British iPhone Giveaway: Summary of Events
Here’s a summary of events as they unfolded, unscrupulous votes and all, in the social media soap opera that is the first British iPhone giveaway. You can also read all the daily updates by clicking on the iPhone tag.
In essence, because the voting system used, Comment Karma, allowed either positive or negative votes to be made for each entry, it was possible to vote down entries as they were made.
This meant that as the giveaway progressed, most entries accumulated negative votes because some entrants(?) were maliciously voting them down.
As the second deadline for the competition approached (I first extended it to allow people to enter up till the Monday after the original deadline: iPhone launch day UK), I initially decided to scrap the voting idea.
The plan was to choose a random winner from the comments entered, much like Engadget and TechCrunch do with their giveaways.
However, Imran pointed out that it would be wiser to only enable positive votes for each comment.
