Board Thread:Debate of The Week/@comment-28112409-20171202105652/@comment-28112409-20171202183533

Addfire wrote: Before you read this, Vert, and if you do read this, this is my opinion. Keep that in mind.

Look, I'll be honest. You've been a total douche. When people don't debate the way you wanted, you'd give an asshole-y response and then go on to the next one. If you thought people could debate better, which I totally agree they could, and sure even I could, you should explain where the faults are, instead of flipping everyone off.

Let me drag up some quotes.

" It was the biggest disappointment in all of DoTW seeing how easy people give up, especially in this debate."

" Looking for good points in this debate was like trying to harvest crops in the middle of a desert."

If you want us to debate well, then judge well. I'm assuming you are at least on the debate team at your school, because you obviously care a lot about debating. Maybe that means you can find flaws and judge better.

Well, you didn't. You used whatever debating expertise you had, and then, well... I'm not gonna go into expletives (realizing I called you an asshole up above but still).

I debated for the fun of it. I was not cross-examining, or drawing up tons of research (aside from the math from whichever debate I did math on). I was doing this for fun. I assume others were, too.

This was not a professional debate. None of the debates were professional debates. Quit treating them like they were. And you're already wrong starting from the 2nd line. I don't want debates to go the way I want them to, I never have. My initial idea was just to host and judge, and do literally nothing else. Whatever way the debate goes, I don't give a fuck, what happens in the debate has happened and whatever else.

But then a part of the participants started complaining about how the standards of the debates were trash and it has gone really downhill. I tried to fix that through criticism, but turned out it killed the fun aspect of a debate. The whole point of the debate was to be an activity to be enjoyable for as much people as possible if not all of them, just to make that clear. After the criticism was passed on, I realized right after just how screwed the activity has now became, because it's either piss the maggots on this side or the maggots on the other side. There's no win-win to it.

The demand for raising standards was the worst thing to happen to DoTW, and that was my first big mistake, listening to those demands. I should've kept it simple, because the initial way I viewed it was the correct way. People didn't want it to be professional, they do it for fun, there's room for both sides to argue... It was when I listened to those pesky demands that things started going downhill, and that was a fatal mistake I cannot deny. I guess the reason why I listened was because of the criticism that swingy topics and roles narrowed the room for argument and made debates one-sided or unarguable.

I then hesitated, because I still didn't want to make it too professional, hence why I didn't go into the nitpicking details of every single flaw. Not to mention that it was gonna be awfully time consuming. Another mistake was thinking that there was some solution in between, but there wasn't.

If I'm seen as an asshole, or a douche, or a pessimistic cunt who should die and do the world favor, I don't mind. I don't deal with people well, I have a problem with my excessive self-awareness when it comes to doing things for other people, and I suck at managing community-made stuff that rely on qualitative information such as debating. I can't do it well, I acknowledged that, I am handing it over for that very reason.

I've never been in the debating club, ever. I've been in MUN. So as ironic as this may sound, I've been to professional, formal and top-class debating activities, not the usual and normal ones. And this is a problem with my judgment, I would judge a debate based on high standards, and not ones that match with the level of the average debater in the wiki. All the more reason to hand over the ownership of DoTW.

It was not my motive or intention to treat them like professional debates, I wanted to just up the standards a bit to appeal to the portion of debaters who took the debates more seriously than others while still keeping it fun for everyone else. Didn't work so good now, did it? And hence, fuck this shit. I've already left the activity and there's not much to argue about anymore. I'm not ever coming back as host, and after this, not even as judge.

I hope you're all happy with FirePyre being host, and gosh bless, fuck my life.