Hacking 10Questions

Note: While it appears we have succeeded in making it to the final 10 Questions, the votes will be subject to a final review process. But barring something catacysmic, it’s highly likely this question will be asked of the candidates.

When I was approached about co-sponsoring 10Questions, I had to admit I had some questions of my own. Though I’m obviously all for the idea of an Internet debate, I had a gut feeling that the left and the Ron Paul contingent would dominate the vote. But I wound up signing on, along with Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, and Townhall, because I concluded that the only way conservatives can get good at the Internet is if we force ourselves to compete, with all its trappings and pitfalls.

This was the time to learn to swim by diving into the deep end.

As the question rating period wore on, I grew discouraged at the tenor of the questions that got voted up, my initial suspicions confirmed. You had net neutrality (somewhat expected), “warantless wiretapping”, “is America a theocracy?” No conservative or conservative-leaning libertarian anywhere near the top 10. Ugh.

About two weeks out, I spotted an opening.

The thought of an eBay auction came to mind. If you’re bidding in an auction that lasts a week, it makes no sense to play early in the process. Your early bid will just be fodder for someone to one-up you, and could trigger a bidding war that increases the eventual going price. The idea is to show as little interest as possible — until the final seconds of the auction when you swoop in with (hopefully) the final bid.

Conventional wisdom in this case would suggest that you post your question in the high traffic early days to maximize its exposure and increase the likelihood of a high net vote total. And if your question is hospitable to the liberal ideology of the early adopters who tend to vote in these things, that is a sensible strategy.

To ask a conservative question, the eBay strategy was needed.

I decided to wait until the final day to post my question. I would then do everything possible to get it posted on numerous conservative blogs, on Facebook, and on Twitter, generating a large flurry of positive votes, and leaving little time for liberals to “bury” the question with thumbs-down votes.

I posted my question on YouTube this morning, and forgetting that it took a while for the questions to be indexed into the site, waited agonizingly for it to be indexed. Finally, at around 4 p.m., the site slurped it up. It was going to be tough to get that many votes in that short a period, though early reaction to the question was 2-to-1 favorable.

The timing turned out perfectly. I posted it on Hugh Hewitt’s blog, where I guest-blog from time to time, my blog, TechRepublican, e-mailed my contact list, sent it to some Facebook contacts, and did Facebook status and Twitter updates throughout the quest.

Additionally, RedState, Instapundit, and Race42008 wound up posting in the final two hours.

For a while, I was deliberately holding back on e-mailing other bloggers, because the last thing I needed was to tip off a Daily Kos, generating a potential backlash against the video. My assumption was that the sooner I made it to the 10Questions homepage (the top 12), the sooner I became a target. However, once I made the front page at around 10:30, it was all guns blazing — I needed all the linkage I could get to counteract the increased negative exposure a top-ranked conservative video like mine could get.

Did I game the system? Well, one of the site’s founders just sent me a preliminary congratulations. The submission stayed well within the groundrules: a question submitted within the time period allotted, no double voting or use of proxies encouraged, the top 10 questions in net votes win. The 10Questions team has always had a live-and-let-live attitude when groups like MoveOn told their members to vote up questions; the more people voting, debating, arguing on the site, the better.

In a similar vein, are Ron Paul’s supporters “gaming” the system by Googling him, doing Technorati searches on him, friending him, or watching videos at rates totally disproportionate to his support in the primary electorate? Absolutely not. These are voluntary activities open to anyone. I don’t always appreciate their tactics, and am sympathetic to RedState’s arguments on this, but they are no more “gaming” the system by trying to parlay Internet support into real support than Mitt Romney is by parlaying Iowa support into national viability. All systems have leverage points where the theoretically weaker side can demonstrate strength.

Online conservatives should demonstrate an ethical hacker’s sensibility to solving the problem of liberal dominance online. No system is flawless. Study your openings (without actually hacking the site), find the shortcuts, and make things work in unintended ways to your advantage.

Knowing that this worked (I wasn’t sure it would), if I had it to do all over again, I would have organized a slate of the 3 to 5 most viable conservative questions already posted on 10Questions or YouTube. I would have contacted the key conservative bloggers a few days out to give them a heads up, and setting out an embargo. And at 6 p.m., with 6 hours to go, we would have released the question slate with a timed series of posts encouraging people to cast a “bullet ballot” for these 3-5 videos — wherein they vote for just those videos and none of the others on the site. With a concerted push over several hours we could have driven 3,000 or 4,000 votes each, and with that, would have had a chance to bring real balance to the top 10.

Oh, well. Next time.

As to why I selected the question I did, I wanted to try something a little different than your typical debate question: to actually force a candidate to state his or her core philosophy on something.

Most debate questions, particularly the “gotcha” ones, are too specific. The candidates can easily sitestep them by claiming ignorance of that particular policy point, and go on to rattle off all the other great things they’re doing in that issue area.

No candidate can claim ignorance on the basic issue of the size of government. No Democratic candidate wants to be branded as a “liberal.” Big government is still a losing brand. So the Democrats will be forced to either flip-flop and embrace the idea of limited government, or be forced to reject the fundamental premise of a smaller government and make an argument for a larger one.

And the Republicans too will need to tell us whether they would take a harder line on spending than President Bush or the previous Republican Congress.

I realize it won’t be quite that pretty. The candidates have days if not weeks to prepare their responses. I won’t exactly be catching them off guard. But short of trekking off to Iowa and New Hampshire, this is the best I could do.

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