join the community. The door is always open. Anyone is free to join in the conversation in the shoutbox or join the gathering. And when you start making friends, naturally you will find more and more friends reading your blog. The idea about ping.sg is not just a collection of blogs. Its a community. If you are active in the community, naturally more people would want to know you more by reading your blog. I don’t think this should be considered cheating.

I’m very disappointed that someone would blast the entire community with such groundless accusation. I’m more disappointed that the person is trying to use this case to justify creating multiple nick for pong cheating. If we were to allow this to happen, then the whole entire community will close down because everyone is cheating.

I hope that article will not tear the entire community into pieces. I have been in this great community for more than 1 year. I would not allow anyone to tarnish the reputation of the regulars in the community. Neither will I allow anyone to make groundless accusation about the whole community.

My response - my post has been misunderstood. I have reread my post and the fault is mine because I wasn’t clear. I shall try to address his comments.

Firstly, I apologize for not clarifying with you that what you (i.e. DK) was doing was part of a one-time joke on Jean. However, I added in bold, at the end of my post, before your post was made that I concede what I saw that day could very well be a one-off thing.

Secondly, the post’s aim was never to tear the community in pieces nor tarnish the reputation of the regulars.

One of the problematic statements in my post is this line:

Simple really - it is where a core group of members pong each other entries until they get to the leaderboard and let the public (non-core group) take over.

Now, in light of what I wrote at the bottom of the post about DK asking Ridz to help pong a post, the above line reads like I’m saying that the regulars deliberately pong each other posts to get to the top of the post. In fact, that was not what I meant. The responsibility of the misunderstanding is mine to bear.

The above line should have been made clearer in context with the subsequent lines:

This is natural. If I know who you are, if we hang out, if we chat, if we msn, if we basically get social with each other, it is probably not presumptuous to say I’ll read your posts and more often than others.

So, basically, I am acknowledging what cobalt paladin and DK are saying - under the new system, it is natural for the friendships formed to affect what goes up to leaderboard because of the very nature of friendships and how it influences our behaviour and the choices we make when deciding what to read.

This isn’t pong cheating in the sense of setting up multiple accounts and using them to pong entries of your own blogs.

The line above was also worded wrongly. My intention was to say that the current system skews the leaderboard the way the actions of a pong cheat would. While the skewing of a pong cheat would lead to more noise, the current skewing is arguably not bad though I think it decreases the filtering capabilities of Ping.sg

Now, DK is right about how anyone can be part of the community. I have never disputed that. But the sheer nature of space, time, human nature, logistics and the whole shebang is that not everyone is equal in a community - I would go even so far to say that online communities always develop a core. The core, whether it is an insidious entity or not, and in this case, I never said Ping.sg regulars were such nor do I believe they are, affects the utility of the online community. My case then is that the core/regular members affect one function of Ping.sg - the filtering of stuff.

Now, I did note that I was being presumptuous that Ping.sg and the leaderboard had the function of helping filter posts worth reading and worth reading by everyone (not just the core/regulars) interested in the Singapore blogging scene.

Now, I never said the core/regulars were elitist or referred to them as elites. The word elite was used in reference to the situation in Singapore politics/society and the core group in it.

DK is right. I don’t for a minute believe the regulars are trying to knock down the non-regulars. But that is besides the point because the friendships and consequent interactions/actions do lead to that in my opinion. Likewise, I don’t believe our government deliberate creates policies to keep the rest of us down. But I believe it is an inevitability.

The use of the word back-scratching was wrong to convey this idea and it make things are unnecessarily confrontational.

I apologize to the members of Ping.sg and DK for any affront to the community and your characters.