Presidential Debate - Airmax1227 VS Larztheloser

The president of DDO is much more than an administrative position. It also carries with it a lot of mandate to set the overall direction of the site. Airmax is a casual, infrequent debater, but a very frequent forum poster - he has posted around 250 times for each one debate he has completed. We both joined around the same time, and while I've been completing five and a half times as many debates as he has, Airmax has shown very little interest in debating at all. That's because he's not a debater. He's a mere politician.I don't blame Airmax one bit. Debates on this site aren't nearly as good as the forums on this site, as they have not been throughout the lifetime of his administration because Airmax hasn't fixed the problem. Still in this election campaign, Airmax is yet to give us one single reason to believe that debates on this site will improve if he is re-elected. I'm standing in this campaign because I'm dissatisfied with the status quo. Being very active around debating, I know what the turnover is like for debaters. It's getting worse.But I have more than a vision - I have a concrete plan to make it happen. There are four key ways in which airmax and I differ, aside from our overall vision for the site. DDO should be a debate site, and I'm a candidate who remembers that first and foremost.TournamentsIn the last election, this was Airmax's big policy. It won him my vote. Instead, while his leadership has given us tournaments, the people joining have almost universally been those who frequent the forums. Disagreements over resolutions and people dropping out as the tournaments have dragged on for months led to the tournaments failing, usually after only one or two rounds. Airmax's solution has been more tournaments, but it's clear that the tournaments themselves are flawed.RL debaters have been organising tournaments for hundreds of years. It's not that hard. One of the most important things is not to have too many tournaments. Right now this site has four tournaments running at the same time. Airmax has promised to start more every single month, for a total of at least around 50 tournaments a year, assuming, of course, that none are started independently. The harm is that you don't get quality tournaments, where beginners can learn from experts, where nobody joins a tournament only for it not to happen, or where they have to wait months. Each tournament should be worth winning. In RL, if you win a tournament, that means something to people. But when I say that I won Spinko's second ELO tournament (which I did), nobody cares. Why? Because it's just one of the hundreds of tournaments that happen on this site.The tournaments organised to date have proven a complete lack of understanding of the most basic principles of running a tournament. Debating tournaments in RL are usually run just like tournaments for chess, or tennis, but this site doesn't know about those. No brackets or power pairing, almost every tournament has been the same simple elimination, isolating beginners. No proper schedules. Almost all topics have been discussed between members via PM and agreed upon, wasting much time.I think it's telling that many of the best debaters on this site once enthusiastically signed up to tournaments, but are now very, very rarely seen anywhere near them. Airmax's tournaments have only reduced the quality on this site by distracting debaters. Tournaments can be saved, and I'm somebody who knows how to do that.VotingVoting on this site is a big issue. In the last election Airmax promised to increase their frequency. Right now the debates on the front page have an average of 1.5 votes. Four are completely unvoted. The number is artificially inflated by some very poor-quality debates that have an obvious winner, which generate a lot of non-helpful votes. It's clear that whatever Airmax has been doing (I actually have no clue), it's been a dismal failure.When my proposal of higher character limits on RFDs was actually implemented by Juggle, that made a huge difference to the quality of RFDs on the site. But the problem of voting is actually a wider cultural problem. Since I suggested it, the site user TUF did a "voter of the week" trial which spawned many votes and got a lot of interest. I want to make it a bit more official, advertise it a lot more, and refine the rules slightly to make it more interesting. I want to feature those users who give good votes.Quality matters too. I'm a candidate you can trust to push this since unlike Airmax, I don't just vote on forfeits. In fact, I tied first in that voter of the week competition.RL integrationMany debaters on here are also RL debaters, but this site does absolutely nothing to integrate with them. There were more topics on here about the Olympics than the World Interversity Championships, which Berlin went to all the trouble to film in part so people on sites like this could learn from and discuss them.I want to help and encourage site members to go to tournaments. I want to help them prepare by pushing video debates and discussing topics. I'd be in favor of shadow tournaments. I want RL events to be advertised on here. That creates buy-in and generates interest for RL debaters.BullyingIn his interview, Airmax stated he can't stop bullying before it happens. That's a lie and every bullying victim in the world knows it. Airmax has done nothing to reduce cyberbullying online.To combat bullying, you need to be proactive in preventing it, not reactive when it happens. Otherwise, it's going to happen. The principle is the same as on a schoolyard - if a teacher punishes kids only when they hit each other, then somebody's going to get hit, but if the teacher reminds students that bullying is not tolerated whenever things seem to be getting tense, that prevents a lot of the problem.Many of Airmax's decisions have been strongly questioned and only retrospectively explained. There have not exactly been many trials, but there have been many bannings. His own administration is secret, accountable only to him, and has never even attempted to provide any transparency. Airmax promised to give us weekly updates after I challenged him on this. Amazingly he has managed to break one of his campaign promises already, even before the vote, as this week this did not happen, nor the week before.ConclusionIt's time for DDO to return to being a site that debaters enjoy debating on. Only one candidate in this election campaign has the drive and vision to make that happen. I hope and trust that this is a vision you share.It's very important, for this reason, that readers of this debate vote come election time. Even if you've never been to the forums before, if you believe you can change this site, and improve it, then vote for the candidate who will make that happen.