Out of all the things in everything, which one... is worst?
It's a question we sometimes ask and never need to know the answer to. And finding answers no one needs is precisely the role of the tumblr tournament poll!
Concept and most of the following FAQ shamelessly lifted from @best-thing. (Thank you Ms. Best Thing)
Thing submissions currently closed.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How does this work? Tumblr users can submit a thing via ask, and the thing will be tried against the other things one by one in random order. 1v1 polls will determine which of each pair is worst, as in, makes you say "Ugh, this is the WORST."
Won't that make way too many polls? Oh yes. If we do ALL the polls of the round robin, there will be a number of total polls equal to the square of the number of things that tumblr users can think of, minus that number, all divided by two. That's pretty many. Or perhaps zero. It depends on if this blog gets traction or not.
Sooo do you have a solution to that problem? We'll probably discard things that lose at least 4 of their first 5 polls (this number is subject to change depending on how many things we wind up with. They can go on a "not that bad" list that will grow over time.
Why not do a regular single-elimination bracket? We like round robin tournaments better! They're a more reliable way to find out the true relative quality of things. Plus we can have rolling submissions this way.
What kinds of things can be submitted? Submissions should:
1) be a thing. It can be abstract or concrete, alive or not, all are accepted. Examples include "doughnuts," "the letter M," "death", "wet socks," "being a mistaken for a wizard," "rotten wizard meat cooked into a sludgy stew," and more!
2) be something that a typical tumblr user could plausibly be familiar with. So "spiders" is fine but "the spider that is in the corner of the room that tumblr user fake-example-person is in" is not. It also can't be "your mom" or similar because that referent changes depending on the answerer. If you're getting specific, make sure it's something the voter could look up. If it's fictional, please include a brief indication of its origin.
3) not be something that it would be fucked up to apply a value judgment to, like a demographic of people or something like that. Specific forms of oppression are disallowed, but like, oppression in general is fine, we guess. Try to keep things somewhat lighthearted, please?
4) be at least annoying/not good. We're willing to accept things that may be ambiguously not bad, but don't send anything objectively good either, like the Civil Rights Movement.
5) not be a fandom thing. There are so many other tournament blogs for those, and they bore me. No fictional characters, works of fiction, films, shows, franchises, songs, video games, musicians, writers, actors, etc. Less specific options like genre or medium are allowed. For example, "Sherlock Holmes" or "A Study In Scarlet" or "Arthur Conan Doyle" would be disallowed, but "detective fiction" is allowed. Something that's fictional but not from a specific source, like "wizards", is allowed. (Some of these are going to be difficult edge cases and they will just be judged by my gut.)
6) be less than 80 characters, please! That’s the cutoff for a poll option. Exceptions may be made.
What do I need to send in my ask? You can just include the thing itself, but if you wish you may add a brief explanation of what the thing is. Please add specificity if your thing shares a name with something else. (See the tar polls on @best-thing, wherein some voters thought they were voting on tar and others thought they were voting on tar.)
What if the options are two very different levels of specificity on similar subjects? Vote with your heart. Is more specificity worse or better?
What determines whether you include a Wikipedia link on a poll? Our finely tuned reference-inclusion criteria consider such factors as an average person's familiarity with the thing, whether we feel like it (it makes the post take longer to write) and whether we remember to (remembering things is hard). We do try to post a link for both options if one is included for either, though this is not always possible.
You sound familiar. Are you some other gimmick blog? The text of this FAQ was, as stated at the beginning, plagiarized from @best-thing. If you have an issue with this, feel free to submit "plagiarism" to the running of worst things.
I'm mad (and not in a fun pretend way) about one of the options not getting votes when I hate it. In fact, I think that this thing may be What's Wrong With Society. May I annoy you and/or others by ranting in the notes about it? No. This may get you blocked.
I'm not mad about it but I think one of the things is good and therefore violates the rules. What gives? I'm not going through a careful ethical evaluation of every thing. Sometimes I remove one that was previously accepted; sometimes I don't. If people are constantly pestering me about which things get accepted, I will stop having fun and this blog will cease. You will therefore have to tolerate some inconsistencies.
Can I submit my orientation, gender, or other essential element of my identity? No. That would be fucked up (see above).
I'm upset with how you handled my submission in some way. That's not a question! Perhaps "a gimmick blog handling your submissions in a way you don't like" is the real Worst Thing.
I have a different question. Perhaps you should ask it instead of waiting for us to anticipate it!
