Alright, Who’s the Train Fan?

We had some drama in the 2000’s Bangers Bracket.

For the first half of last year’s brackets, we’d always say, “Be cool,” when telling people about the multiple ways to vote. The meaning of that was that while we were happy to have people vote multiple times (engaging with us on Instagram and Twitter and on the website is generally helpful), we didn’t want anyone abusing the facet of the Google Form that lets you vote as many times as you want (or making a bunch of fake accounts on Instagram or Twitter to swing those votes). The reason for that is that it makes the brackets less fun for those who don’t abuse it, because it makes their votes irrelevant, and we want the brackets to be fun because that keeps people voting, boosts our brand, etc. Good things.

About halfway through last summer, we stopped including the note to “be cool.” Everyone was being cool. We felt the note was irrelevant.

Yesterday, though, someone, or someones, was uncool.

We noticed it a few hours into voting. Somebody was casting a lot of votes for “Drops of Jupiter” on the Google Form (for reference, other matchups had only something like 40 votes at this point):

This is, of course, hilarious. Somebody took a lot of time to vote for “Drops of Jupiter.” A LOT of time. A whooooole bunch of time. To whoever that is: We’re flattered that you care so much, and we’d imagine Train would be similarly flattered if they knew how much you love their best song. (It’s a great song!)

But it wasn’t very cool of you to go about it in a way this brazen.

We don’t know exactly how everything happened after that first check-in, but there was an overnight countereffort in favor of “Mr. Brightside,” and then in the counter-countereffort this morning, whoever was supporting “Drops of Jupiter” added “1985” (another great song!) to some of their ballots. All told, a group of at most a few people cast more than five thousand votes for the ballad. More than five thousand votes.

When we went on to start tallying the votes, a little more than an hour ago, we saw what was happening, and since we can also cast as many votes as we want, we cast a few thousand votes ourselves to get the two affected matchups roughly evened out with their results on Instagram and Twitter (where individuals were not voting thousands of times, to both 1) reflect the will of the people and 2) make sure The People’s Rankings remain sacred and accurate (we’re combining The People’s Rankings over years, so the overestimation of “Drops of Jupiter” or “1985” could live on forever and mislead the world about how the people collectively rank various things). Here’s the link to the Google Form response sheet, if you want to check it all out. It’s a wild spreadsheet, which is quite the strange thing to write.

This is, of course, on us. We didn’t tell you to be cool yesterday. But we’re saying it now, and we’ll keep saying it going forward.

Please.

For the sake of the brackets.

Be cool.

(But also thank you for this plot twist it is quite the piece of intrigue.)