Speaking of the FIMFiction featurebox … · 1:02am May 8th, 2013
The story I just published will never appear in it.
(UPDATE, 7/2013: The policies have once again changed. This blog post's complaint is now obsolete.)
This is not a commentary on the quality of Melt's writing, nor of the tastes of its readers (though I'll admit the idea of a poem getting featureboxed is far-fetched). This is not a commentary on its competition (though there are some excellent stories currently featured). This is not pessimism, or prediction, or a passive-aggressive call to arms. This is a cold and simple fact.
Here's what it boils down to: Moderators will pass stories at a minimum of 1,000 words. However, a story must be 4,000 words to be eligible for featureboxing.
Did you know that? Probably not. It's nowhere in the FAQ or the story submission rules; I'm pretty sure it's never been officially announced. I myself only found out via coincidental word of mouth (and confirmed it with site administrators).
Now, I understand FIMFiction's reasoning. Short, low-effort stories will clutter the featurebox if given the chance; all other things being equal, shorter stories get more views because there's less effort involved in reading them. Feature-banning them gives more attention to deeper fiction. (That this policy also murders the entire genre of pony poetry — minus a few insane efforts like The Six Deeds of Harmony's 17,000+ words of iambic pentameter — is, objectively speaking, minor collateral damage. It's frustrating to me, but you could hand out playing cards to the membership of the site's poetry group and still have jokers to spare at the end.)
What does rankle is the deliberate obscurity of the policy.
The existence of a featurebox on the site's front page carries an implicit promise: readers have chosen their favorite stories out of everything we've published. It's an expression of pure democracy. A level playing field. Secret rules that affect some stories but not others are fundamentally incompatible with that — and they have real consequences for authors.
For example, I spent my first six months on the site writing an unbroken string of high-effort, polished, yet ineligible stories, and getting progressively more convinced that I was incapable of writing something that could earn popular acclaim. When No Regrets launched (with an EqD feature, no less)? Too short.[1] The Lotus Eaters? Too short. The catchily-named and universally upvoted Princess Luna Picks Up Hitchhikers? Too short (by 100 words).[1] I'd check the front page, seeing them accumulate views and thumbs, and then … nothing. All victims of a rule that nobody would tell me about.
I was too stubborn to let that deter me … but how many good authors have our lies of omission driven away?
Anyway: Melt. Won't featurebox, too short for EqD, and poetry's a niche market. Doomed to obscurity before it begins.[2]
Let me be clear: That isn't a plea for signal-boosting. If you find Melt's ineligibity for the featurebox outrageous, I'd much rather have you spread the word about the truth of the secret 4k rule than plug my piece. That's something that affects every single author on the site. I'd rather save other new authors heartache than earn a little extra egoboo.
Extended author's notes:
Melt started out as a straight ponification of T.S. Eliot's classic and endlessly quotable The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, based on a joke I made while darf and I were talking. (I have a bad habit of taking my own jokes seriously.)
Prufrock is about a narrator who regrets never working up the courage to make big decisions. My first idea was to rewrite it, faithfully, about Pinkie Pie's father … but then an odd thing happened. The poem developed a plot.
The seed was planted back in a filk-off with my nemesis[3]; I realized Sombra had his own boatload of regrets (and a more interesting character arc). Some conversations with Silver Quill and Gemini Star about the link between Sombra and Nightmare Moon fleshed it out, and then the setting of the tabletop RPG Polaris hit me between the eyes. Suddenly, a tragically flawed hero creating his own downfall.
The thing about that sort of story, of course, is that it's remarkably difficult to have the narrator regret his lack of decisions.
As such, Melt ended up much more an homage than an adaptation, but I hope I've remained faithful to the source poem in spirit while trampling all over its themes.
—
[1] The material that brought it over 4,000 words was added later on.
[2] Except for an awesome and gracious shout-out sent to an audience of almost 2,000. So, um … never mind! 
(Thank you, Darf.)
[3] "I grow old … here in ice … the day is bright, some curtains would be nice" was cut from the final poem, alas.
Oh wow, I had no idea.
I really don't understand the shortfic hate. I didn't bother submitting Old Friends to EqD because even though I knew it was good enough, it was a few hundred words short of their 2500 requirement (after talking to a friendly prereader about it I submitted anyway and it got through; my impression is they're looking to change the length requirements).
Melt is lovely[1], but I must take issue with what you said.
Unless the rule is quite new, stories of less than 4k words are eligible for the featured box because Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea was featured, and that doesn't even clear 2k.
Or is that a new thing? Because if it is, I think it is a travesty.
[1] And when I have more time I'll gab more about it.
Just to weigh in on this (not knowing how much it's prudent to say about undocumented site policy):
You're one hundred percent right on the fact that the featurebox limit was instituted to filter out the type of pandering schlock that was rocketing to popularity over and over again (and driving mods, users, and writers insane as a result). The surplus of 1-2k word '[Pony] [Verb]s a [Noun]' made the feature box even more useless than it is now. I can't remember exactly when the change took place, but everyone I remember asking was happy about it.
That said, it does bear acknowledging that it's undocumented. knighty can correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I think there's a very good reason - that being, the mechanics of the feature box are deliberately kept secret to avoid people 'gaming' it. The specific machinations of what gets a story up there, what keeps it there, and what the different algorithms at play are going into all that are already shrouded in mystery - the word limit being similarly obscured is, I believe, intentional, mostly because we don't want authors inflating their stories with unnecessary words to get them featured.
All of the above in consideration, however, I've been an active proponent of some kind of system to the benefit of poetry for a while. Sadly, even if there were enough of it being written to warrant a major campaign behind its consideration, getting changes to happen on the site is nothing short of impossible unless knighty's been bitten by the coding bug: we have a bug list/known issues document several pages long that hasn't been touched in months, with more prudent things like categorical content filtering (turning off sex but not gore, etc.), tagging systems, and well-known user issues. All of that stuff should theoretically be addressed before focusing on the concessions necessary to support a genre of writing that barely anyone partakes in.
Still - I'm first on board to say some stuff needs to change. I don't know if the word limit is one of those things, nor that exposing it would do anything other than force the community as a whole to suffer through 4,000 word crap instead of 1,000 words of similar - but I'll bring the issue to knighty's attention to see if he has anything to say on it.
Elsewise... another day in the Fimfiction wasteland, and only despair on every horizon.
1062012
I understand the need to avoid people toying with the system, but having secret rules in place is...not an ideal solution. Also, of course, anyone going for a sparse style or poetry is preemptively screwed which...is even less of an ideal solution.
Perhaps poetry needs to be its own tag with its own rules? I won't write any -- I'm too wretched at verse -- but I'd sure like to read some.
Finally, I want the record to show that I really regret naming my all-showing-no-telling story about change and loss "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea." I only learned about Pony Verbs a Noun after.
1061950
I believe the rule was instituted with the site update in December 2012. At least, it was soon after that when I started hearing the rumors.
1062045
I agree one hundred percent about a poetry tag or similar system - however, I must direct your attention to the part where getting anything changed on the site is next to impossible.
1062046
Ah! Thank you. That explains it.
I'm glad I managed to squeak through, then. Forgive the self-serving attitude, but I'm quite glad TSMACOT was featured without needing to be fattened to 4000 words. Hell, if I were a better writer it would have less than the ~1600 it has now.
1061950
Good data point. Tea featureboxed approx. 2012-10-24 [1], so the rule was changed sometime after that, but current policy definitely is 4k.
1062012
I appreciate the semi-pseudo-official word. Here's my stance: I don't necessarily disagree with the limit; as cool as more poetry would be, I do see the utility of discouraging 1000-word crap. I've seen a lot more good stuff in the featurebox this year than last, so it might even be an overall positive change!
What I'm objecting to is the secrecy. (In politics, they say, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," but I'm not trying to imply any crime here.) There's a vast difference between knowing that up front, and finding out after the fact after sinking lots of effort into stories that never had a chance. There's also a vast difference between the secrecy of gamable metrics — which can be a headwind or tailwind, but won't on their own flat-out reject anything — and the secrecy of a rule that divides stories into Acceptable and Unacceptable classes.
On a personal level, finding out that 2/3 of my stories had been preemptively and secretly filed into "unacceptable" was a direct and clear message that my efforts weren't wanted.
That's the flip side of the "crap in the featurebox" coin. How many sincere contributors is it worth alienating?
--
[1] ISO 8601 compliant.
1062012 Yes, yes, nothing's likely to change, but while I kind of dislike the unspoken rule there (and will, I'll openly admit, be guided by the fact that it's there in future writing), part of me wonders if it might not be possible to... and you're all going to loathe this idea... put in a preferential treatment system to allow some things that are short to be eligible.
Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of routing through a poetry tag or anything, because that seems as prone to abuse as basically any other option. And I do think short pieces will always have a competitive edge for the feature-box, simply because it's not as big a commitment to pick them up and look at them.
But given that every story that hits the site gets at least a cursory glance somewhere to approve it for appearing, it makes me wonder if it might not be possible to have something like an override switch, for when the site volunteer reading a new story thinks it shouldn't be barred under the unspoken rule. Now, of course, that stinks of preference and is itself prone to abuse, but I tend to feel like we, as a community, ought to be willing to trust the people running that community to handle certain decisions responsibly and I feel like this sort of thing would be one of them.
The rule makes the system arbitrary and unfair, though any system is going to have some sort of problem and I do think the current solution is largely good - keep the flood of short stuff out, but don't make it so widely known that everyone starts trying to game the system by fluffing okay stories into bad ones or bad ones into worse ones. But I do think it could probably get done better.
Actually, come to think of it, it might not be unreasonable to just put a penalty function into the selection algorithm based on either log word count or log adjusted word count. Hmm.
Anyway, that's all I have to say at the moment.
I agree that not telling people sub 4k word stories can't be featured is a bit iffy, but you're right in that we had reasons for it which NTSTS outlined. And as he said, telling people this has the unfortunate side effect of people slapping extra words into stories just so they can be featured. Something I've been wanting to do but just haven't got around to is "punishing" shorter stories on an analogue scale rather than the binary 4k barrier we have right now, which would mean a 3.5k story is only slightly penalised, but a 2k story will have do do considerably better than a 4k one to be featured.
1061950
Just a copy of what I posted to RBDash47's blog here. It dates the introduction of this rule to within a month.
1062141
I very much appreciate your response.
I would be 100% behind an analog slider, even a secret one. Secret + binary is a recipe for heartbreak. Disclosed + binary is at least fair, but I concede that it encourages padding. (I certainly would have changed my earlier stories if I'd known.) Sliding-scale penalties just seem to me like they're compensating for the extra attention shorter stories get.
1062056
Hmm... take up coding, get knighty to send you the site's code, then send it back, with the changes so it can be updated. At least that solution works in theory.
1062259
You can. It's called 'browse' and 'sort by: heat'.
1062278
1062279
fc08.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/021/0/8/derpy_oops_by_mmtob3-d4n4bc2.png
1062141>>1062056>>1062175
Would telling poets to add some extra line of text (such as PonyPoemTag) in their title or description make them easier to search for?
Or did I forget how the search function works?
Ah. And now I know exactly how long I need to make the long-planned sequel chapter.
My stories reach (relative) perfection around the 3k word mark. I grew up on Reader's Digest, so everything I'd consider a complete story clocks in around there.
Unspoken rules are like playing a witchhunter in Morrowind, and wondering why I can swing an axe a hundred times at a mudcrab and only hit it once. Turns out I could have used a mace...
1062141 I know I already mentioned the idea in my own comment, but all my yes to doing some sort of log wordcount-based penalization-type scheme. It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do, though I imagine getting the balance right would be pretty tricky. That said, I suspect something like the following would probably work pretty well:
current_featurebox_weight * min( ln( (word_count/1000) - 1 ), 1 )
This would essentially make it impossible for a 1000-word story to get in, and would penalize anything under about 3718 words while leaving everything above that point at the current weighting scheme. That said, it's not entirely clear to me that it wouldn't be worth continuing the weighting past 4000 words if one were to adopt a system like this, to continue to make longer stories more competitive, given the reading cost involved with them. But as a quick-and-dirty way to implement it, I suspect this would work pretty well.
1062613
No disagreements, although the point of my post was: you have to know the rules of the game in order to play it. What rustles my jimmies is that you can do everything right to be "popular", and unless you follow the secret alchemical Quadremille Formula which they only teach to the Fourth Degree Exalts, you can be doomed without even knowing it.
My goal in writing is not to be popular … but let's face it, if we didn't want attention we wouldn't be here, and so these secrets matter.
1062572
I don't believe the rule applies to the length of updates, only to the size of the story as a whole. But yeah, a good argument for adding in bonus material or an alternate ending or something if the main story falls a bit short.
… and yeah, I am conscious of the irony of talking about gaming the system, which is exactly what the rule was hidden to prevent, but let's face it: when there is a dividing line between Eligible and Not, the only rational response is to move from the latter to the former.
Don't worry buddy, Melt will never be featured either, right along side Melt. They can be Melt buddies.
1062627
That's not irony. That's just the secret getting out. You know that people will game the system because of this post. Stars and storms, you wrote it because you feel you were unfairly denied the tools to game the system. (Although it turns out most of the events you had in mind predate this system.) I have no objections to gaming systems, but acting as though it's a side effect of your post is disingenuous.
Realize that by making this public, you're actively working to tear down a policy that the site's creators have put in place. This is not an indefensible thing to do, but it does require actually defending. I'd like to see some thought about whether or not this was your secret to tell.
1062950
> acting as though it's a side effect of your post is disingenuous.
You're right to call me out on that, and I'm sorry. I had a long day yesterday. Consider the "irony" thing stupid and retracted.
> This is not an indefensible thing to do, but it does require actually defending.
All sleep-deprived equivocation aside, I did lead with my best defense:
> I'd like to see some thought about whether or not this was your secret to tell.
It wasn't. Full stop.
But — here's where the defense comes in — I feel it was the only right thing to do. Once I came into possession of that information, as a site user, there's no way I wasn't going to use it (see: "only rational response"). The only remaining question is, do I use that to unfair personal advantage, and bestow it like a secret handshake on people I feel are worthy? Or do I say I'm not cool with a secret rule that (at a quick estimation from the current frontpage) arbitrarily featurebans 2/3 of all published stories out the gate, with no regard for quality, execution, origin, or worth?
> you wrote it because you feel you were unfairly denied the tools to game the system.
That, on the other hand, is not true. If my concern were for my own ability to game the system, I'd have shut up and used the new information for personal benefit. Speaking out reduces my featurability because it will increase the number of people writing featurable stories. I posted it knowing that.
The fact that the rule personally hurt me was a factor in my decision. Of course it was; no writer is immune to ego. But I'm trying to make things fairer for everyone.
1062950 Realize that by making this public, you're actively working to tear down a policy that the site's creators have put in place. This is not an indefensible thing to do, but it does require actually defending. I'd like to see some thought about whether or not this was your secret to tell.
It sounds like you're asking an ethical question. In practice, and by law, knighty can do whatever he wants, and so whether you think revealing how the featured box works is right or wrong, is irrelevant.
So IF WE ARE TALKING ABOUT ETHICS, which we are, I want to question the idea that knighty is ethically justified in doing whatever the hell he wants to with the featured box and not telling us.
Point is,
A) Most of the work that has gone into making this site what it is, is work by authors.
B) AFAIK, all of the money made by this side (quite a lot, based on estimates from site traffic, though our click-through stats may be atypical) goes to knighty. Based on the fraction of site favorites that are my stories (I think it's around one-quarter of a percent), and using a price/earnings ratio of 10, I figure my work has probably put a few thousand dollars in knighty's pocket.
So as long as we're speaking about ethics rather than about what is practical or what is legal, I think the authors are justified in wanting to be treated with respect and to have a say in how the site works.
1063198
Without actually disputing any of your arguments, I do want to defend knighty on the financial issue.
I would be surprised if this site turned a net profit. Server space, bandwidth, etc., are massively significant costs. I know the administrators of several furry art repositories, and all of them pay hundreds of dollars each month out of pocket to keep things running. Ads (especially the tiny, non-Flash, bottom-page ads FIMFic has) defray those costs; they do not generate revenue.
Even if FIMFic does generates money because of its text-based rather than art-based content (again, I'd be surprised; due to the sheer number of users, it still has outrageous server needs), consider the number of hours that he puts in on site coding, maintenance, etc. I do not object to unobtrusive ad monetization.
But to the important things:
> So as long as we're speaking about ethics rather than about what is practical or what is legal, I think the authors are justified in wanting to be treated with respect and to have a say in how the site works.
Agreed.
1063221 The traffic is high enough to turn a nice profit, but on the other hand, most people here are poor high school or college students, and I at least have started zoning out the ads. A lot of people have ad-blocking software. Traffic might justify a sale price around a million dollars, but the legal question marks re. fan-fiction could bring that down seriously. It's all a big question mark from where I stand.
I suspect profits could be higher if knighty correlated ad click-throughs with story favorites and served ads to people likely to click on them, and solicited ads from pony-friendly vendors. I've never seen an ad for a pony plushie. Right now I'm looking at an ad for "Glamour Hang-Outs: Get more zing with our fabulous beauty routine." That's just about the worst-possible ad to show the brony demographic, let alone me. The ads, like feature-box stories, are repeated far too often; I get shown the same ad day after day. Just like a feature-box story, if I didn't click on it the first ten times I saw it, I'm probably not going to click on it the eleventh time.
I hope the site makes money. That would be great. I don't begrudge anyone the money. But it irks me when people imply that authors are just freeloaders here.
1063185
Point taken. Allow me to amend my statement to "you wrote it because you feel we were unfairly denied the tools to game the system"
Since the featurebox is a zero-sum game, I'm okay with using a crude tool to weed out 2/3 of stories that are relatively less likely to be good.[1] I had thought you agreed with this and only objected to the "secret" part, but now I am confused.
1063198
Heck yes this is what I wanted to talk about. Let's go.
To investigate your argument: most of Google's value comes from content Google does not create (i.e., the rest of the internet). When it comes to presenting that content on a search page, I don't believe they reveal all the details of their algorithms, in order to defend against SEO-type shenanigans.[2] Is this ethical? (I would say yes, but I am a shameless capitalist neoliberal.) What obligations, if any, does Google have to the creators of the content it uses? Should those creators have a say in how Google works? Is this different from our situation?
I feel like I'm missing something. If you're basing your argument off of driving money to the site, shouldn't you be looking at views rather than favorites? Or is it just a matter of which data you have on hand?
1063273
Also the ads are ludicrously unobtrusive. I don't run adblock or anything, but I never consciously realized this site had ads until you pointed it out. And, while this may shock you, I spend a lot of time on this site.
I don't have a strong position on what is ethical in this situation, but I feel like I should be the devil's advocate. Interrogating your arguments without offering any of my own would be logically rude. With that in mind, here goes.
This site is knighty's playground. Your contribution to this site is your stories and your attention, and knighty's only obligations are to respect the integrity of those contributions, i.e., to not delete stories without warning, not alter them, not sell them without permission, not put malware on your machine, etc etc. So long as he's not doing anything outright exploitative like that, he has no further obligations, legal or moral, to the users. (There is no moral distinction between "readers" and "authors" here; there are only people using knighty's code and knighty's servers.)
If users don't like how the site is run, they are no worse off than if the site didn't exist in the first place; therefore creating a featurebox you dislike can't cause harm; therefore creating a featurebox you dislike can't be unethical.
We're not freeloaders. We're not partners, either. We're customers.
[1] It would of course be better to use a more refined tool, like the proposed length-dependent heat penalty. Still, that's a difference of degree, not a difference of kind.
[2] If this is wrong or out of date, pretend otherwise for the sake of the example. (Maybe substitute Facebook for Google.)
1063470
You complained that horizon was unethical in revealing the 4000-word rule. Explain what obligation horizon violated by doing so.
(Also, I disagree with the claim that not causing harm is all that is required to be perfectly ethical.)
How are you or I more customers than partners? We're content creators. That's the source of our disagreement, I think. Here is a website that has value, which was created jointly by knighty and by the authors. Who has what obligations? You seem to approach it from an extreme libertarian viewpoint, where people enter into contracts and ethics consists only of fulfilling or not fulfilling the terms of those contracts. IMHO that's not what the category "ethics" exists for.
1063198
The site doesn't exist without stories, and the stories wouldn't have this place to live if it didn't. They exist in harmony, each one needs the other. And yeah, if you want to be cynical about it, I make money off of content people make for free. But this is no different to any other hosting service, the same as fanfiction.net even. You are receiving the service for payment, and in return I make money. In essence your payment is the platform and the ability to expose your work to thousands of people.
I do not endorse people who comment with things that suggest I have no obligation to users just because the site is free to use, and it's kind of annoying when people say that. But in my opinion, that obligation is limited in scope. I do my hardest to make sure we never lose data and that your stories don't just magically disappear, as well as keeps your stuff safe. Clearly that doesn't always work out, but that's where I consider my obligation to be, and it's the stuff I'll stay up coding through the night to fix is there's an issue.
Also your money estimate is hilariously far off. You realise by your logic I make millions right?
1063531
No; I'm talking about value, not cash flow. A price-to-earnings ratio of 10 means that a website that makes $x per year could be sold for $10x today. This is probably too high for fimfiction, since a buyer should be skeptical that there will still be a huge brony community 10 years from now.
I checked some website evaluators out of curiousity, and they gave estimates of fimfiction's value between $1000 and $1,500,000. Without getting bogged down in statistics, the typical probability distributions for these sorts of things suggests that log(true value) is closer to log(1,500,000) than to log(1000). But, that valuation is based on a P/E ratio around 10, on legal assurances that fimfiction doesn't have, and maybe on assuming a high number of unique visitors, so it could still be too high by maybe a factor of 10.
Whatever it is, thanks for all the work you've done!
<- patron saint of hard work
1063597
I'm actually a little mystified as to how you think Knighty makes a bunch of money off of this site. I see no ads, not premium services. Honestly, I've been expecting a fund raising effort at some point to help defray the costs of bandwidth and hosting.
As for the length requirement for the feature box, as a mathemetics person that does software development, I can see a need for a minimum word count as part of the algorithm to keep, for example, a brief collection of cruddy knock knock jokes out of the featured box. I wouldn't consider it "shortfic" hate.
Furthermore, given the complex nature of the feature box, I am aghast that people are so shocked to find that word count is involved in the calculation. I felt it went without saying, otherwise it would be hard to explain why, for example, stories with relatively low read and like counts end up in the box. In fact, without taking word count into consideration, long stories would have an extremely difficult time ever entering the featured box simply because of the barrier to entry that most long stories pose. Even at my typical fanfic length of ~25k words I am often met with complaints that people will have to 'read it later' due to the length.
Also, there have been a number of announcements in the past regarding interesting behaviors in the feature box (it seems like one was a slot reserved for older stories, for example). These algorithms clearly must exist for the feature box to function, so it is, I would say, peculiar to act as though it is 'shocking' to learn they exist.
However, it does seem like there is a group that feels marginalized, which is certainly not a goal (Right? o.o). It seems like if there is a particular threshold where the algorithm becomes unfavorable or impossible to overcome for a very short story, perhaps the answer is to add a slot reserved for these "shortfics" as >>RBDash47 called them.
Just my two bits!
~Frost
1063521
Yeah, I left out a crucial piece of the argument. I did the thing where it seemed so clear in my head, I didn't think to write it down. Sorry about that.
The idea is that this is knighty's space (although I know you don't entirely agree with that assertion) and that people ought to play by his rules when using his stuff. If site policy is to ban chain letters and those polls where you tag five people, then all else equal, participating in those things is wrong. If site policy is to keep something secret, then all else equal, keeping that secret is right. Of course, all else isn't equal, and horizon's point about unfair advantages weighs against this. I'm ambivalent about whether keeping quiet would've been less bad than speaking up.
That's more or less accurate in this case. There are stronger versions of ethics, but we're not exactly Harriet Beecher Stowe and I don't think it's practical to fulfill those obligations by writing fiction. I deal with horsefic for fun, and when I'm trying to have fun, I don't aim any higher than "do no harm." Abiding by contracts (implicit and explicit) is usually a good way to do that, although it's not the ultimate goal.
1063470 Google's users are the people using Google to find stuff, the searchers. That is who Google has obligations to. Google's purpose is to sort/rate/value the rest of the internet, and help searchers find what they are looking for. The content creators only benefit if they have what searchers are looking for.
FiMFiction's user are both readers and writers. The consumer are also the generators, so there is an obligation to both.
1064827
Oh man, where have you been? Since I've been on the site (56 weeks circa this post, versus your 81 weeks at the same time), the featured box has:
- Weighted towards longfics that recently updated. If your fic was top-slot-in-the-feature-box popular and you throw up another chapter, bam! instant feature-box.
- Weighted towards new fics, full stop. This had the side effect of weighting towards shortfics.
- Had two slots added to it, using the same new-fics algorithm.
- Had three more slots added to it, using a longfic-weighted algorithm similar to (possibly the same as) the one in use when I first joined.
- Moved from the top of the page in the banner (remember that!?) to the frontpage, and had the little pips swapped out for full-length fic titles.
- Had the new-fics algorithm tweaked to drop fics under 4k words. This may or may not have accompanied the move to the frontpage, I'm not sure.
And that's just the stuff I know has happened.
Your cruddy collection of knock-knock jokes is already blocked both by moderation (that's not a story, silly!
) and the 1,000-word publishing minimum. I think that makes mentioning it a fallacy, but I'm not sure.
1062012 FWIW I think the 4k limit only catches most of such drek. For example, your typical shortskirtsandexplosions oneshot runs eight to fourteen thousand words. That's his short stuff. Now, he does produce some really good stuff -- Background Pony (both in its original oneshot form and what I've managed to read of the full thing), The Numbers Don't Lie, and Fear and Trembling are all great. But then there's Applejack is Full of Squirrels, which is... uh... well, it's, it's, it's full of squirrels, that's what it is, and I think it's going to end up with my downvote. Maybe I just don't do well with the [Random] tag.
1068142
All of those sound correct, I just didn't feel the need to specify.
Also, I've seen a large number of questionable items pass through moderation. For example, a buddy of mine accidentally submitted an empty story and later found it was approved. My point, moreover, is that I think there has been so many interesting changes to the feature box that it shouldn't really surprise anyone to find things like a minimum word count.
As for the "knock knock" joke comment, I've seen such bad short stories get propped up that would be an embarrassment to find in the feature box. One in particular I was subjected to involved five 200-word chapters about a Self-insertion OC presenting something in front of her classmates, getting laughed at, and crying. I would label this as less valuable (from a literary standpoint) than a list of knock-knock jokes. Unfortunately, due to its short length and sadsack content, it got a lot of knee-jerk likes and fortunately did not make it to the feature box.
Now, this is not to say that you can't write a 1000 word story with high quality; you certainly can. I am simply asserting that no filter is going to be perfect. Invariably some great stories will go unnoticed and some mediocre quality with buzz-topics are going to ascend undeserved into the limelight.
If I were in Knighty's position, the feature box would look considerably different. Rather than a simple list, I would have five to eight categories, probably something like "Best Short" "Best Long" "Best with Mane 6" "Best without" "Best OC" "Best Updated" and they would be clearly labelled, maybe with a few "Runner Up" positions for high quality items in good contention but not the best of their particular category.
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Perhaps you would also be interested in this discussion on "Original Fiction"?
I wish I could link you to the comments between me and Periphery that eventually resulted in Buried Treasures, but a lot of that discussion took place in PMs. That group doesn't work as intended anyways, and for reasons besides lack of moderator involvement (which is also a problem).
Ah, okay. I spoke up because the one you mentioned was nonspecific enough that the phrasing made it look inaccurate to me.
The drek you mentioned is... disappointing, to say the least. Maybe I just love reading/writing too much.
The fact that no one knew this is terrible. Ah, well.
Featured box is shit anyways. Instead of showing the better side of fimfiction, it reads more like a summary of fanfiction: 90% is junk, 10% is gold.