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Old Jan 26, 2010, 09:26 PM
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quintin3265 quintin3265 is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2009
Location: State College, PA
Posts: 193
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There are two points I think are worth saying in reply to Om's post.

First, Mika, I still disagree with this idea of there being some sort of competition between this site and the other sites. It is a competition now, because of the way the other sites treated us, but I never stated anything about a competition months ago until site administrators made it so. If you'd like, I can post the E-Mails that I sent to virt BEFORE the first line of code was even written suggesting that we collaborate. While it is possible that people might spend less time at other sites because this site exists, isn't it also possible that the combination of all the vibrant subcommunities will cause more people to join in than any single site alone would have? I disagree that this is what would be called a "zero-sum game," where one site has to win at the expense of all the others. virt, Liontamer, djpretzel, and the VGMusic staff are closed-minded and not willing to even acknowledge that there is room for synergy.

Second, and more importantly, though, the attitude of a zero-sum game is something that seems to be represented particularly strongly in the remix community. I offer that, in many other communities, the offer of a prize, or contributions to Haiti, or some other promotion would be seen as a gesture of goodwill. Here, for whatever reason, people look highly negatively upon these and many other things. We will probably have to agree to disagree, but I assert that the reason for this negativity is because of sites attempting to usurp rights from song creators, feuds, hacking incidents by Ptrocity and others, and the Overclocked Remix administrators' promotion of an exclusive clique. I'm not convinced that the same actions, done in another genre, would have yielded the exact same response. In part, we're battling against the poor precedent set by the current big sites.

As to the issue of working hard, I see the development of the site so far as a sunk cost. If it becomes popular, then that's the best outcome. But if not, then I have a lot of other great ideas, and the opportunity cost of sitting on them is high. How about a 3-dimensional Wikipedia? It's done, the 12,000 lines of Visual Basic code is on my drives; I just have to test it more thoroughly, but I haven't been finishing the idea for a year because I've put so much time into this site. Without active effort, the site isn't going to magically take on a life of its own, and will instead become obsolete as what we now call the "competitors" continue to improve their sites. That's why I've asked people here if they'd be willing to create compos themselves.
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