Hatting the System
Not to be confused with Hacking the System the popular television show hosted by Brian Brushwood and Jason Murphy on National Geographic.
Hatting the System is a collaborative effort by the chatrealm and Tadpool to ensure that the Podcast Awards feature enough funny hats™.
History
Back in 2015, the Podcast Awards were hosted at the New Media Expo by Chris Jericho and Emily Morse. During the voting process, there was a slate at http://t2t2.eu/podawards that consisted of Night Attack for Mature and Best Video, DTNS for Tech, The Morning Stream for Comedy, Film Sack for Movies, The Instance for Gaming, and Coverville for Podsafe Music (whatever that is). t2t2 created a fancy bookmarklet to assist in voting. The bookmarklet was not cheating because it was not automated. The Diamond Club made a clean sweep that year and was 7 for 7.
Brian Ibbott and Brian Brushwood attended the awards in person in Las Vegas that year. When The Morning Stream was announced as the winner of the Comedy category, Brian Ibbott walked up on stage to accept the award and Chris Jericho made a comment about his "funny hat." Brian Ibbott was then referred to as "The Funny Hat Guy" all during the awards ceremony. Chris and Emily were stunned and laughing when Brian "Funny Hat Guy" Ibbott kept walking back up on state to accept awards from the Tadpool. Hence why the movement is called Hatting the System.
2016 Podcast Awards
Nomination Process
When it came time for the Podcast Awards to take place once again, Todd Cochrane, the founder of the Podcast Awards, found himself back in control of the Podcast Awards due to "unforeseen circumstances," meaning New Media Expo wasn't happening that year. He announced on a GoFundMe page set up to help "Save the Podcast Awards" that there would be "new rules and guidelines" for the awards including each show having to pay $10 in order to be considered for nomination and shows that have won more than 5 times in the past 10 years (or 4 times in the past 5 years) and that had won last year were not qualified to be nominated this year.
When these new rules were announced, we decided to hold a primary to see which podcasts we would push for this year. The term "Hatting the System" came about because of Brian Ibbott being referred to as funny hat guy when he kept accepting all the awards, and thus http://hat.t2t2.eu was born. t2t2 then set up a Google form for voting for the slate used for Hatting the System and which podcasts we were going to nominate. The original slate that we voted on and nominated is as follows:
- Arts: The Beerists
- Business: The Bizarre Briefing
- Comedy: The Giz Wiz (didn't get nominated in that category)
- Education: Scam School
- Entertainment: We Have Concerns
- Games & Hobbies: The Angry Chicken
- GLBT: Diary of a Trans Woman
- Kids & Family: Hypothetical Help
- Mature: JuRY
- Music: Joe and Meg's Musical Adventure
- News & Politics: Current Geek (didn't get nominated, replaced with No Agenda)
- Science & Medicine: Weird Things
- Society - Culture: The Phileas Club
- Sports & Recreation: Mat Men
- Technology: Hak5
- TV & Film: Cordkillers
Unfortunately, The Giz Wiz got nominated for Technology instead of Comedy, competing against Hak5. (We suspect this was because of Chad's Minecraft fans.) In addition, Current Geek didn't get nominated for News & Politics. We decided to stay to our original slate and vote for that (sorry Chad).
Fortunately though, No Agenda got nominated in the People's Choice and News & Politics categories, so we added them to the slate of shows to vote for, as well as Politics Politics Politics got nominated in the Government category, even though there is a News & POLITICS category, oh well.
Voting Process
The 2016 Podcast Awards voting went from May 22nd to June 12th and thanks to t2t2's bookmarklet, it made the voting process very convenent and easy.
Awards Ceremony
The awards ceremony took place on June 26th and Hatting the System was 14 for 17 in winning the Podcast Awards with only No Agenda losing the People's Choice award, Mat Men losing the Sports award, and Cordkillers losing the TV & Film award. Oh well, it's good enough to be nominated, right?
Controversy
Or did we win 14 out of 17 possible awards? After the Podcast Awards ceremony, there was a user by the name of @mudyhalo who started going off on Twitter about how it was an automated voting website and the awards were a sham. Immediately, an "investigation" into Hatting the System was done by Todd Cochrane with a series of updates posted on the official Podcast Awards website.
- Update #1: A message stating that all the shows listed on hat.t2t2.eu shouldn't be celebrating quite yet.
- Update #2: All winners are on hold
- Update #3: Our shows are more educated, not necessarily better
- t2t2's response: " I didn't know it was the best show awards...."
- Update #4: Few people would know how to do this, it's unfair to the other shows
- Update #5: The voting wasn't illegal. Things will probably change in the future
- Update #6: Removed the hat.t2t2.eu url and got rid of the part where he said we may have ruined the spirit of the awards
- Update #7: I'm sorry if you're offended
Here's the full album of PodcastAwards.com screenshots put together by Chimaera
The mood in the chatroom at the time ranged from "Ohh come on!" to "LOL *popcorn eating gif* ". And boy, t2t2 was throwin' ALL KINDS OF SHADE on Twitter! It was great!
As of 9:30 PM Pacific Time the night of the awards, the front page of the podcast awards site showed all of the winners that were announced on the stream. Then @podcastawards tweeted to Adam Curry that the votes will stand and that all the winners are actually winners. So there ya have it. We won… fair and square? Lol who cares.
@podcastawards returned to twitter at 11:19 PM Pacific to clarify to everyone exactly how we totally owned the awards this year (and also last year). In a string of five tweets, he tweeted screenshots of the bookmarklet in action, a link to the nomination methodology on GitHub, and a planning thread on Reddit. He even retweeted t2t2 who sent him links to three other related Reddit threads. Of course, he continued the tradition of screwing up names (see Sam Schoo and "Jiz Wiz" for just two examples) by referring to the people behind hat.t2t2.eu as "Diamond Group". Oh, Todd. Here's the screenshots of the five tweets.
Winners were given the option to buy their own outrageously priced trophies. The cost was $400 (+$40 shipping) for large trophies and $250 (+$35 shipping) for small trophies.
Are We Banned?
Rumors are now speculating whether Diamond Club is banned from the Podcast Awards for causing so much controversy around the awards. According to Robert Jason Young on Night Attack, Todd had said that he will try and sell the Podcast Awards and that he will not continue running them after 2016.