The importance of user interfaces · 11:10pm Feb 3rd, 2015
When I look around at other fan-fiction websites, I notice two things:
1. They don't have as good user interfaces.
- They have no ratings system for stories. At most they let you order stories by the number of favorites, but a terrible story with 1000 views will always have more favorites than a great story with 100 views. Possibly there is a great story somewhere on Wattpad about One Direction, but you'll never find it. The only other fanfic site with ratings AFAIK is ponyfictionarchive.net, but very few people leave ratings there [0].
- They have no downvotes, only upvotes.
- They require too many clicks. You have to click to see the comments by other users; you have to click several times to leave a comment. So nobody leaves comments.
- They don't provide interesting, pretty, or customizable user pages.
- They don't provide user blogs.
- They're ugly, or at best boring.
[1]
2. They don't have as good stories.
I don't think this is a coincidence. I started posting stories on fanfiction.net. Then I moved to ponyfictionarchive.net. I gave up on both those places (sorry, RBDash47!) I had at least half as many hits to my stories on each of those websites as I did on fimfiction, but I didn't care about the hits, because they were just numbers. I didn't get comments; I never got to know anyone. About 1 reader in 100 leaves a rating, favorite, or comment on those sites, versus 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 on fimfiction. I believe that's because the user interface makes it easier and more fun to leave comments. Also, because users can have informative user pages, and blogs, you can see somepony is clever in a comment and click on zer username to see zer favorites, watchees, etc. You can read zer blogs. You can find people with similar tastes and get to know them. You can be part of a community without needing to be totally obsessed with the site and hang out in chat or on twitter for hours a day.
I write ponyfiction instead of Harry Potter, Buffy, or Star Trek fiction because fimfiction made it fun to post stories, and fun to compare my metrics (thumbs, favorites, views, followers) to those of other writers. I still post stuff to EQD, but only to drive people to my fimfiction page. If I were limited to the comments and metrics I get on EQD, I'd have quit years ago. [4]
The user interface determines how users can find stories and how they will respond to stories. That determines what kinds of writers will stay, and what kinds of stories they'll write.
Minor changes can have enormous impacts. For instance, back in 2013, chapter updates didn't appear on the front page. (They were technically in the front page; they were in the HTML, but you wouldn't see them unless you clicked on a tab. [2]) Also, the featured box had no slots for chapter updates. Because the only things that mattered at that time were either (a) getting onto EQD, or (b) getting into the featured box--to a first approximation, no one read your stories unless they did one of those things--it was obvious to me that writing multi-chapter stories was a waste of effort. Only 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 readers would favorite a story, which meant that if the entire story wasn't up there the moment the first chapter was posted, the number of readers who finished a story was approximately zero (if you didn't get featured and didn't have lots of watchers), or else 1/10th of the number of readers who read chapter 1 when it was featured. Writing longfics was thus pretty pointless, because even in the best case of getting featured, few people finished them.
There were old long stories from the pre-fimfiction days that everypony knew about, like Eternal, Fallout Equestria, and Past Sins, but my impression (unsupported by actual counting) is that 2012-2013 was dominated by writers like shortskirts, AbsoluteAnonymous, Blueshift, & RainbowBob who did a lot of one-shots.
Now, with a column and 3 featured-box slots for updates on the front page, longfics are about as beneficial as one-shots, especially short-longfics, e.g., 3-5 chapters, for which you release one chapter per day, since if the first chapter gets you into the featured box, each subsequent chapter guarantees you another day in the box.
I used to think user avatars were stupid, but now I think they may be important. I know that, except for me and TheJediMasterEd, people don't look like their avatars. But it gives me a face nonetheless. Somehow seeing that yellow sponge in blue pants makes me feel more like a real person wrote that comment.
Font size is critical. There are plenty of blogs out there where user comments are in a tiny font underneath the original post, and sandwiched between ads on each side so they have a linefeed every 6 words. That communicates that user comments aren't important. And the users get that; they leave short, useless comments.
What I'm trying to say is that all the seemingly insignificant details about a site's user interface ultimately determine what kind of people use it and what kind of stories they write.
I have my own two proposed UI changes for fimfiction which I think would have dramatic effects on the kinds of stories written:
1. Get rid of the featured box. Its primary direct effect is to concentrate literally most of the views on the site on a handful of least-common-denominator stories. Its primary effect on writers is to strongly motivate them to write the kinds of stories that get featured. Without the box, writers might hope to write good stories and get views by word-of-mouth. With it, it's orders of magnitude more effective to write stuff that is likely to be featured. [3]
2. Remove the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons from a story's front page. Nobody should be able to vote on a story without at least seeing one page of the story's text. If this change were made, we'd eliminate most of the "I'm downvoting this because clop / alicorn OC / Rainbow Shy / sucky picture / dark tag". Then the list of top stories wouldn't be so dominated by sweet, inoffensive stories.
[0] There was a time on ponyfictionarchive when I picked up one follower who read and loved all my stories, and rated them all 5. He didn't notice that the rating system went from 1 to 10 and converted that to 1 to 5 stars. Nobody else rated most of my stories, so they all had 2.5 stars out of 5.
[1]. Fimfiction fails big in one way: it has no forums. Groups are only a partial substitute. I suspect one reason we have no forums is that would provide a mechanism for discussions about fimfiction policies, and knighty doesn't want public discussions of fimfiction policies. I suspect a larger reason is that Xaq and knighty prefer chat.
[2]. The single most-important rule of web UI design for sites like this is that at most 1 user in 10 will click on anything that isn't a continuation of some previous decision to click on something. That is, once someone has clicked on a story, they've decided to investigate that story, so the odds are pretty good (1 in 2) that they'll click on the first chapter, and also pretty good (1 in 2) that they'll then click on the second chapter. But odds are only about 1 in 10 that they'll click on a thumb, or a star, or to leave a comment. On sites like ponyfictionarchive.net, where you have to make 3 clicks to leave a rating, less than 1 in 100 users leaves a rating.
[3] Of course that won't happen. One interesting alternative would be to give one slot permanently to EQD, and another slot to rotate through the recent selections by the RCL, Seattle's Angels, the Royal Guard, and Twilight's Library oops.
[4] We could get into a long discussion of why the comments on fimfiction are so much more intelligent than the comments on EQD. I don't have any theory other than "why write long comments for people you don't know?" The effect is so strong, consistent, and long-lasting, that there must be at least one good explanation.
[not referenced] The recent addition of "Also Liked" could have had a major impact, though it hasn't for me. The only story of mine for which "Also Liked" lists anything other than stories by me, Skywriter, Cold in Gardez, horizon, GhostOfHeraclitus, and PowerdByTea is "Experience", and I'm getting decreasing rather than increasing hits on that story. ("Trust" and "Moments" are the stories that have become inexplicably popular lately, and between the two of them, they list only one non-Bad-Horse story under "Also Liked".)
I think I agree with your suggestions #2 and #3 (for what little it's probably worth), and I don't think I need to discuss either much, because you're laying out my opinions.
I think losing the feature box would be a bad idea, though—primarily because I think our community benefits a lot from diversity, and because the feature box gives a major incentive to most writers. It's almost like a lottery. People will play, just for the chance of winning. And most writers aren't going to approach the feature box with the sort of analytical rigor you're suggesting (though obviously the best way to get in is to do so, to be willing to appeal to the LCD, and to be able to write well enough to make things stick). On the other hand, I know what tends to get featured, and while that's always a bit of a motivator for me to go that way, I still do most of my work on stories that are much less likely to succeed. I'm disappointed any time I can't get 500 likes (which never happens), but I'd still rather write the stories I want than whatever grabs the feature box. I figure it's all the more proof of quality if I can get a story in there without catering.
But I'm a very different case than most Fimfiction writers. I know I can tailor a story for EQD and get a major view boost through them (it may not be worth as much as it used to, but EQD still drives a lot of traffic). I know I have people paying attention to me who can drive conversations on the site. I'm not the only person working in that sort of field. The vast majority of writers aren't, though, and for them, the Feature Box is an achievable goal—because of exactly the arguments you're making against it. They can figure it out and make a decent attempt to get a story in. And quality does still matter for Feature Box stories, just not at the level a place like EQD cares about. It's pushing writers with lower skill levels to get better.
If anything were to change inre the feature box, I think what I'd actually suggest is to build in a small heat penalty for a user's number of followers or create some sort of user-based cool-down penalty effect, to make it a little harder for the folks who seem to have stories constantly flooding in and out to take up so many spots. Because I think that's the only real problem with the Feature Box—stories getting locked out because one or two users are mashing the same dopamine button all week. It doesn't happen that often, but I've seen times when one author had three of the seven new story slots, for three very similar fics. That's not helping to encourage anyone to write better. But aside from those (fairly rare, I think) instances, I feel like the feature works just fine and acts as a net positive.
I don't see why you wouldn't use they here, it's perfectly usable as a gender-neutral singular pronoun and gets the meaning across without any confusion.
EDIT: removed unnecessary hostility.
Ohgods that suggestion #2. YESYESYESPLEASE.
Everything you've mentioned is why I don't write as much non-pony fic as I used to. I am currently, admittedly, working on a Zelda story. Mostly because a friend expressed interest in reading it, which gave me some actual motivation to write. "Getting" to post things to Fanfiction.net and watching the complete and utter lack of comments, favorites, or anything else fun is really not enough motivation for me to write. I'd rather work on ponyfic, where even my very worst and least popular stories have about as much attention as my best and most popular over on that other site.
Fanfiction.net has a lot of good stories, actually. Maybe not pony stories, I don't go to it for that, but good stories. They just tend to be lost in all the dross.
I do agree with you about avatars. Having an image to associate with a person makes it easier to keep track of them and recognize them in a variety of situations. It's easier to say "oh it's that person again" when seeing them in the comments of a story, for example, because humans are visually oriented to a large degree. For this reason, I find the people that constantly change their avatars frustratingly hard to remember and often only by chance recognize that I've run into them again.
I suspect your featured box suggestion is a bad idea, but it's hard to say as I'm atypical in that I always find new stories by trolling through the favorites lists of authors I enjoy. It wouldn't affect me to be rid of it, but I'm aware I'm atypical and I suspect the average person would not enjoy its loss. Some of your analysis seems like you are not aware that you are not an average person in all respects. For example, you have overly optimistic ideas about what leads to getting views with stories. Didn't you say you had previous experience with fanfiction.net? Many of the most viewed stories there are atrocious and you can't tell me that it's related to a featured box, because they don't have one. Sure, they also don't have rating systems but some of those fics have many, many glowing reviews.
Ultimately, I feel like if you're more concerned about writing a featured story than a good story now, you aren't suddenly going to be concerned about writing good stories if the featured box is gone, you'll just look for a different way to game the system.
I always feel like I'm less involved on a site where I cannot use my standard avatar. Reddit is a big example of this, I have the same username and am occasionally recognized, but if you see my fireworks there's a 99.9% chance it's me and you just can't there.
As a reader I'd hate to lose the featured box, I have found plenty of good stories (and more importantly, authors worth watching) in that box.
Completely unrelated to this:
Harper Lee is going to release another book, apparently. I remember you noting that it clustered stylistically with Capote's work, ages ago; it will be interesting to see how it goes without Capote around.
It's true. The gleam of my scales doesn't really come out in art.
I also actually end up associating voices with some folks based on their avatars. HoofBitingActionOverload sounds like Rainbow Dash to me.
I do agree that avatars help me to associate words with names and faces and, thusly, people. Also, I think that the appearance of your avatar makes a difference on how people perceive you. If I had a cheerfully maniacal icon, do you think that people might think I'm more whimsical? I suspect that they would.
I strongly suspect this is the result of Skype conversations and blog posts, which unfortunately are invisible to us. Another thing is that "Also liked" may not be reciprocal; I suspect that some stories are fed into a lot more than they feed out. That is to say, a highly rated story which is well-liked is likely to show up in the "also liked" list of more stories than show up in its own "also liked" list, because the list is limited to eight stories for each story.
This is a great idea. They should be displayed, but not clickable. Of course, I've suggested the same, as have others. Not sure why Knighty DOESN'T do this, honestly.
If you know how to advertise your stuff, you do better in the featured story box. I know a lot of people think it is a pain, but I've been trying to collect advice from folks who do get featured for a long time, and I've managed to actually build up some tactics for it. Bookplayer noted that I get "lucky" with the featured story box; I don't. I combine the technology of my own observations, bats' advice, and The Abyss's promotional techniques; since I started doing all three, only one story (Famous Last Words) hasn't hit the featured story box, and even though I screwed up the release of Dawn, it still briefly made the box (had I released it at the proper time, it likely would have a ton more views; unfortunately, I didn't de-queue it after submitting it on a Sunday afternoon and having it go up at 1 am on Monday morning). I may not be the most successful at occupying the featured story box, but I can get stuff into it. Even Ruin Value made the featured story box briefly; it was one of only two More Most Dangerous game contest entries which did. And even it was not quite released at an optimal hour; four hours earlier, and it might have actually stuck in the featured story box.
As an aside, one thing that doesn't work for me? Posting covers elsewhere. I put my covers on DA and Derpibooru. Number of hits from there: 0.
But I digress.
I think that the featured story box is valuable. Assorting views in this way is not really any worse than assorting views in any other fashion, and by putting fresh new stories up on the front page of the website on at least a weekly basis, not only does it show life and dyanmicism, but it also drives people to want to get featured and creates a common community of talking about stories in the featured box, complaining about them, whatever. If a story gets featured folks are more likely to read it even if they're already following you.
But I think that the cultural impact is the most important bit; it creates a sort of common base of stories to talk about and discuss on Skype or whatever, and sort of gives us a background of what is going on in the world of FIMFiction. Sure, it drives a lot of views to those stories... but I'm not sure if that's really a bad thing.
One thing that might make it slightly better, though I'm not sure if it really would: instead of featuring just a set 7+3, instead have it have 14+6, and display two different, alternating sets of 7+3; that being said, the problem with that might be that the stories which don't make it may more frequently be dreck, and consigning them to popular stories may be a bit better. It would mix things up a bit more, though I'm not sure if it would have a desirable effect or not.
2767573
Honestly, while you and I and Bad Horse may believe that LCD stories that make the featured story box are easy to write, we all have made the featured story box already, so I'm not sure if we really have an objective view of how easy it is to write a LCD story that makes the featured story box is.
I believe this is intentional. It funnels discussion into blogs and story pages and avoids the identity crisis that forums typically encounter.
2767590
Bad Horse is adopting a German accent into his typing patterns to throw off forensic linguists trying to determine his true identity.
2767695 It might not mean much, though--she's nearly 100, deaf, nearly blind, and supposedly has some dementia.
2767890
After reading some additional reports, supposedly this book was actually written before To Kill A Mockingbird, and she was advised by her editor (presumably Capote) that the story of Scout when she was young was more interesting, which lead her to write, well, the book we all know. So it may not resolve things at all, given that it was probably edited by the same person and written in the same time period, assuming, of course, the story of its provenance is true.
Of course, that might also mean it isn't going to be as good as To Kill A Mockingbird if it was abandoned in favor of the other work.
I'm afraid I have to take the story of its provenance with a bit of salt, though; I mean, the story is, at least, remotely plausible (seriously, editing before computers sucked) but the idea of a lost novel is one of those "too good to be true" stories.
2767590 No; "they" is plural.
2767901
People have been doing it for centuries. George Bernard Shaw used it in this way. That's good enough for me.
I think you meant [3] here.
I don't think I would have continued reading ponyfics (this is the first time I've read fanfics) if it weren't for this site. I really dislike fanfiction.net or deviantart, and while I can tolerate Gdocs, it's not ideal by any means. It makes me happy that knighty has plans on expanding the site, since I don't think I've seen a fanfiction site that has as good an interface as this one.
I really like the second suggestion. It's actually quite weird that it hasn't been implemented. Not so adamant about removing the featured box though. While it's true that I've never found a story that became a "Top Favorite" due to the box, I do think it adds some flavor to the site, and it is a convenient place to find up and coming stories and writers. Speaking entirely from a reader's perspective, I've never really had trouble with it.
I very much have to agree with you on the community that is built up on Fimfiction, and how this acts as a motivator for writing. The only other fanfiction community with which I have much experience is the Daria fandom, and a similar community exists there (albeit WAY smaller). This community originally grew up around several websites and message boards, though it is now almost entirely centered around a single forum. The effect is so strong that nearly all fanfiction written (which is quite a bit more than you might expect for a semi-obscure cartoon that went off the air fifteen years ago) is posted first, chapter by chapter, in that very forum. Many good stories are never posted anywhere else (which is hell for trying to find anything), especially since the main fanfiction site for the fandom shut down a few years ago. The main reason for this is the community, the comments and feedback writers get in replies in the forum, similar to the comments here, which they do not get anywhere else. This similarity is one of the things that drew me the fimfiction in the first place.
I love plenty of other franchises (Harry Potter, Avatar: The Last Airbender, etc etc), and I've occasionally thought up fanfic ideas for them, but I have never found any community well-developed as these two to really draw me in to them.
[1] I have 2 reasons.
1) Yes, I prefer chat. I loathe forums in fact
2) We'd have to have a ton of moderation for forums. Groups serve that purpose and allow self moderation which works way better.
Here's a better idea than eliminating the feature box that would accomplish many of the same goals: personalize the feature box.
As anyone who has read John Perry's reviews knows, there are certain types of stories that often appear in the feature box, and these types of stories reflect the major types of readers on fimfiction. My proposal would be to use a system similar to the algorithm that generates the "Also Liked" stories, except instead of looking for stories that were upvoted by similar groups of users, look for users who upvote similar groups of stories. The site could cluster users by the similarity of their patterns of upvotes into some number of groups (say 10-20), calculate separate heat scores for each of those groups of users, then show you only those stories with the highest heat scores from the group(s) with which you cluster most closely. For example, the feature box of someone who upvotes mainly clop stories would feature stories most popular with others who upvote mostly clop stories, whereas someone who rarely upvotes clop would see a different set of stories. This would lessen the problem of stories that appeal to the "least common denominator," while at the same time expanding the number of stories that get featured (and featuring those stories only to those who would be most likely to enjoy them).
Implementing this clustering is probably a computationally difficult task, given the number of users and stories on fimfiction, but such a calculation could probably be performed infrequently (e.g. update the user groupings once a month). Alternate methods would be to cluster users based on whom they follow or the groups to which they belong.
I think you're on to something here. The only times I've ever successfully posted more than about 2-3 chapters worth of any piece of writing were when I was posting stuff to a forum (guaranteed feedback--if you're not getting feedback after every update, including the first one, you've done something wrong) and one time when it was sort of a spinoff to an RP group (which also meant guaranteed feedback from people I was already friends with, ironic since I'd be surprised if more than 30 distinct individuals read that story). This site seems to be just as good for feedback as any forum, except much better organized for actually reading things.
I also suspect I've left comments on more stories on this site in the last two months than I have on all other fanfic sites combined; the only reason I don't say more comments period is because of one story on Archive Of Our Own (which is actually almost as good as this site in terms of comments being easy) with, you guessed it, lots of direct interaction between the author and the commenters.
2767901
Increasingly (and particularly in BrE), style guides recognize the singular "they" as perfectly grammatical and even preferred. I expect that it will be the norm within a decade.
2768302
Personalized recommendations would be amazing. What you've described sounds similar to collaborative filtering. Ideally, I think, a recommendation system would take into account the preferences of similar users as well as fic attributes like tags and length.
2767709
Not only do I do this, but it's so bad that I often give voices to people whom I have heard speak before. For instance, my brain insists GhostofHeraclitus sounds a bit like Graham Chapman pretending to be Socrates.
2767606 My serious question is: Why do you look to the featured box to find stories? You could read the stories posted on EQD, entered into the Vault or the Royal Canterlot Library, recommended by Seattle's Angels, the Royal Guard, Twilight's Library, PresentPerfect, Chris, Soge, Titanium Dragon, or people you follow who recommend stories. You could use the "Also Liked" list of stories you like. You could go to the user pages of writers you like and see their list of favorites. You could go to the write-off's archives and read the medal winners from each event.
Between all these things you'd find thousands of stories, almost all of which would be better than anything you'd find in the featured box on a typical day. So why ever use the featured box?
2768214
Hate to bother you about this, but have you thought about disabling the buttons on the story front-plates, so that you have to actually be inside the stories to click on them?
2768636
People look for stories in the feature box because it's efficient, much more so than finding and then reading through any of those reviewers' pages. If you're the average reader and you're looking for a fic to read, you refresh the front page and boomdiddlydoo there are a few new stories, at least one or two of which you're gonna be interested in.
If you get rid of the feature box, you don't disperse all those views across the front page. Most of them you just lose, because people don't want to scroll through pages and pages of stories to find something they're interested in. The feature box isn't to blame for featuring stories you don't like. That's just how popularity works.
2768636
Probably because it has the appearance of being easier/faster, as well as having the presence of "the crowd" behind it. Like, which is the average moviegoer more likely to spend their money on: the latest, big block buster hit which everyone is seeing and talking about despite the fact its reviews are all middling, or the one all the moviephiles are raving about and is getting a 98 on Rotten Tomatoes but is hardly making any money? Probably the blockbuster, right?
I think it's the same thing behind the feature box. People like to be in fashion, to keep up with what's hot. And the feature box presents itself as having what's hot. Personal and small group-led recommendations don't have nearly as much oomf behind them.
Also, if you're not actively seeking out these other groups for higher quality recommendations then it's likely the feature box satisfies your desires in terms of the quality and type of fanfiction you want to read. Or else you find another way to satisfy them, like I do. The guiding force here is that I don't think everyone comes to fanfiction looking for quality first; a lot come just to have fun and eat popcorn.
It certainly is an interesting issue. I agree with your blog almost entirely, by the way. And I'd be very interested in seeing what would happen were the feature box to be taken down, even temporarily. I also like your idea about not being able to vote from a story's front page; I would go so far as to say it would be better if we couldn't even see a story's up/downvotes until we clicked on it. When it comes to the frontpage, votes can outweigh even an interesting synopses or title or picture (or a bad synopses and picture and title).
2767573 I'm asking here because I'm lazy and your email address doesn't automatically come up on my phone
: do you think you can make it to Sunday rehearsal?
2768636
While I haven't posted it yet, I've been tracking stuff on my TD Pony Fanfiction Reviews spreadsheet, basically looking at what it was that made me read a given story, and how good of a source it was for a recommendation.
For reference, right now, featured has gone 0/2/2/10, which is to say, 2 recommended, 2 worth reading, 10 not recommended... which SOUNDS really bad, until you realize that some portion of the "Good author" stories ALSO were in the featured story box. As were some of the stories from pretty much all the other categories. And some of the stories which I simply read at random, and marked as worth reading, ended up getting featured subsequently. Coincidence? Hard to say. But I've found a number of stories to review which I ended up reviewing before they hit the featured story box.
The RCL is at 1/0/3/2, which is to say, 1 Highly Recommended, 0 Recommended, 3 Worth Reading, 2 Not Recommended... but again, this is probably somewhat biased because I've read a bunch of RCL stories that appealed to me, so these are by their nature either new ones or old ones I'd put off reading.
Stories recommended to me by random people are at 1/0/5/3, which is about the same as the RCL rate - which is pretty weird, when you think about it.
Seattle's Angels is at 2 not recommended; I don't really use SA very much.
PP has given me 1 WR and 2 NRs.
Contest Winners has given me my highest rate of anything; only one story I've read since I started reviewing which was a contest winner have I not recommended.
Good Author (i.e. I follow them) has given me 2/1/12/26, which is depressing on many levels (I actually unfollowed two people after I started keeping track of this and realized that I wasn't reading anything of theirs that I liked, and I had only ever liked one of their stories).
The sad thing is, browsing the reading list of some random guy (The Mighty Fenrir, who as it turns out actually runs a group which sort of collects what he considers quality stories, something I didn't remember at the time) got me 3 WRs and 2 NRs.
The other really good one is the Writeoff, which has yielded 0/4/6/5, which is a really, really good record.
I might start including multiple tracking columns to see if I can figure things out better (because I strongly suspect that will change some of these things), but right now, from where I'm standing, the RCL, random people recommending stories to me, and stories from the writeoff are my most successful lines of inquiry.
Unfortunately I'd have to do a ton of reading of stuff off of PP's lists to see if PP's recommendations are actually good for me or not. I do actually mark stuff he recommends as stuff to read, if it isn't already marked, but an awful lot of stuff already is.
...now you have me wanting to do a massive amount of data analysis.
...anyway, point is apparently that the Writeoff produces great stuff and apparently, at least according to me, that's about as good a bet as anything.
As a baseline reference:
Bad Horse: 2 unread
HR 4
R 5
WR 7
NR 9 (this is probably somewhat unfair)
HoofBitingActionOverload: 3 unread
HR 4
R 1
WR 11
NR 4
Bookplayer:
HR 2
R 4
WR 11
NR 11
...
On second thought, maybe this should be a blog post.
Enough of that. The featured story box.
The featured story box serves a lot of valuable purposes. One of those is allowing new writers to acquire visibility. By sticking it there on the front page, you're much more likely to see stuff you might not otherwise see, which not only encourages people to try out new and different things, but also means that you aren't quite so dependent on everyone already liking what you write. It is true that people who have been featured before have an easier time of getting featured again, but when I was doing analysis on the featured story box's contents last summer, every week there was a bit north of one person on average who had never been featured before as far as I could tell - and sometimes, it was someone who had never even written anything before. So clearly, even though the veterans dominate to some extent, newbies can still break in and get noticed.
Another thing is, as I noted, variety. It exposes us to things we might not have known we wanted to try out.
And, as 2768685 noted, it is a lot less work than digging through stuff, which is itself a not-insubstantial time cost. And let's face it: time costs are important here.
I guess, from the point of view of an established person who knows what's what, the featured story box has less relevance. I COULD just go through my read later - high priority list for the next few months, and never read a new story.
But we probably aren't who the featured box is really for, anyway. Plus I do like looking to see what is new, even if most of it is drek. There are zero stories in the featured story box I really want to read, and one (The Magic of Orphan Cookies) I might read. But if there was something good there, I'd take a peek.
It doesn't cost me much to browse the featured story box, after all.
Though one thing that might help would be a better group stories page UI. There's no convenient way to browse through group stories and tag them all as Read It Later or whatever, which would be useful.
Quite.
EQD used to be how you advertised longfics--you'd get a new post every update. This was particularly necessary way back in the day when the stories were all on Google docs. In the early days of Fimfiction, the difference between a longfic that was posting update links to EQD and one that wasn't was extremely stark.
2768636 I gather recommendations from all of those too, but they still don't give me all of the stories I end up enjoying than I'd experience with just them and not the featured box as well. The box tends to be how I stumble upon brand new authors who aren't bad, but just haven't made it into the collective mindshare of the stories recommended by all those other sources.
#1 Not sure about that... I dislike stories in the featured box most of the time but I can't see how it would be damaging that much. Would you really start writing stories in a style that you hate just to get featured? That sounds a lot like unpaid and unpleasant work.
2# The up-/downvote issue: it could be worthwhile to simply include a timer. If you don't spend at least 2 or 3 minutes on it after clicking on a chapter you don't get to vote. The instant-downvote for a tag, content or I think this writer is an idiot can kill a story from a lesser known author because the chances of getting views drops dramatically when your story has attracted zero ups and 4 downs in the first few seconds. Instant upvotes because of who the author is are also somewhat silly even if not that damaging.
As for the 'also liked' feature: I wouldn't know the effect it has for well known authors but I love the effect it has for me as a reader. I've found a lot of small gems by largely unknown writers that way over which I'd probably never have stumbled on my own.
YES! YES1 YES!
THANK GOD SOMEONE FINALLY SAID! YOU EXPRESSED WHAT I'VE BEEN THINKING FOR NEARLY THREE YEARS BUT HAVEN'T ACTUALLY VERBALIZED ANYWHERE!
THANK YOU!!THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
I will write a more in-depth comment once I'm rational
2767598
Yes, but the experience is akin to drinking week-old coffee.
Aside from the fact that the site itself is UGLY, comments (which are called "reviews", for some reason) are inaccessible unless you are already logged in AND click an out-of-the-way link (oh, and logging in also requires CAPTCHA. Always).
It's also much harder to search for good stuff-I used to rely on TVTropes for that, but it's not ideal.
2769364
Also, let's not forget that comments cannot interact with each other in fanfiction.net, which is insane moon logic to me.
If we're bitching about ways the site fails, may I bring up the lack of tag clouds?
Because seriously. That should be basic functionality.
Also, as far as the featured box goes, that's the number one reason I dread sending people who have only a vague interest in reading ponyfic here. Not because the stories are lowest common denominator, but because the stories are often vile.
I try not to judge based on content, I really do. But there was a moment last summer when I looked at the feature box and it was literally (and I mean literally as in I did the math) 7/10ths stories that basically boiled down to "3,000 or so words describing a rape in graphic detail and nothing else." Of those seven, three involved pre-pubescent children. Three (a disjoint set from the three involving foalcon) featured cover art that was near-pornographic in nature.
It often isn't that bad, but there is rarely a day I can't find a story in that vein sitting right in the featured box when I visit here. I know it's considered bad form to suggest any kind of content policing, and frankly I'm unsure there's an fair and equitable way to walk down that road, but I am just... it's wearying, you know? It's like, THIS is what we feature? Like, all the time? Really, we can't do better?
I am aware that the content isn't much different on other sites, but those sites don't front and center it the second you arrive.
2769369 What would you do with tag clouds? Seeing that "sex" is big still wouldn't make me click on it.
That is an interesting point. The mods already moderate stories; it wouldn't take much extra effort to moderate the featured box.
2768813 Wow, I admire your systematicity. I've been too lazy to keep such records. Sparse data, though. I wouldn't dismiss Seattle's Angel's so quickly. I think they're my best source, though I haven't counted. I only read the ones that appeal to me, tho. Did you get your numbers by reading a random sample of recommended stories, or by (doing what you're supposed to do and) reading the reviews and reading only the stories that sounded appealing to you? Are you counting that jazz one I recommended, which you already knew you didn't like?
I think the basic problem here is that you hate everything.
Wait a minute. You follow me.
Logically, this can only mean you've read only 3 of my stories, and don't like anything by anyone else.
2767590 The write-off has an award for most controversial. You have won it.
2768685
I doubt that, but we shouldn't argue over it unless we have some evidence to use.
BTW, other than write-off stories, "Spring is Dumb" is the only featured-box story I can remember enjoying since "Brony Hero in Equestria" 2 years ago... but I didn't read SiD when it was in the box. I read it when people recommended it to me.
2769461
Properly implemented, it would make searching a lot easier and more exact than it is now. We kind of, sort of have tags in the form of the predefined character ones: I can get everything that's been tagged "Twilight Sparkle" or "Rainbow Dash" or "Twilight Sparkle AND Rainbow Dash." But unless I've missed something, that's about as far as it goes. A proper tag cloud allows for user-defined tags and much more detailed filtering.
For example; I should be able to filter by the tags "Twilight Sparkle OR Rainbow Dash", getting all stories with either rather than only those with both. Maybe my interest is in stories where they hook up; in that case I would be able to search on "Twidash" or "Twilight Sparkle/Rainbow Dash." (Communities tend to settle on accepted nomenclature really quickly and then the tag becomes standard.) Or maybe I'm only interested in stories in which Twilight and Rainbow hang out together but DON'T hook up; in that case, I would search on "Twilight Sparkle AND Rainbow Dash EXCLUDING Twidash." Maybe I want romance but am not interested in fluid exchange; I would search "Twilight Sparkle AND Rainbow Dash AND Twidash EXCLUDING sex." Perhaps I'm not really interested in romance if it doesn't involve a larger plotline, so I would need to include "adventure" along with "romance" and my shipping tags of choice.
Maybe I'm only interested in adventure stories involving post-apocalyptic versions of Equestria; the tag "post-apocalypse" would probably take me there. Maybe I really goddamn hate the Crystal Empire; I can exclude "Crystal Empire." Or maybe I love it and really want to see what stories have been written about the Crystal Empire today!
Maybe today I want to see what stories have been written about Twilight's gender-swapped duplicate, Dusk Shine. The user-created and curated Dusk Shine tag will take me there! Ditto for stories about Nix. Or griffins! Let's see what's new in the griffin tag. Maybe today I have a powerful urge to read about interspecies sex, so let's search on "griffins AND sex."
Tag clouds. They're awesome, done right.
2769503 You're talking about 2 different things, user-defined tags, and boolean searches. Boolean searches are awesome, but contradict the simple "just click on stuff" design philosophy. (BTW, we can already exclude tags; we just don't have the OR.) User-defined tags would be pretty cool, but contradict the "I must implement a system that allows me to forbid tag combinations I don't like" design philosophy. (EDIT: knighty is right that we'd end up with 12 different tags for Rainbow Dash.)
Tag clouds, to me, mean the graphic display of clouds of tags, with font size indicating popularity, and is independent of those other things. Wikipedia says,
2769516 Well, that's fair; I was using the term in the context to which I've been exposed to it, where "tag cloud" just means "the cloud of all existing tags." I'm more than prepared to accept your definition, which is also how I've heard it used.
I am, yes. In my defense, those two things really need to go hand in hand. User-defined tags are an excellent start in and of themselves (they're the best part of AO3, a site that gets many things wrong but got that much at least right) but you really have to be able to get some proper filtering going on in order to make full use of them. But even just having user-defined tags would be a big step forward, allowing people to one-click search on all stories featuring "griffins" or "dragons" or "Twidash" or what have you.
True, but you'd need to drill down to get to it. I don't see any problem with "simple on top, but you can drill down to get increased functionality." That said, I understand the design philosophy the site is going for here and that they won't want you to have to have a basic understanding of programming to run searches.
How so? I mean, I'm only a programmer in the loosest sense of the word (I can just about take apart a script in PERL or Python if I really have to) but is there some technical limitation that allows "users can define their own tags" and "users can search on a group of user-defined tags" but doesn't allow "exclude tags they don't like while running searches on said tags?"
2769549 Ok first of all, stop saying tag clouds. That's not what you mean at all.
Secondly, adding user defined tags would take me almost no time, so why haven't I done it? Because user defined tags without any kind of thought are awful. I have a very clear vision for what tags are supposed to do which I've spoken about at length before.
1. They are for READERS not AUTHORS. That is a very important distinction to make. If I'm searching for Twilight, I don't want stories that feature her in like 2 sentences. This is the problem booru sites like derpibooru suffer from, and I think it's awful. By giving authors control, they will happily tag every character under the sun (hence why we have a programatically enforced 5 character limit). Engineering this social system is incredibly complex and I frankly haven't seen anyone do it properly as far as I'm concerned, so I'm not rushing on it.
2. The other purpose is to denote "warning" content like sexual fetishes and whatnot, regardless of what a small part they play, again for readers.
So yeah, I could add user based tags in no time right now, but it'd be awful, like every other site with tags.
2769503 I think knighty's right that user-defined tags would make a mess here without a lot of moderation. Look at the groups. There are 24 groups that describe themselves as the group to put stories about Derpy. We'd end up with pinkie pie, pinky, pinkie, pinky pie, pinkie-pie, and pinkypie. They'd also bork up the simplicity of the tag search UI.
2769564
I don't have a stake in this philological battle, so I'm happy to oblige here. I will just say that this is the common usage I'm exposed to with regard to the term.
... you know, it occurs to me that I should actually be, y'know, following you, so that I can see when the guy who actually runs the place talks about stuff at length.
Easily fixed.
Ideally, they're for both, but we live in an imperfect universe.
This is true, yeah. I'm familiar with the phenomenon; I spend a lot of time over on AO3, and while most people there are responsible with their tags, a non-trivial number do in fact do what you describe. As well as the people who decide to tell a lengthy aside with their tags, which, no. Just no. You're not on tumblr. I don't need to see a list of tags that reads something like "shipping" "non-con" "no seriously really non-con like wow you guys" "i warned you" "sorry" "not sorry".
See, for me, speaking as a reader, I've always found just about every site that even managed to half-ass user-created tags to generate increased functionality and enjoyment that more than offset the awfulness involved. It's like, yeah, okay, some people are messing this up horribly, but I can just ignore those guys and instead concentrate on the guys who are actually doing it right. I've found a lot of authors and artists I really, really enjoy that way, because it turns out the people who are diligent enough to curate their stuff responsibly are also diligent enough to make their body of work worth a look.
It's about the trade-off, and it has always been worth it for me.
That said, this is your joint. I just would really like to be able to do a lot more complex searching using more granular tags than we have now. But I'd like a lot of things that aren't likely to happen.
2767590 The appropriateness of "singular they" is going to be the 21st-century equivalent of the 19th-century foofaraw over whether or not splitting infinitives was allowable, only with a lot fewer crusty Oxford dons with hard-ons for making English as much like Latin as possible and a lot more... uh...
Hmm.
I don't really have a witty "more" there. But my larger point is that singular they is one of those things that can provoke a fight. Some writers and editors regard the use of it as a good reason to exile any work they see it in to Word Hell (a hell for words that are bad and should feel bad) and others regard it as salvation from having to use "he or she" or "h/she" and will evangelize the hell out of the virtues "they" has in the singular form if you give them half an excuse.
You can't even refer to authoritative sources to settle the dispute, because style guides are all over the map on it.
2768214 Perhaps a cross between forums and groups, then. A hierarchical list of topics for people to put their groups in, like
The website has too many users and groups now for the existing group system to work like it used to. Most new groups die because nobody's aware they exist.
Group creation could be moderated, like story creation is. The sole rule being, Don't create a group that already exists. I'd guess there are less than 10 new groups made per day.
Users without followers feel muzzled. They have things to say, but nowhere to say them. I've seen plenty of users who joined, wrote great blog posts for a few months, then gave up, because they had no comments.
I've had maybe 10,000 comments across my stories and blogs, and never needed to moderate anybody. (I blocked one guy temporarily, but didn't need to.) The only forums I've seen that needed moderation (beyond infrequent bannings after user complaints) were boards for illegal activities that had to continually ban posts for explicitly promoting illegal activities, or for advertising.
2769364
... You know that you only need to log in to review if the author has turned off anonymous reviews for their story, right?
Or do you mean you don't stay logged in? Because that shouldn't be happening, it remembers log-ins for three days.
2769490
This is on new stories I've reviewed since I started reviewing everything I read, rather than drawing on past data based on what bookshelves stuff is on.
The overall data was, as noted, assuming I reviewed everything you wrote:
Note that not all the NRs are downvotes (on people who are good, they're more likely to get no votes than downvotes, because they're unlikely to be that bad).
I actually made a blog post about this.
Because you've only written one story since I started doing reviews (The Mailmare), only one of them has actually been reviewed.
Oh, probably.
I've had a poor track record with Seattle's Angels' recommendations even prior to reviewing stories, though I'm not sure how bad it is. Honestly a lot of stuff they put up doesn't really light my fires.
I try not to read stuff just blindly anymore; I do look at the descriptions. Though admittedly I do sometimes read stories that I don't think will appeal to me because I'm wrong about them sometimes (this is how I eventually read your red-and-black alicorn story, for instance, which I loved). If someone recommends sometimes to me, or has written other good things, I'm less skeptical of their stuff based on descriptions.
2769564
I just wanted to say that I agree with this; one of the reasons that FIMFiction's tags are useful in many respects is that they are limited, though I sometimes am frustrated that I cannot search for certain genre tags (mythology and mystery being the big two that I would actually use, though both are very rare tags for stories here in general... which is probably why I suppose I want them, because those stories are hard to find. Also, ship-specific tags) but the reality is that limiting tags is useful in many respects.
2769672
The other problem is you have no idea which is the "right" group to join for the various ships (many of which have multiple groups) or individual characters unless there is only one such group, which is bad for advertising stories. Groups are a very useful means of advertisement, assuming you can find the right one; the ship-specific groups, for instance, tend to be very interested in new stories which are up their alley.
Of course, the downside is that you wouldn't have groups like the Intelligent Shipping Discussion, which is a more moderated version of the shipping group. Ironically, I don't think that has really involved much in the way of moderation, just expectation.
Reading this blog's comments has made me more glad than ever that I filter mature content on this site.
7/10 feature box stuff involved rape at one point? That's crazy! Most of the time there's one or two fics in the box that stand a chance of being followed by me. Usually the writing, instead of the premise, fails to meet my standards, but this is an amateur writing site. I'm not surprised to see poor writing on here.
7/10! Wow! Maybe bronies are as perverse as some media would want me to believe.
2771125 Now that you mention it I had a look...
currently 6/10, one featuring tentacle sex and two with incest. I mean, come on, this isn't a kink meme where this needs to be placed prominently on the front page.
I wish fanfiction has as good a user interface as this website. There are millions of stories just waiting to be read, but I will never find the good ones because there is no rating system. Shame.
I used to spend hours upon hours, before fimfition, on fanfiction looking for good Harry Potter fics that were not slash fics or heavily based on romance. You would think filtering put romance would make that easy. Wrong! People seem to think a story based on romance isn't romance if it has adventure as well. Just the other day I was looking through stories with the romance filtered out, but then I saw a story that half the discrption was "Zong! HarryXVoldemort! Slash!". Then when I asked the author why the story didn't have the romance tag, they said that romance was only a part of it. Yet they based their description on it, as well as choosing to put a supernatural tag instead of romance. Supernatural. On a Harry Potter story. Kind of redundant, right?
Ugh, this is why I stick to this site. While it may only have one fandom, it has such a good way of finding stories that it seems to have more good stories than all the stories in fanfiction. Also, the tagging system has room for more than two.