The amount of drama and sheer stupidity being generated by the Livejournal Advisory Board election is beyond belief.
For those of you wise enough to stay the hell away from Livejournal (“going downhill since 2005”), a brief summary. The Livejournal Advisory Board is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of people who advise Livejournal about their corporate policies. With no actual power beyond that to advise. Hence, “Advisory Board,” you see. And Livejournal decided that they would have a user election to put a Livejournal user on said advisory board, to advise the new Russian corporate powers-that-be about capitalism and drinks other than vodka. This is rather blatantly a position with no actual power worth mentioning.
Naturally, Livejournallers having the collective sense of perspective as Salvador Dali drunk on absinthe and wearing an eyepatch, the user election for the position has become all but the campaign to be President of Livejournal or something. The drama got ratcheted up to fever pitch when Jameth, who is exactly the sort of completely harmless troll that you want a dickhead on the interwebs to be (loudmouthed, often annoying, but essentially harmless if you are capable of, say, ignoring a person), signed on as a candidate and got the Something Awful goons and their Livejournal equivalents to vote for him, mostly to piss off the Harry Potter fandomsphere.
The Potter fans responded exactly as you would expect the least rational, most spoiled fan base on the entire goddamned planet [1] to react when you poke them with a stick: they exploded and launched a massive campaign to deny Jameth the nomination by giving it to one of the various fanboi/grrls running for nomination. Currently their favored candidate is Legomymalfoy, who is already on the Livejournal Support Team. You might think that working for the company and simultaneously representing the userbase might be a pretty basic and obvious conflict of interest. Thankfully, LMM has responded to criticisms on this score by banning comments and locking posts from public view.
HP fans have spread rumours about Jameth “attacking” epileptics by having flashing icons. I was curious about this, and it’s easily disproven, but the dynamics of the Livejournal election are an interesting microcosm of how the Internet makes people stupid in regard to elections – say, for example, real ones that matter, where certain candidates are said to be Muslims or something. The parallels are honestly kind of striking: you have people accusing others of using their sockpuppet RP/troll accounts to gin up vote totals (election fraud!), baseless attacks from both sides (meaningless propaganda!)…
…and, since we’re talking about the Livejournal election as an example in microcosm for the real thing, it is worth noting that now, the fever pitch over this completely meaningless election has escalated to include violent threats.
For a meaningless position with no real power and no monetary compensation.
SWEET JESUS.
Fresh air, people! Go out! Walk in the park! Watch little doggies play! Or whatever it is you do in parks.
[1] Seriously, sometimes I think the entire Harry Potter fan phenomenon is just a massive psychological experiment by J.K. Rowling to see if she could create a subspecies of nerd more despised than furries.