Rex's Las Vegas Lists
Well, now I realize why awards suck. They are repetitive, pointless, and are a desperate attempt to appear relevant.
But I’ll try anything once. Except sex with a goat.
And let’s face it, what else do you have to do at work other than surf pointless lists on the web?
The free-form voting of this thing was quite a challenge, and took awhile to accurately count. If we do this again, we are going to have to narrow it down to checkboxes. Counting tens of thousands of misspelled votes is like herding cats, and it’s a bit anti-climatic.
“Wow, The Hard Rock has the most douchebags, who knew?”
EVERYONE KNEW, that’s who!
And here were countless “protest votes” ie.:
Favorite Website – All of them suck!
Favorite Blog – What is the difference between a blog and a website? (answer: I have no idea)
And of course, some things were completely miscategorized.
Favorite Buffet – Mon Ami Gabi
And it quickly became apparent that nobody read the ultra-verbose voting instructions (I don’t think anyone reads this site).
I said specifically that no votes for this site would be counted. Yet, this site got votes in damn near 70% of the ballots. We would have won many categories easily.
“Gee Rex, way to pat yourself on the back! Be a little more self-congratulatory next time!”
Noooo!
It was not just the good stuff.
I rank way up there in “Biggest Attention Whore”, and “VegasRex.com” or “Rex’s House” is a very solid contender in “Best Place to Spot a Douchebag”. Two enterprising people cut and pasted “You Suck!” in every category on the ballot.
Trust me, it was far from a love-fest.
And while we would like “every vote to count”, we can’t hand ourselves a bunch of awards, good or bad. So they had to be disregarded.
Only a small percentage (about 15%) of people voted for everything, and about half of the people voted in less than 40% of the categories … but I think this was a good thing. If people didn’t have informed opinions, they didn’t seem to offer an opinion. Ergo, Circus Circus wasn’t the default “absolute worst at everything” choice … which has always been a bit suspicious to me as 1) I don’t think most people have spent an appreciable amount of time there and 2) It’s really not that damn bad.
Almost nothing got a majority of any vote. The responses were so wide and disparate that sometimes the #1 spot got less than 10%. Everything was mentioned several times in every category. The Bellagio even got the nod a couple of times for “Most Ghetto Hotel”.
Such is the nature of “open voting”. We had to just take the most recurring answers, and count them.
We got some first-hand insight into how hard people people try to rig these things.
One IP address voted 108 times for ???favorite podcast??? and ???favorite blog??? over a week’s time, and those were the only two things they voted for.
Unless the person running the ???poll??? is incredibly vigilant and detailed, and uses several methods (proxy checks, etc) to detect ballot stuffing, my guess is that they can be stuffed kind of easily.
I am surprised at the lengths people go to and the time they will expend to place well in meaningless ???awards??? that are just supposed to be fun.
It’s also quite political. For whatever reason, people take this stuff very seriously.
For instance, there was controversy about the categories. Especially about what constitutes a ???Vegas??? blog or podcast.
Some people insist that it should originate in Las Vegas or be published by locals to be a ???Vegas??? this or that.
“I am from Boston and visit there 4 times per year. I love Boston but I’ve lived in Vegas for 10 years. Who would consider me legitimate if I started a Boston blog from here, and where would I get my information from?”
It’s a valid point. Las Vegas is no longer a sleepy town of only tourists. It is now a city of 2 million people, our tourism numbers are fairly close to that of New York, and we now have a fully established residential base. If someone in Atlanta started a Brooklyn blog, would it really be a “Brooklyn blog”? What if that person had never even lived in Brooklyn? Is it legitimate?
I don’t know, and it is a heated topic, but if people read that blog and accepted it as a Brooklyn Blog, then I suppose it becomes a moot point.
There is no right or wrong answer, only opinions.
People like what they like, and I’m not going to enforce a locals only rule because if someone does something better from somewhere else, you have to give credit where it is due. If people like it, then apparently said folks are doing something right. You can’t argue with success.
We counted everything, regardless of location, and let them speak for themselves. Apparently locals don’t totally suck, though, because they did surprisingly well. At least better than any other poll I have seen. It might be because Anthony Curtis owns all Internet connections into and out of Las Vegas.
The “subjective” votes (best new slogan, best experience, etc) will be included later in an actual post.
Anyway, enough mindless rambling, if you care, feel free to check out the winners.
