There are a few people complaining in my video comments about the legitimacy of the gold medalist for this week's fizzylimpics awards. This gets under my skin for a few reasons, the first of which is that at the end of the day, this competition doesn't matter. At the end of the day, what does a shout-out from a little guy with 3800 subscribers, most of whom don't even watch his videos, and the remainder of whom generally watch with passivity, actually mean, in the grand scheme of things? The award for winning was a shout-out from me. That is the same award that the silver gets, the same that the bronze gets, the same as half the people who didn't even win get. It's not like I'm giving money to people who don't deserve it. The only people getting anything physical are the people who entered all four competitions--not even the gold medalists get that.
I also know every video that broke the rules. To be honest, it was a significant chunk of the entries. I am as big of a rule-monger as anyone in a lot of things, and it was quite tempting to disqualify everyone who broke the rules and give a sarcastic "sorry." However, I reminded myself that my goal, my only goal in this competition, was to share good content and provide a venue with which to do so. That's why I would give a medal to someone who uploaded it a month before the competition, or to singers who did covers, or to videos that went over four minutes, or to people who sent theirs in after the due date, just to name a few. They made good content and deserved to have it shared.
I also don't think people realize how much time and effort I put into this competition. I had to stay up late several nights finding judges, giving them spreadsheets to judge with, compiling the list of videos to send them, and then compiling their answers and trying to come up with a gold from there. I could have spent my time doing lots of other things--things way more important to my life--but I thought someone needed to share this content. That makes comments calling me out extra-painful; it just seems ungrateful to me to say that with all this work, all this effort to be friendly and forgiving, someone would have the audacity to compare me to a corrupt politician.
All I really wanted to create was a light and friendly competition. I hope that we can keep it that way.
