Will The Mods Please Get Their Heads Out Of Their Collective Asses? · 2:51am Jun 8th, 2014
Just for two seconds, because I'll bet that's all they can manage.
Anyhoo, remember that blog I just made critisizing the sheer retarded dumbfuckery of the featured box. Well today my opinions have been bolstered in a way not seen very often, a story that is completely rejected my popular opinion, and yet still makes it to the ShitBox™. That's right, I'm talking about The Line
There's plenty of controversy surrounding this story, including why the story hasn't been removed for his blatant breach of spamming rules (he even admitted it himself). But I'm not going to talk about that, I'm going to talk about the fallout. Though I was already aware of this fact previously, Prak summed this up more succinctly than I ever could:
One thing I've learned from the mods is that downvotes actually add to heat, albeit not as much as upvotes. It's theoretically possible for a new story to be featured with nothing but dislikes if it gets enough of them. Basically, the box is a joke.
Well, if people didn't believe that before, then they should now. That's right people, it doesn't matter how large a percentage of people dislike something as long as you get enough people to like it, even through means clearly against site rules, that's okay.
It wasn't always like this. I remember a time where the featured box was actually important. And then they moved it out of the top corner where it used to be, and around the same time shit started making it in. I'm not talking about my personal opinions, I'm talking about the upvotes and downvotes. There are only two statistics that matter when judging the quality of a story: Upvote to Downvote ratio and Upvote to View ratio. Total views are not important, as they are based on the success of your past works and your ability to market yourself as a writer, rather than on your abilities or the quality of your story. If a story has a lot of views but most people don't like it, it's not worthy of being paraded on the front page. You're rewarding stories for sucking ass, at least according to popular opinion, and we all know how fickle that can be.
This is actually an important issue, and I wish all of us were less lazy and more willing to stand up to the mods about this. This site is more than a little blog that posts fanfiction, it's a major hub of creative discussion, expression, and development, and it should be treated as such, not as a place that encourages copy-n-paste story topics. The only problem is that, as much as we think otherwise, we actually want the featured box to be this way. There, I said it. The general populace of this site is wrong about what they want, and the proof is all around. But that's an argument for another blog that will be posted shortly.
So yeah, mods, if you're seeing this, write a better fucking algorithm. Yours is shit.
The thing about the feature box is that it's not about what's necessarily good or bad, it's about what is popular. Stories that have those super-large amounts of downvotes are popular because they have so much heat from so many downvotes. There's also usually a large comment section on said bad stories because of author vs critic flame wars, and this also serves to just add more heat. This isn't even factoring any views or favorites.
In the end, it's not really the box's fault. It's kind of our fault for giving the bad stories the attention they don't deserve. Stories like The Line wouldn't have as much of a chance of getting featured if we just left it alone instead of getting into massive flame wars into the comments section and downvoting it into oblivion. Downvoting, commenting on how bad it is, and the ilk only serve to do the very thing we want to prevent: give it heat and a chance at the featured box.
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I love you Icebox, but that first paragraph is wrong. It's not called the popularity box. There's a list of popualr stories on the front page, and that's how that should be used. But it's marketed as the "featured box". That has nothing to do with how many views the story has. The word "feature" implies that the listing is based on quality and popular opinion, rather than the amount of controversy being drummed up about it. And it's certainly not the box's fault, but the morons who created it as it is today.
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I believe I have done a less-than-stellar job of crafting a response summing up my feelings in the form of JonTron. I can die peacefully now, but also roll in my grave seeing as the whole fimfic system is based on LIES.
I don't give a shit about the box.
I just want group notices.
2185633 First of all, cut the mods some slack. Yes, the FB algorithm no longer works for its intended purpose (I'll get to that in a moment), but just because it no longer does so does not make them stupid. Are they a bit behind with how the FB should be working the way the site is run now? Yeah, sure. But they're not stupid. Trying to keep over 120,000 people happy with only 6 people to keep order is pretty hard to do.
Second, I'll agree that the FB is false advertising, because 'featured' does have a connotation of quality that is deserving of a spotlight. And, earlier in the site's run, this was true. You even said it yourself:
That was back when we didn't have as many users on the site. Back then, there were less people writing and reading and commenting and upvoting and favoriting and downvoting as there are right now. Back then, the probability of a genuinely good story getting featured was higher, because there were less users to contribute to the heat pool. Because of this, the algorithm went for the most popular stories, because during that time, popularity was a general indicator of quality. Users were drawn towards better, more promising stories, and this gave the good stories the feature instead of the bad.
As the site started to get more users, the number of people who could contribute to the heat of a story increased, and we started to get people who were inexperienced with writing and literature contributing. Was it dumb luck the newcomers had bad taste? Was it cyber-terrorism? Was it divine intervention? We'll never know. What we do know, however, is that the algorithm was not always broken. It used to work, back when the algorithm accounted for less people. It's kind of like a public pool. The less people you have swimming in the pool, the less crowded the pool becomes, and the more enjoyable your swimming experience is. Then, when the obnoxious little kids show up and start jumping into the two-feet end of the pool, the experience takes a general turn for the worse.
Now, I do think that the algorithm could use a little better work to make it easier for generally-favored stories to get in. How? Maybe something like this:
[upvotes * favorites] / downvotes + views = heat factor
For example, a story with 10 ups, 10 faves, 100 views and 10 downs would have a heat factor of 110, while a story with 100 ups, 100 faves, 1000 views and 10 downs would have a heat factor of 1100. The stories with the 10 highest heat factors would get in. By not accounting comments (the things that are indicative of popularity), you'd most likely see an increase in more generally favored stories get into the FB, because we'd only account for the things that are generally indicative of quality. You should keep views in, because people tend to click on and read stories that are said to be good.
Either way, this is how I see it, and you're totally allowed to have a differing opinion than mine. I will, however, say that it's not worth getting too worked up over, because in the end, the real writers will come out on top.
Besides, it's fun to get popcorn and read those flame wars.
This is the opposite of what I heard from two of the mods. What I heard is that downvotes subtract from heat, BUT that due to the way the heat declines over time, usually any downvotes that happen after something is in the box count much less than downvotes before it went in the box (unless it was posted and jumped into the box within an hour or something.) So you could knock something out of the box with downvotes, but it would take way more of them than most things ever get.
You are mis-remembering, or misinformed, it was always based off of views as well as likes and dislikes. Yes, making the feature box used to be a bigger deal. But that was for three reasons: 1) Heat didn't fall as fast. Where as now, heat starts dropping in a matter of hours, and is pretty much even for all older stories after a few days, back in the day the heat lasted for weeks. Authors like TAW, AbsoluteAnonymous, and Device Heretic could literally sit there for for two weeks, taking up a spot. 2) Being at the top of the page, the feature box was viewable to everyone. You got more views, meaning more heat, and combined with the first problem that meant it was really hard to dislodge something in the feature box. 3) There were fewer spots. When I joined, there were five "new story" slots, period. What that means is that if you look at the bottom two new story slots on the current feature box, those wouldn't have been there. Not only that, but without that exposure they wouldn't have had a chance at climbing to knock out a story that was lodged there.
The box now is both easier to get into, and less important. Stories end up getting fewer up and downvotes, not because they're not as good as ones in the box back in the day, but because the box gives them less exposure.
But the box has always counted views [1], because it's always been a measure of popularity. I remember Knighty and Poultron arguing that back in 2012. It is the New York Times Best Seller list of Brony fandom. Look at the NY Times list-- a lot of the books there are Not Good, and many of them get on the list thanks to the authors name or marketing alone. All the list is telling you what people are leaving the bookstores with. Which is information that people seem to want.
It's not the job of the site, or the people on it, to review stories. And, frankly, if the feature box were based on upvotes and downvotes, you'd be doing more harm to a lot of genres-- Human, Crossover, Romance, OC tag, Mature-Sex, and various other tags all get auto-downvotes, as do most specific authors with a lot of followers, regardless of story quality. I think that giving downvotes more weight would just encourage this more (because it would do more damage), effectively limiting the Feature Box to Slice of Life stories about the least controversial characters and plots.
So, even if I'm sometimes not a fan of the stories in the feature box, I don't want it to change. It does what it does, and these days I think it does a good job of letting you know what people are reading and talking about, cycling through those quickly enough that no one is hogging the spotlight, and I see more "new" authors in there now days then I ever did before. I'm not lazy or unwilling to stand up to the mods, I'm not interested in changing things.
[1] (I will note one major change: giving heat value to comments. I think this is the only part that was a mistake, because it turns Author Meltdowns where people come with popcorn into a surefire way to make the feature box. Not something we want to encourage.)
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I believe this is indeed the case, but that views add to the heat. If that's the case, then downvotes may subtract the heat, but the views make up for the loss.
Regardless, the feature box algorithm is a funny little thing that you shouldn't let bother you, Garbo. Just write that amazing story that I know you can write and watch is sail to the top spot of the featured box for seventy-two hours.
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You're probably right. If my source was correct, the algorithm could have been more intelligently designed by a howler monkey, and I don't think the site staff are morons.
Except the guy who apparently (hopefully!) gave me bad info.
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Sorry, I don't normally pick at comments at all like this, Bookplayer, but I wanted to know what your opinion was on the idea of invidiaul users having more weight per upvote and downvote based on how much they'd already voted on another user. For example, voting every single fic on a single a user would have less of an effect of just upvoting one. Furthermore, if you upvoted everything you ever saw, upvoting another fic would have less of an effect than someone who was more reserved with their upvotes.
The idea of this being that if you voted less, then your votes would hold more weight. I can, of course, see the obvious flaws with this system, but it was my attempt to empower those who reserve their upvotes for fics that leave them speechless.
Regardless of that, I'm interested to hear what you think would be an improvement to the current system, if nothing else.
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I can totally see why that would be appealing, and I don't think it would mess up anything too badly, but there are some pretty big holes in it.
First, the most visible representation of the "heat" system is the feature box, and as I said before Knighty has never intended that to be a display of quality. It's always been intended as an answer to the question "What new stories have caught people's attention?" So, to that end, it doesn't make sense to give any individual users extra weight-- Just because one person upvoted five stories this evening and another only upvoted one doesn't mean that the story that was the only one someone upvoted did a better job of catching the attention of the public.
Second, when it comes to individual authors, while it does penalize those lovely people who downvote all the stories by one author, it also penalizes authors who are just good. When you look at authors like Skywriter, or GhostOfHeraclitus, or Tchernobog, there's a good reason someone might have upvoted all of their stories; they can write.
Third, it also penalizes the weight of peoples opinions just for being prolific readers who have opinions. Some people, like Skeeter the Lurker or JetstreamGW, just read a lot of stories, so it makes sense that they'd vote on them as well.
Finally, the biggest problem with the idea is that there's no definition of what you are and are not supposed to use the upvote/downvote for. Some folks, like Titanium Dragon, are just harsh judges. He downvotes a lot of fics because he feels that if he was bored by a story, or just didn't like something about it, it deserves a downvote. At the same time, other people wouldn't downvote a story unless it was serious Nazi propaganda full of spelling errors and the author personally threatened to kill their kitten. Both of them are "right" in the sense that nowhere on the site does it tell us what a downvote is supposed to be saying. And TD is no better or worse a judge of a story than the other person; he just has a different idea about what his downvote is saying. The same is true of upvotes.
So, without explaining to people what they're supposed to be using upvotes and downvotes for, it's not very fair to "punish" or "support" people who use them in the way that you think is right. The thing you suggest only works if you assume that an upvote is supposed to be for a story that takes your breath away, which isn't a fair assumption.
Do you think any mod will see this, or someone may link a mod to this blog?
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First, I'd like to apologize to everyone who had to be exposed to such a poisonous blog. I had a shitty day yesterday, and this was just another thing to get pissed off at, and I turned what could have been a completely legitimate argument into something completely uncalled for. Do I stick by my opinion that the featured box is crap? Yes. Do I stick by what I said about the mod team? No. You all have the right to be appalled by what I said here, if you are. I've written a proper post to show a less hate-filled argument, and also to apologize for this.
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Stories that go into the featured box tend to lose heat over time. How would you account for this heat loss? After all, heat suggests the popularity of a story at a given moment, not across the story's lifetime. This algorithm doesn't take into account the impact of time on heat.
2186855 maybe a story loses 100 heat per day? I dunno
I came up with it in about a minute and a half
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Im not really offended by what you said, I was asking a legitimate question. I want to know if the mods would care what one of the users thought of the box.
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Not particularly.