"Vote for me"

Over the past year or so there has been an explosion of "Vote for me" competitions, predominantly on Facebook. These competitions are run where you enter a comment or picture and get as many people as you can to like your entry and so the winners are invariably those with the most friends and not the ones with the best entries, or you'd think so but more recently with some of the prizes getting bigger some people have been rumored to be using fake accounts to gain themselves extra votes and this has lead to some competitions being pulled and changed over to the prize giver choosing the winner(s).

I really don't like this sort of competition, I'm not the sort of person who could go to all my friends and hassle them to vote for me in this or that competition all the time but there are some who do and who do very well out of them. but I saw this on a post on Facebook today and I have to say that I blew my top over it:

Now when you have a large community of people entering this sort of competition there is always some bad blood and accusations of cheating but when you add in that THE PROMOTER has put in the "and disliking the others" that's just asking for trouble between people who were once friends.

Comping used to be a friendly hobby but over the years I've seen greed get in the way of a few friendships, luckily I have some good friends and it doesn't get in the way between us no matter who wins what but the one thing we do all seem to agree on is our hatred of these comps and the feeling they create between people who were once friends.

Hopefully at some point in the very near future PR companies will stop being lazy and start judging entries again themselves or if not, make it a draw so it's fair to all the entrants :-)