Jan
13th
2024
"The feature box is full of porn" -- but is it? · 11:46pm January 13th
Words often seen in various Discords:
The Feature Box is full of porn!
But is it?
Warning: below are numbers and statistics.
I decided to evaluate only stories since January 1st, 2022, embracing recency bias.
tl;dr: [Mature] rating is less likely to be featured than [Teen] rating, which is in turn less likely to be featured than [Everyone]. However, a [Porn] [Mature] story is twice as likely to feature than a non-[Porn] story that is rated [Mature].
The details:
- Total stories 12618, featured 4529, for a rate of 35.9%
Mature stories 3852, featured 1045, for a rate of 27.1%
- Mature but not Porn: 1606 stories, 279 featured, 17.4%
- Mature and Porn: 2246 stories, 766 featured, 34.1%
- Teen stories 4622, featured 1805, for a rate of 39.1%
- Everyone stories 4144, featured 1679, for a rate of 40.5%
Quantitatively, porn is both less common and less likely to feature than Teen/Everyone stories. The impression that "The feature box is full of porn!" is perception, not reality.
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SockPuppet · 419 views
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Fascinating! Thanks for the data. n_n
Thank god, some reliable mathematics.
Ooh, good takeaway. I suppose most of the people making this claim are either comparing it to the old days, when Mature stories and especially Porn ones made up a smaller chunk of new fics, and/or bemoaning how, as output drops across the board but drops less for them, and there's more than a 1/3 of a chance of any fic getting featured (as will happen when the box is the size width for the fandom's heyday despite the output now being about 30% of what it was then), there's near-always a few on there.
Also, this shows that more Mature Porn fics are published than Mature non-Porn fics by nearly 40%. Which, while not too surprising, is still plenty telling of the wider issue.
I suppose this is mathematically equivalent to saying "Your swimming pool is less than 20% alligator by volume. It's still over 80% water."
If one doesn't like alligators (porn), this might still seem too much.
5763599
I think "Mature not Porn" is a weird dead zone. I can feature box it reliably by writing sex comedies, but people trying to write horror or drama struggle to get traction in that space.
5763601
It doesn't help that many people, and I'm guilty of this too, tend to auto-jerk look away from any Mature story on the feature box without even looking at the tags, because even if the cover isn't obviously porn, many of the rest don't tend to be written well either.
Non-Porn Mature fics doing well these days, I'd wager, probably only happens with a much-followed author and/or the rare word-of-mouth viral hit (mushroompone's The Head is a good example of this, that did the rounds with "this is top quality" suggestions for ages).
5763604
You've hit both issues precisely on the head here, yes. In my mind:
I do love some good data, even if a number of my Mature/Porn stories have contributed to the perception that the Featured Box is full of porn.
Perhaps people know what they're getting into with porn. Mature without porn (especially with a crossover tag) is often unhinged rambling of some edgelord.
...doo-dah, doo-dah?...
Yep, this reflects what I'd gathered from previous looks.
Basically, porn only pays if you're one of a relatively small cadre of established authors. A Leech or a Steel will get the views but 75% of the rest won't even scratch it. Voting is much harsher, too: if you look at the most recent featured porn stories, many of them are a quarter to a third downvotes. By comparison, a comedy or drama in the same time frame is only getting around 10% negative or less.
Edit: the last month's worth of featured porn stories average going 72/16. The comedies averaged 55/3.
5763621
To be honest, you sometimes get that with your porn, too.
5763632
Horse fame matters even with porn! I guess this ties with the above: you know that when you read a Some Leech story, you might get kinks and stuff you're not into, but it's going to be well written and not devolve into some weird rant about how donkeys secretly control Equestrian banking, or something.
there are 3 mature and porn stories in the feature box as we speak...
5763643
That's why I averaged the analysis over 24 months, to get the ensemble numbers.
5763644
it's either porn or mature but not porn stories that instantly get abandoned, or they get to just long enough that you trust the author to continue, and then its 6 months for a 2k word update and then nothing again. that's been my experience over the years at the very least.
Edit: Also numbers of quite a few things are off ever since the explosion of users from 2020 onwards, we see a lot more........... I don't know how to say trash without being rude so...
(edit 2: god, the amount of self insert hie...)
5763647
I have a simple system: I don't read anything that isn't marked complete. I got burned one time too many by abandoned fics when I first joined the site.
The apparent explosion of users on the statistics page is from when the mods gave up on banning bots in 2020.
I think Luna the Holy for the [Self-Insert] tag; I know to skip this without clicking.
Keep in mind that the statistics only account for what stories have been displayed on the feature box - not the amount of time they actually spent there (or how many times they have climbed up there, for long-form multi-chapter fics [which rarely, if ever, includes clop]). Theoretically, you could have porn taking up the half the slots all year with a far lower statistical percentage, so long as the stories never dropped off.
That said, I'm aware this changes nothing. I doubt that there is any significant variation between the times fics stay in the box of selective-fame, safe for some edge-cases. And if you're only interested in what makes it into the box, what I've said matters even less.
Anyway, thank you for running the numbers 👍 Always interesting to see this sort of thing
*edit Forgot to mention that this mostly applies to how people "see" mature content taking up the feature box. If clop stories truly remained on the box for longer than other stories, it would seem to outside observers as if it was easier for them to get into the box, when in truth they have lower chances of getting there.
Hmm, I wonder how much the fact that there are technically two featured lists (mature and not mature) is messing with the statistics. On the days that the mature box is filled with mature stories, the non-mature box has to fill those same slots with non-mature stories. This means it might force the numbers of teen and everyone stories featured up, because they have a feature box where they don't have to compete with the mature stories.