Vote for the Worst

» see votefortheworst.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Vote for the Worst was not a hate site and it was not a recap blog. It was closer to a piece of adversarial testing aimed at a television network. Every week it named the contestant it thought was weakest and instructed its readers to call in for that person, and its entire argument was that a competition scored by unlimited phone votes from whoever cared most is not measuring singing at all. You cannot argue that from the outside. You can only demonstrate it, and the only way to demonstrate it is to do it.

Dave Della Terza started it in 2004, during American Idol's third season. It began as posts on a Survivor message board and moved onto a GeoCities page before it ever got a domain of its own, which is about as complete a fossil record of how a website came into existence in 2004 as you could ask for. The selection criteria were never purely about being bad. The site went for whoever was worst or most entertaining or most obviously being set up by the producers.

Idol was never mine. Turkey had its own singing-contest formats running in exactly those years and they were their own national event, but American Idol itself arrived here as something you read about rather than something you watched, and the phone vote at the center of the whole thing was only dialable from an American number. This is a grave for a mechanism I find genuinely interesting and a show I never once sat through.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Season six, spring 2007. The site's first two picks were eliminated early, so it moved to Sanjaya Malakar, a seventeen-year-old whose performances were the weakest left in the competition and who had become a running joke on national television. He then survived six more weeks.

Howard Stern told his audience to vote for him, which took the campaign from a niche website to something being covered on the news. Entertainment Weekly called Malakar the most successful pick the site ever had. A girl crying in the audience became a meme years before that was the standard unit of internet culture. Nigel Lythgoe, one of Idol's producers, dismissed the whole operation as a fly buzzing around a cow. Lawyers approached Della Terza twice about possible action and nothing was ever filed, because there was nothing to file: every vote Vote for the Worst cast was a legal vote made under the rules the show had published.

That is the part worth sitting with. The site never hacked anything and never cheated. It read the rules carefully, noticed that they measured enthusiasm rather than talent, then organized enthusiasm. Fox could not answer it without admitting what the rules actually did.

~ what it became ~

It expanded, which is usually the beginning of the end. Campaigns ran against Canadian Idol and Dancing with the Stars, later The Voice and The X Factor, and none of them landed the way Sanjaya had. Idol's own ratings began falling after 2007 and kept falling. By season twelve the show was no longer a national ritual, and a site built to sabotage a national ritual has nothing to do once the ritual ends.

Della Terza closed it in June 2013 after nine seasons, saying more or less exactly that: Idol had become irrelevant enough that there was no point. By April 2014 the domain was parked at GoDaddy. Visit votefortheworst.com in 2026 and you get an Indonesian gambling site that has taken the name for the search traffic, which is the ordinary afterlife of an expired domain and a fairly grim one for a site whose whole existence was about who deserves the votes.

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