Bradel Brainstorming – Promoting Fanfiction in the Wider Community · 1:29pm Jun 22nd, 2013
I can't take credit for the idea here, but I can at least blog about it and try to get it some exposure.
If you care about fanfiction as an art form—and I'm pretty sure a number of you do, since I know my watchers list includes a number of people who take this writing thing very seriously—you've probably heard people talk about how fanfiction seems to exist at a lower tier than other endeavors in the MLP fandom. I suspect that most of us can name at least a couple individuals producing MLP fan music: Living Tombstone, Mandopony, Wooden Toaster, etc. The same goes for MLP fanart, though perhaps to a lesser extent: John Joseco and Jiayi are probably the only two I recognize by name, though there are a number I whose works I recognize by style. Even video blogging is starting to get some limited celebrity status in the MLP fandom.
Meanwhile, we seem to toil in obscurity. And there are some significant reasons for that. The cost (in time) of reading even the shortest publicly listed piece on Fimfiction is much greater than the cost of looking at a piece of fanart. It's also greater than the cost of listening to most fan music. Moreover, people are more aware of Sturgeon's Law in the fanfiction setting than elsewhere. And not without some justification: the barrier for entry on fanfiction is very low. But all of this has been discussed at length elsewhere on this site (WandererD's blog is a good place to look).
Do people in the wider MLP community know fanfiction? Oh, sure. Most of them have heard of "Cupcakes", and maybe "Rainbow Factory". Judging by readership statistics, a lot of them have read "My Little Dashie". And that's probably the extent of most casual fans' knowledge of what we do. Yes. Three stories, none of them well written, and two of them grimdark. Maybe some of them know about Past Sins, but that thing clocks in at 200,000 words. It's not the most enticing entry point for our world.
So I occasionally wonder, what would it take to bring more MLP fans into the world of fanfiction? And on this point, I really do love EQD. They've published stories I think are sub-standard a time or two—sub-my-standards, anyway—but they never publish anything that's out-and-out crap. They're a safe bet for new readers. And while I haven't found time to participate yet, I'm frankly ecstatic that they're doing things like flash fiction events. Participatory activities are things that really raise the profile of a discipline. Even if they'd never participate themselves, EQD readers are bound to get ideas about stories that could be told for those sorts of events. Storytelling is one of the most instinctual things we do as human beings. So EQD, I think, does about as good a job as they can promoting us to the wider community. And yet the face of fanfiction remains "Cupcakes" or possibly "My Little Dashie".
Enter the point of this post. I was over on bats's blog tonight, where he'd written about "Being a Good Citizen of Fimfiction"—a topic that's not quite related, but bats does good blog work anyway and is worth paying attention to. Anyway, in the comments on that blog post, Azusa said something that really stuck with me. And I'm just going to drop a massive quote, because I think this deserves to be read.
I think Tumblr has played a big part in helping to legitimatize fanart. Equestria Daily is the closest thing we have to that and... well... A lot of people hate EqD. Plus, they aren't really a fanfiction site. This site isn't much better, but for vastly different reasons of which you're already familiar with. It would do wonders for this site, if Knighty even added a "send to" button like YouTube has. Or he could add an option to show stories that users who you're following have favorited to the feed.
But even those would only do a little to help matters. America isn't a reading culture, but that is slowly changing as people realize that forcing children to read "classic literature" does more harm than good. And the two-hundred-million dollar "book trailers" that Hollywood keeps pumping out have helped a lot, too.
Give it time. One of these days, someone'll make a site that does what EqD does, but better.
Until then, there are two things you can do to help. One: Make a DA account with a link to your FimFic page somewhere one it and comment on fanarts that you like. Two: add a link to your fimfic page on your YouTube account page and comment on Pony videos and Pony music often. People will see your comments and possibly end up reading one of your stories in the end.
I think if more of us tried reaching out to the other sections of the community, and making friends with them, there might be more people who read fanfic.
I've already been in the process of setting up Youtube and Deviantart accounts for my Bradel Bound handle, specifically for doing pony-related work. The Youtube gets used for my dramatic fanfiction readings, of which hopefully I'll be able to do a bit more this summer. The Deviantart gives me a place to store the work I do on my story cover images, since those often involve image-compositing and vector drawing. I've had at least one art request, too, and since I can vector, it'll make a nice place for me to post any fanfiction fanart I do (amateurish as that will be). Azusa's suggestion, though, is what made me jump over to both of them and set up profiles that provide prominent links back to Fimfiction. And prompted me to start going through drawfriend posts to pick out the pieces I really liked, so I could leave some solid comments for their creators on Deviantart. I'll be trying to step up my commenting on other things like music, too, if I can.
Are people going to check out my profile and click back to my page on Fimfiction? Probably not, though even getting a handful would be nice. But at the very least, by being very public about the fact that I write fanfiction and trying to engage with some of the other facets of the fandom, maybe I can help show the other fans out there that we're also a part of the MLP community.
I'm not really expecting people to go set up Youtube and Deviantart accounts just to go comment on other people's work and link back to Fimfiction. But I figured I'd at least throw the idea out there for you all. I think we have some of the finest work in the MLP fandom on this site, and that's something I'd like more people to realize. And I'm willing to step up my engagement with the rest of the community, if it means maybe helping some of them realize it.
Reading is good.
First off, good to hear you'll be doing more readings. That's where I first encountered you, after all. :)
I wish you had posted this about a week ago, because I was in the middle of a lot of deep thinking about the state of fanfiction in this fandom. Specifically, I've been wondering just how of the issues involved with the perception of fanfic are our fault, as in the fault of the writers, readers and reviewers who compose the community.
And see, this is where that timeframe issue comes in, because I've sort of forgotten my entire argument. :| It's along the lines of, what do we do to make ourselves look worse? It may say something about me and/or the people I hang out with around here, but it seems like good writers do an awful lot of snarking bad ones. We get caught up in drama on fimfiction and EQD, we badmouth the reviewers who we don't feel are quite up to snuff or the authors who seem to be totally full of themselves, we nitpick popular stories that don't live up to our standards and make fun of their fans, and then we whine when no one loves us.
Yes, we have legitimate complaints, namely that the show staff cannot be exposed to fanfiction for legal reasons, and thus the necessity of the no fanfic button. (A rant for another time: why that excuse is complete and utter bullshit.) But, and again, I've forgotten all of my arguments at the moment, if you take a good look around this place, you might start to think that the brony fanfiction community is toxic. Just look at how many talented authors and reviewers we've lost to burnout. No wonder no one wants to come around here: we are not nice people. I think it's telling that fanfiction was the first thing to really have major standards imposed on EQD, because we do have standards, and quite a lot of us have let that come to mean that we are better than those who don't.
I just... This is a problem of our own creation, I'm almost certain of it. At the very least, we do nothing to help our own image when someone starts talking about fanfic and it's the fanfic writers who jump in with dozens of reasons why fanfic is terrible. And if it is our fault, then we're the ones who have to do something about it.
Thoughts, discussions, etc. welcomed. This is a new idea and I'm not very good at persuasive writing.
Also how sad is it when we have to promote fanfiction via something other than its own merits. :/ I mean really, set up a YouTube account with a link to Deviantart and comment on other peoples' things in the vain hope that they might want to click through and see what you've done? That reeks of desperation, I'm sorry. :(
That's an intriguing idea. It sounds like a decent way to bring more people towards this side of the fandom, the more "intellectual" one. I might attempt something myself.
Laconic as it may be, this statement conveys so much of the activity's magic. Reading is indeed Magic and I personally believe that people who do not read quite literally hurt themselves, for they neglect their spirit's growth and welfare. The ability to read is among humanity's greatest "inventions" and surely one of the finer things in life.
Honestly, given the demographics presented by the brony surveys that have been given airspace on EqD to try to up their sample size,I don't think the majority of the fandom reads for pleasure. They seem to be mostly 12-17 year olds with attention spans that can only be measured in nanoseconds.
Those that do generally don't have the patience to sift through the absolute shitshow that is FimFic's content when taken in aggregate to try and find the good fics. Heck, I don't, and I love words like you would not believe.
Half the problem there is that FimFic is really, really poorly set up to actually be used to promote good fiction. The feature boxes are so bad that my options are turning off mature content to avoid all the foalcon and [rape][gore][grimdark] fics that have been circle-jerk voted in (which would also prevent me from seeing at least two of my own stories, naturally), or to simply do what I do now and run a script to excise the feature box entirely from the site.
The other half, of course, is that at least one of the administrators is openly a fan of foalcon and supports that sort of trash being a major feature of the site. Hard to try and present fanfiction as a medium for quality storytelling when the site you're hosting your stories on is hip-deep in fictionalized child pornography, eh?
I would love to see a competitor to EqD that actually showcased good stories rather than posting what is at least capable of hitting the minimum bar for entry. That said, I don't have the time to curate such a thing myself, and building it a readerbase would be a time consuming thing and rather thankless task.
Well, I like to think that I do my part by adding TV Tropes pages so that people know which stories are worth their time. Speaking of which, I'd better get that one I have planned out up and running. Keep an eye out for it.
1160624 The demographics is actually one of the things I like about the idea of increasing my presence on Deviantart and Youtube. A lot of the overall community may fall in that age range, and generally speaking (but not without exception) I wouldn't trust kids of that age to recognize good writing anyway. Heck, I could barely recognize good writing at that age. I was reading authors like Eddings, Brooks, and Goodkind. It was only around the end of High School that I finally started developing standards.
But engaging with content creators on Deviantart and Youtube means engaging with people who aren't casual consumers of pony media. The people making that stuff are people who are already dedicating significant time to the fandom, and they're probably more willing to invest the half-hour it might take to come read a decent story over here.
Personally, I love how Fimfiction is set up for the most part... but I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I approach the whole thing from a writer's perspective rather than a reader's. It has great tools for community interaction, like this blog stuff and like the group system. I definitely see your point about the site not being terribly reader-friendly, though. Then again, I'm not terribly sure how much can be done there. I use the top rated list and the search-by-tag features a decent amount (though I'll admit most of my reading probably owes more to who I watch and interact with). Given that the site has over 40,000 stories on it, sorting through them is always going to be a pain. (Though it would certainly be nice if we got more quality work into the feature box and less knee-jerk clop)
I'm not holding out a lot of hope for an alternative to EQD, though, unless somebody does something like building a Goodreads-style collaborative reviewing site.
Hmm.
1160637
That's actually something I've considered in the past. Fimfiction is a great archive site but it doesn't solve the (orthogonal!) problem of reviewing nearly as well. Here's how I see it working:
1) Anyone can create an account.
2) An account can create a "reviewing committee" and add other members to it.
3) Members may add recommended stories.
4) Anyone can subscribe to a reviewing committee.
Each committee can decide for itself what its policy is on adding stories. They could be submitted by prospective authors, be invite only, be based on subject matter etc. By avoiding any kind of algorithmic selection the reddit problem is avoided. With that basic model, the rest is just working out features that make it nice to use. E.g. import from the fimfiction API, nice CSS, etc.
Edit: One final note: this would store links not actual full text.
1160657 Yeah, as soon as I typed those words, I started thinking about some possibilities for how to do something like that well. Depending on the level of seriousness, maybe we should talk about this...
1160686
Well, I'm going to have a lot more time on my hands in just a few weeks. We should talk then I think. In the mean time, I'm procrastinating again. I should close this browser window.
i.imgur.com/jCAUjuO.png
EqD is a bad format for fanfiction, but if someone made a new site, would anyone come to it?
EqD has a lot of what I'm going to call, for lack of a better phrase, popularity inertia. In my time as a pre-reader, I've actually seen a few people we rejected get so incensed at us that they made competitor sites; none of them ever really achieved any kind of notoriety. The trouble with this new site would be advertising it, and odds are it would likely just be folks from Fimfic.
Not to be totally down on this discussion, but I just don't see much hope for this. In example, (though they use much the same format as EqD) who here has even heard of Derpy Hooves News' Lyra Heartstrings blog? They use it to showcase fanwork, and the current hit counter is under 50k as of the time of this comment. And that's an offshoot site from a fandom longrunner; although DHN has never really been huge, I can remember them being around at least during the Season 1 days.
Other alternatives, such as the Pony Fiction Archive, started with a grand mission akin to some of what the contributors to this discussion had envisioned, but due to backlash and losing a VHS-Betamax format war to Fimfic, have largely went underused. (RBDash47, for when you inevitably see this, I apologize, but I just never see that much activity on your site.)
In summary, I'm not sure what could be done short of some kind of mega musical between popular and good brony musicians (whoever they are, I don't listen to brony music with a few exceptions) and a bunch of fanfic authors prompting this new fanfic utopia. Or something. In any case, just keep in mind that even though some of us helping with the current "big names" would like something better, it can be difficult to launch a new content aggregator.
1160779 Oh, agreed. I'm not entertaining the notion very seriously at the moment, and it certainly wasn't the point of this blog post at all. But there does seem to be some desire for such a thing. And I think I can kind of see the shape of how one might do it, were it to be done well.
But doing any sort of serious project like that would be a huge commitment of time and energy. Oh, sure, you could create a tumblr or a blog or whatnot, but you're absolutely right that for something like that to work, it would need to have a lot backing it up, right out of the gate. That's actually one of the reasons I found Powered's idea interesting.
To be a legitimate player in the market, any website would have to be of comparable quality to Fimfiction and EQD, and that's a damn high bar to clear. And here I'm not talking about content, just web functionality and aesthetics. Fimfiction is one of the prettiest sites I frequent. And, frankly, I think that'd probably price me and anyone else right out of the market. But I think the EQD fanfiction survey had floated the idea of doing an EQD Fanfic site similar to the EQD Music site, and so I think it might potentially be worthwhile to do something like going to Sethisto with an action plan for how to build a better fanfiction resource for readers. Though the design aesthetics on Fimfiction are better, and some of the ideas I have dancing around in my head are functionally similar to pieces of code Fimfiction already has in place, so there's that, too. Going out on your own to make an independent website is doable, certainly, but it's an ugly prospect from any angle.
So there's that. The other side is what the website would actually accomplish, and whether people would be willing to use it. And that's the side I think might be a little easier to handle, predominantly because of the idea Powered floated. I think there's a fair amount of demand here on Fimfiction for a more reader-friendly way to find stories, but there's also a lot of existing structure here as well. I'm a big fan of Fimfiction's groups system, but they just suck for story listings. Dump a bunch of things in a few folders with little rhyme or reason?
Powered's idea about reviewing committees is nice, but I think it'd be a lot easier to get that off the ground if you did some legwork here, first. Talk to some of the major active groups, like the shipping groups. Try to get them interested in a more functional way of listing and reviewing stories. I suspect there might be interest in TwiDash and AppleDash, at least. You'd want a large stack of things like that to start (and you'd almost certainly want Seattle's Angels and EQD involved to the point of at least publicly listing, if not rating). And you'd want a very large number of high-profile Fimfiction users on board to signal boost the project. That's a pile of big asks. But if there is widespread demand for a better system for readers, it might be an attainable pile.
The actual review functionality that makes the most sense to me is something like what Goodreads and Amazon do, but with a few added nuances to try to cut down on the effectiveness of ballot-box-stuffing. But Powered and I both have heavy math backgrounds, and that's fundamentally an algorithmic problem, so that sort of thing is our cup of tea. And beyond that, I think there are a few people hanging around on this site (e.g. Bad Horse) who have put some significant thought into that problem already.
Let me reemphasize. This is not an action plan. Thinking a lot is what I do, and this is all basically off-the-cuff as I'm writing this. It's still an ugly mess of work, even in the best-case scenario.
But I don't think that means it's necessarily not worth thinking about.
1160657 1160697
I've seen that idea bandied around a lot, but unfortunately I've never really seen it leave the planning stages. Making a new website is hard, and such. Still, it sounds like a great idea in principle. Much love for the EQD PRs, but they're only human. They have personal opinions, and tastes in fiction vary. I'd much rather a system where I can find reviewers with similar tastes to mine, and watch them to see their recommendations. They might help me find something off the beaten path, or I might help them in promoting something in the process of going viral.
----
On another topic, on the subject of attention spans, especially for people who don't traditionally consider themselves readers, what are thoughts about making easier-to-digest output, like short, daily chapter updates? That obviously doesn't work for all types of stories, but it's easier to say "1k per day" rather than "read my 212k+223k+164k behemoth"
1160657 1160820 1160637 How is what you want different from using one of the reviewer groups on fimfiction, such as Seattle's Angels? Or from watching somebody whowrites reviews on their blog?
I created the Orient Express Explorers to try to channel some of the energy people showed in the Train Wreck Explorers into reviewing good stories. The idea wasn't to do high-quality Seattle's Angels type reviews, but to get ordinary readers into the habit of writing short reviews, to make that part of the culture here. A lot of people joined and said they were excited, but over the past six months, people other than me have written maybe six reviews total. It was a waste of my time; I could have written six reviews myself in much less time than it took to organize the group.
So, what I'm saying is that I'm demonstrably inept at motivating people to do reviews, and burned out on the idea of trying to organize people for that purpose. Although a few groups have gained momentum doing that, it's a mystery to me how they did it.
If anyone wants to take over The Orient Express Explorers and do something else with it, there's a thread in its forum for that.
1160558
That's partly why the music side of the fandom got as big as it did. The musicians and artists have a lot of connections with each other. For that matter, there are many good music artists in the fandom who have hardly any views.
I saw the Equestria Girls movie today, and it a big theme throughout was sort of similar to this. Though I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen it yet.
1160820
>what are thoughts about making easier-to-digest output, like short, daily chapter updates?
I really don't see that working too well. I can easily read a 30k word story in one sitting if I really want to. Now imagine that same 30k story with 30 chapters... Yeah. To put it in perspective, that's more than some long-runners.
For that audience, they tend to stick with short one-shot fics anyway. They probably wouldn't really be interested.
What I want to know is, how can we get people outside of fandom to take fan writing more seriously? Not to read it, just to be open to the possibility that some of it might be not completely shameful. I'd like other writers to consider whether they can learn something from fanfiction, and editors to scout it for talent, and to be able to talk about my fanfiction in comments on writing websites and not be immediately outcast. Just last night, my brother asked me, "Have you even written any stories in the last 10 years?" His wife said, "He's written pony stories," and my brother rolled his eyes and said, "I mean real stories."
I've begun asking a few writers to send me any non-pony stories they have. If I find enough good ones, I'm going to put them together in an e-book and sell it on Amazon, so we'll have something to point at to prove we are capable of writing other kinds of stories, and something that people who refused to read about ponies might possibly read. The question is how to market it to non-pony readers.
1160853 That's a very good point, and a pretty serious nail in the coffin of the idea you all have me talking about. If you can't get people to review, a review-based site is going to go nowhere.
That said, I think the Fimfiction group structure is kind of inimical to doing things like that, because it doesn't give you handy ways to sort through recommendations. Digging through blocks of text to read reviews every time you want to know what new story to try isn't a lot of fun, and any group looking to sort things into "recommended" and "unrecommended" stories is basically just doing what EQD and the Pony Fiction Vault do anyway.
The issue, to me, is functionality of presentation. You want a system that gives you semi-random suggestions for what you might want to read, based on your preferences and external quality measures. Or that lets you look at semi-random recommendations from individuals or groups who you think might offer good suggestions. But I live in an ivory tower (no, seriously) and I'm long accustomed to the fact that functionality I'd find useful isn't necessarily what other people are looking for. But to my mind, any serious reader-aide site is going to require something like star-ratings (probably as voted only by a limited set of people, thus the reviewing groups). That's going to lead to manipulation no matter what you do, but I still think it'd be necessary.
The "people don't want to review things" problem is pretty overwhelming, though. You can hardly crowdsource quality evaluations if the crowd isn't willing to evaluate.
1160871 That is a question I'd love an answer for myself. I've started taking more seriously the idea of trying to publish some stuff professionally since I've been here. I still don't think I'm up to snuff, but I feel like I'm improving and it seems like my stuff gets a generally good reception. But yeah, other than as an exercise for building my own experience and for developing a small online readership following, it doesn't have a lot of potential to result in other things right now. And that's a shame, because there is some very good work being done around here, in various places. That's one of the reasons I thought your Clarion idea was so cool, even if nothing came of it this year.
I have to run—have to see a man about a horse—but I'll be back later. I'll let you know if I have any thoughts, and to the rest of you, feel free to hang out and discuss (or head over to Present Perfect's blog, where a tangential discussion is going on)
1160853
Hue.
In terms of if this requires a new site, maybe. Not necessarily. In a new site, you'd have review group accounts (EQD Orient Express Explorers, etc) as well as individual accounts (DPV111, Amit, etc). I can follow whichever accounts I trust the recommendations of. I can also "retweet" reviews, or write my own reviews. If multiple people I watch are recommending the same story, that story bubbles up to the top of my recommended list. Of course, you'd need to build an index of stories for every story that exists on Fimfic, EQD, dA, PFA, etc... That could all be user-submitted, but it's a lot of rebuilding.
Integrating directly into Fimfic has pros and cons. I don't necessarily trust the reviewing opinions of my favorite authors, nor vice versa, so you'd want two categories of "Watch". Then you'd need to enhance the Favorite feature to include optional fields for a numerical and/or text review. Fimfic could at least track which stories you've already read (not that the other site couldn't track this separately as well)
I remember Way Back When, Fimfic had auto-generated story recommendations, and the problem there is that it turned into Six Degrees of Anthropology. Especially if you're only following like-minded individuals, it would turn cliquey, and wouldn't really address the current problem of some stories being more popular than they "ought to be", or conversely not popular "enough".
In terms of encouragement, the best argument I've found is to give every user an arbitrary bar that they can fill, a la Stack Overflow. Write a lot of reviews? Bar goes up. People mark your reviews as helpful? Bar goes up. Find an unknown story, and then hundreds of people retweet your review? Bar goes up. The bar holds no function, but it appeals to base human desires. Rewarding the promotion of "unpopular" stories could potentially help avoid cliques, as long as it's not abused.
1160864
That's kinda the point. By chopping it up into, "Hey, read 500 words once a day," it appeals more to their one-shot sensibilities while "tricking" them into reading longfics. Once hooked, they can then migrate to more traditional story/chapter lengths.
1160864
As another example of (essentially) a longfic with a microupdate model, Homestuck.
1160912
That's not prose fiction. It's basically the same as a webcomic that updates ten times a day.
If you want further proof, check out Bad Horse's Sherlock crossover, which tried a similar strategy to what you're suggesting and failed.
I don't think the problem so much is, like a lot of these comments seem to be suggesting, that what we have already (Fimfiction, EqD, et cetera) is ill-suited for us. Rather, we're just not utilizing, presenting, and ultimately exploiting what is already here to the fullest. I think going off to create a new website or some form of would be entirely unnecessary and, ambitious bastards we may be, I don't think anything could be truly be done to sustain it in the long run. We should focus instead on what we have already and orient it to how we want it. I'm not declaring a hostile takeover in any shape or form, but the fanfiction community should get a say in the formats, processes, and other behind-the-scenes aspects. I like plugs that go further in-depth and do interviews and such like the Ponyfiction Vault, I like the reviewing services such as Seattle's Angels, and I really like the groups that are centered on finding the best written magic horse stories in any way, shape, or form much more than the ambiguous circlejerking. This is a community, goshdarnit. Get people involved and work together. We're all friends, right? No? Do you even watch the show?
/endthoughtlessdrivel
So I've read this thread. I like this thread. And I have a few ideas (and that might be a bad thing). Fair warning: This may very well be an incoherent mess.
But before I get into my ideas, I want to take a look at what I'd want as a reader and consumer. I'll also mention that my ideas may not actually do much to address the issue at hand: Getting more people in the fandom to recognize ponyfiction as something not inherently awful.
That said, let's get started.
As a reader, something I'd love to have is an easier to access reviewing system. Namely, in addition to the comment section, I'd like a reviewing tab. A place to find all the reviews on that story so I can take a look at actual opinions on the story rather than a bunch of generic comments. I'd also like some system in which certain reviewers are "approved" while everyone else still has the option to post "amateur" reviews. That way, when looking at "approved" reviewers, I know there's at least some semblance of quality control at work. Additionally, I'd like a tab (perhaps next to the "Groups" tab?) that lists all the "approved" reviewers. This list contains links to all their profiles as well as an archive of all their reviews and some sort of biography thing, perhaps a general list of reading preferences. There would also be a "Subscribe" button (not to be confused with the "Follow" button). This way, I can find reviewers I like and subscribe to them. By subscribing to them, I'd ideally get notifications whenever they review something and perhaps even favorite something. If they generally read things I like, I'd like to know what they're reading since I might also like it.
So, with that in mind, how would I go about implementing a system that would provide that sort of service? I'd also like to think that that sort of service would be a generally good thing, something most people could use effectively.
To start things off, let's begin with a common problem most of the comments have described: Making a whole new site for this would be very difficult, especially when it comes to building a readerbase. As such, implementing the system I outlined above would have to be done on either EqD or FimFic in order to accomplish anything productive. And since EqD doesn't have the massively large archive that FimFic does, I think FimFic is the place for such a system.
Moving on, the "Reviews" tab. Each story currently has a comment section. What if there were two tabs in this section, one labeled "Comments" and the other "Reviews"? Posting a comment would work the same as it does now. However, there would also be an option to post a "Review." So, once all the text is typed up, you'd click the "Add Review" button (next to the "Add Comment" button), and before it gets posted, some additional options would pop up. A star rating system might be an option, though I find that rather arbitrary. What do the stars mean? Do they indicate quality or entertainment? Another option could be tags. The reviewer would have the option to list off a bunch of tags, separated by commas. These tags would then be viewable under the "Reviews" tabs after clicking "Show Tags." Then you can find reviews from a specific group, for example. And since they wouldn't automatically show, I don't see much issue with including them. Maybe other features too? I'm not sure what they would be, though. So, after all this, you click the only button available, "Add Review," and presto! The review gets posted, both as a comment so that readers and the author can reply to it, but more importantly, it would be posted under the reviews tab where people can find it more easily than searching through the comments. And like the comments, the reviews can be sorted, though I'd add in a way to sort them by rating (determined by thumbs).
So, at this point, anyone can write reviews. These reviews have their own tab so people can find them. To further sort reviews, tags might be an option. Sorting by rating is also an option.
Now, to take this a step further, I'd divide the reviews into two sections: "Amateur" reviews and "Approved" reviews. "Amateur" reviews work as described above. Anyone can post them, and their quality is therefore hit and miss. That's where the "Approved" reviews come in.
Approved reviews can only come from approved reviewers. So, first off, how does one become an approved reviewer? For starters, anyone can become an approved reviewer. In order to do that, you'd need to submit a fairly decent number of reviews in order to look at both the quality of the reviews and the consistency of that quality (5, perhaps?). A group of people (3-5) would look at the submitted reviews and come to a consensus, either "Yes" or "No." If "No," the applicant can resubmit a certain number of times (or infinite?) and also ask for feedback from the group (committee might be a better word). If "Yes," all of the applicant's "Amateur" reviews would immediately enter the approval queue for becoming "Approved" reviews.
That leads into the next part, the queue. Becoming an approved reviewer doesn't mean you can type up whatever you want and post it as a review. It also means you can no longer post "Amateur" reviews. Instead, whenever you come out with a review, it's placed on the queue. While I have no idea how it actually works, I imagine it'd be similar to what FimFic does for story approval. However, unlike that queue, which only has very basic quality control, this approval queue would require three people to give it the go ahead. Alternatively, if two people say it's not ready, it's removed from the queue, and the reviewer is asked to revise. To combat potential rivalries among reviewers, in order to say a review isn't ready for posting, valid reasoning must be presented to the reviewer. The idea behind the queue is to maintain a standard of quality for these "Approved" reviews.
So that's the application process and the queue. Now for some of the other features.
Perhaps next to the "Groups" tab below the banner would be a tab called "Site Reviewers." This tab would be something like the old site staff page which featured avatars, links to their profile pages, and a short bio. It would also contain a link to a list of all their archived reviews so people could easily see everything the reviewer's put up. Additionally, on this page would be a "Subscribe" button which would work differently from the "Follow" button. Clicking this button would give you a notification every time the person posted a review. Additionally, it would also notify you whenever that person favorited a story. Since readers would likely subscribe to reviewers they agree with, giving them access to what the reviewer likes is an easy way for readers to pick up new stories. I imagine these notifications could easily be added to the current "Feed." A final feature on this "Site Reviewers" tab would be a list of/link to each reviewer's "Recommended" stories. These stories wouldn't necessarily have to have a review from that person to be on the list, but to prevent abuse, only ten stories can be selected for this list from each reviewer. Otherwise, reviewers might simply just add stories to that list and not review anything.
Finally, I'd imagine each reviewer would get some sort of fancy icon next to their name. Or something. I dunno.
So, in sum:
- Reviews are added in as a subset of comments
- Reviews are split into two categories: "Amateur" and "Approved," with priority to the latter (ie: they're listed first no matter how you sort the reviews, save for the possibility of sorting by tags).
- Anyone can apply to become a reviewer
- All reviews must be approved before posting in order to maintain some sense of quality
- There will be a "Site Reviewers" tab below the banner where users can see who the approved reviewers are, subscribe to them, and check out their reviews
- The tab will also contain links to all the "Approved" reviews
- Fancy icon thingies
So if any of that made sense, cool. In the likely event that it didn't, feel free to ask as many questions as you want.
Cheers!
1160950 I'm not declaring a hostile takeover in any shape or form, but the fanfiction community should get a say in the formats, processes, and other behind-the-scenes aspects.
Problem is, if you don't have hundreds of followers, you have to wait for somebody else to say something like what you want to say on their blog, and respond to it. I've said repeatedly that we need a forum-- a bulletin board system, a place organized by topics, where anyone can post a new thread. Like this.
Some of the mods, maybe Poultron and Wanderer_D, replied to me, and said that they definitely did not want a forum on fimfiction because it would be too much work for them. Now, I don't think it should be much work for them, because I don't believe people need to be supervised that much. Just kick people out who are repeatedly reported for being abusive. But I also believe that stories don't need to be approved. Stories on fanfiction.net and ponyfictionarchive.net don't need to be approved, and they are no lower in quality than the stories here that have been approved. (It's still my suspicion that the approval apparatus is a lot of effort to block a few bad stories per day, stories nobody would really notice anyway if they weren't blocked.) It's really the same disagreement, I think.
But if I were right, everyone would already have done this and created accounts on http://ponyfictionarchive.net/forum/ . I don't know why people don't do that.
A long time ago I created a group on fimfiction for discussing fimfiction: Fimfiction. It has three members.
1160820 what are thoughts about making easier-to-digest output, like short, daily chapter updates? That obviously doesn't work for all types of stories, but it's easier to say "1k per day" rather than "read my 212k+223k+164k behemoth".
My thoughts are: Stop writing 600,000 word stories. For most long stories here, the problem isn't that the chapter size is wrong, or that the updates are too infrequent. The problem is that the stories are too damn long for what they have to say.
This comes at a point when I am cutting back on my activity. Now I feel bad.
So, as was pointed out to me by a
mortal enemyfriend, I forgot to address one major issue with the system I proposed. He reminded me that some of the features might breed an idea of elitism, that people would treat the approved reviewers similarly to how people here treat EqD.So, to address that, the purpose of the approval process is to have some semblance of quality control. Ideally, there'd be a large pool of reviewers. The goal of this whole system, though, is to help readers find stories they like. As such, there are going to be plenty of reviewers readers don't agree with. There are going to be reviewers that like and recommend things I don't like, for example. That's not the point, though. If everyone agrees on everything, it'll be boring. No, the point is to find the reviewers that have similar tastes to you. The whole system gives you access to all the guys who know something about story-telling, actually write up reviews, and were bothered to apply to be approved. It's not to say they're better than anyone else. Inevitably, though, people will think that because any sort of quality control always gets branded as "elitist" by someone somewhere.
So I don't know if that actually addresses the issue adequately, but it's something. I think.
1161117
That's a pretty generalized statement. While there is some truth to that, it's not always so much what the story has to say but what happens along the lines to getting there—the actual story. True, some can get quite tedious, but there's usually a method to the madness, and as a matter of fact I'd argue a good number of stories exist just to tell the story, not because there's a deeper meaning behind it all to pull away from, one that may or may not even exist and it may not even have to.
It seemed like such an innocuous thing to say.
My God. What have I unleashed?
1161117 Incidentally, all my this. I don't even understand this phenomenon.
1161117 1161521
*shrug* While I'm NOT claiming that Harry Potter is the epitome of literary excellence, and while I do acknowledge it had a good amount of fat that could've been trimmed...
~Total: 1,084,000 words
Would the story have been the same if its length was cut to 500k? 200k? 100k? Was the story simply tl;dr and didn't deserve to be told?
Are dramatic readings of fanfic worth listening to? I've been reluctant to listen to any so far.
I hear you loud and clear over here... Even though I consider myself a patient, well-read, person who prefers a well-written article to a video or photo gallery any day, I spent almost half a year in online pony communities before I even gave fanfiction a chance. I think part of the problem is that only the very worst fanfiction becomes famous in the grand scheme of things— prior to joining this site, my idea of fanfiction was based entirely on examples like "My Immortal", "John Freeman, Saver of Humans", and the "Twilight" series of books.
Seeing as though those notable fics don't exactly constitute a body of great literature, the very idea of checking into pony fanfiction made me shudder. What's worse, when I finally was talked into reading "My Little Dashie", I found the experience to be quite disappointing. It really wasn't until I was 20,000 words into my first fic that I even realized that this website existed.
1161553
Mostly, no. The appeal is usually the personality of the reader rather than the story itself.
1161152 I didn't mean it in the pretentious literary sense. I just meant they have too many words and not enough stuff happening.
1161553 Illya Leonov recorded both Eternal and Past Sins, and he's an outstanding reader.
1161549 Of course I'm not saying all stories should be short. I love Eternal and Fallout: Equestria. But running long is a particularly-common failure mode of fan-fiction. The Harry Potter series is a million words long, but more interesting things happen, and more interesting and mysterious characters are introduced, in the first first chapter than in the first 20,000 words of most fanfics.
1161658
Most fanfics are terrible regardless of length. Length isn't the issue. The skills present in the author are.
Getting back to the original blog post, what can we do to make people take fanfiction seriously?
Assuming we're starting with bronies anyway, let's take all the porn off the damn coffee table and put it in the closet.
I think there are two main things working against the idea of fanfiction being legitimate:
1) The perception that writing is something anyone can do. This is only true if we define writing as putting together a sentence. By the logic most people apply, I can draw, about this well:
ragecomics.com/-img/51c6041cafa96f6ce9000285.png?w=600&h=664
But most people who draw at that level would say "I can't draw, just stick figures." However, people who write fiction about that well would say they can write.
This is not a perception unique to bronydom.
2) Porn, and lots of it, all over the damn place.
To be fair, we share this problem to an extent with fanart, but I do see one difference: DeviantArt doesn't like porn, and makes it difficult to go too far. Their standards are loose enough to not step on too many artist's toes when it comes to what they want to express, but the straight-out porn is rejected. All sorts of lesser-known site host that. Which is fine, no one gets a bunch of porn shoved in their face when they are looking for decent pony art that qualifies as good art.
FimFiction.net has a terrible rating system: kiddie stuff or kiddie porn. No middle ground. This is a complaint that I know several fairly big players around here have already brought up to Knighty: we need separate R and XXX ratings, and a way to set my frontpage to the middle ground here. I don't want to turn off 'view mature,' as that would hide a lot of high quality R-rated but still artistic work. But I don't want to have to walk through a porn store to see that stuff.
And we could leave the, more specialized stuff, on the site, as it will be somewhere anyway. It simply shouldn't be in the front window.
Those are the problems I see, more that a lack of good reviewers. The folks at EqD, while very nice people in real life I'm sure, have made a few enemies around here because of what I believe to be an inevitable consequence of the reviewing process, but not the obvious one.
Let me try that again: There is a lot of fanfiction being written. More than fanart or fan music or fan animation, because it is a lot easier to access the technology needed to write fanfic and because more people believe they can write. So, lots of fanfic. EqD want to showcase the best of pony fanworks. With fan animation, they need only to separate out stuff that's done. With music and art, the standards are a bit higher but not by much, honestly.
For fiction, however, the standards must be much higher, otherwise they'd be posting 27 stories every day. Bt there's the rub: the higher the standard, the more subjective that standard becomes.
I'm not talking about the 'no mature' thing either, (I get that at least), I'm talking about the 'perfect grammar according to one set of grammar rules standard. To be exacting, they need to be picky about stuff like grammar. To be that picky, they need to start making generalized decisions about what constitutes 'correct' grammar.
There is no one universally accepted set of rules for grammar in fiction.
Note that Shakespeare, Twain, Dickens, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Addams would all fail EqD's grammar test.
The higher you set your standard, the more subjective that standard becomes, and the more people (both writers and readers) you alienate from your opinion. Which is why a lot of us will check out EqD for the latest comics but don't care what they have to say about fanfics. I think.
But any new site/group/ functionality would inevitably face the same problem: trying to narrow the field down below a couple dozen thousand fics (most people here can spell and capitalize)will start to impose subjective standards. Maybe different ones, and if there were enough then there might be one you agree with, but, well, probably not. Just somepony else to complain about. Which is not really helping, now is it?
In conclusion, there's way too much porn on the front page. And the weird stuff, too.
1161683
i'd like to chime in with my token opinion as a horsesmut purveyor to say that i absolutely disagree that porn has anything to do with bettering fanfiction's perception in the fandom or outside of it. if the front page of Fimfiction didn't have "Pony Has Sex With Pony #56" it would have "Brony Hero of Halo's Master Equestria #32" instead. they're both terrible, and both, if shown to someone unfamiliar with fanfic or interested in being shown that it's better than their preconceptions would suggest, would likely scare them away.
i think what's more relevant in this discussion is the notion that fanfiction consideration should start within, rather than beginning on a global scale and narrowing our sights once we theoretically conquer the world. i feel a few other members of the discussion have hit the nail on the head with why fanfiction isn't as popular as other forms of fan-media – but, in doing so, the discussion has to turn to why writing and reading in general aren't as popular as other forms of entertainment (in my mind, anyway). fandoms seem to be unique in that visual art has a place elevated above writing, but in that regard, as already addressed, there's a much greater level of investment in reading something, as well as all the other pitfalls that come with encouraging literary engagement.
with that in mind, are we fighting a losing battle from the get-go? is this just a microcosm of the notion that people should read instead of enjoying themselves in less challenging ways? i'm not sure there's much that can be done, if that's the case. if it isn't, and we assume that everyone can be persuaded to read, then suggestions can be changed accordingly, but i'm not sure we'd be appropriating any theoretical efforts correctly if we focused on 'get the people who already read fanfics to read betters ones' rather than 'get people in the fandom to read more fics' in general.
though, the former might be a lot easier to tackle, which seems to be the focus of the suggestions i've seen herein.
1161553
I'll second Bad Horse's suggestion of Illya Leonov
and add myselfThere's a new site I've just heard about, http://mlpaudiobooks.net/, that's going around collecting readings. I don't know that they have any content or quality standards, however, so there's that. Reader quality varies wildly, but I've found, at least for a starting point, that people willing to do full (and I mean completed) audiobooks tend to be better at quality.
1161751 Let me first say that I have nothing against clop, for what it is. I read pointless clop from time to time and enjoy it. (if you know what I mean)
Also, you make a good point about shitty crossovers. I hadn't thought of that.
I do think it's not the same as reading in general though. While people don't read (I won't even argue that they should or that reading is better in any way than any other form of being told a story. Movies are great, for instance) they do, in the non-fanfiction literary world, respect writing as an art. They do not respect fanfiction.
Is there a similar gap with fanart? Probably. Is it as great? I honestly have no idea. Is there anything that can be done about that? I don't know.
As for more reviewers, with new standards, I don't think it'll make a big difference. Critics never get a lot of respect. And who can really say whether Past Sins was, objectively, a good story? I know I enjoyed it. Many others did not. The only objective standard we can apply is 'words were spelled correctly.' Not enough to go on if we want to direct people to 'good' fanfiction, but since any other standard is ultimately subjective, what can we do, really? Just make recommendations to anyone who will listen, and remind them of the inverse of Sturgeon's Law:
10% of everything is good. (sometimes really good)
1161900
i feel like most open minded people i talk to, who enjoy reading and writing, can be convinced to consider fanfiction a valid method of literary expression. maybe you just hang around different circles, but i'm envious that you can mention you know people who respect writing in general in the first place
if we're conceding that literacy isn't the focus of fanfic promotion, then i absolutely think there are countable ways to promote it – i know knighty has talked about hosting some kind of 'art meets writing' contest on Fimfiction, which i'd be hugely in favour of. i also agree with people above that saturation and exposure are necessary tools just to help expose more people to the community's writing. EQD isn't enough... though, the idea of starting a new site and making it function to promote fanfiction to non-fanfiction readers is a daunting and potentially impossible task. if you make a site full of fanfics people should read, who's going to go there other than people who already read fanfics?
the answer, in a circular manner, is to circumvent that problem by finding a venue that is seen by all folks and shoving writing down their throats – but i'm not sure what form that might take, or how one would go about doing it.
Okay, a lot's been said, so this is going to be a somewhat lengthy response. I'll try for some more brevity in my points here, just so you don't all have a slog to get through.
I agree with the point 1161751 makes about how something crappy is going to clutter the feature box no matter what. I also like the word horsesmut. Most people have pretty questionable taste, and anyone who writes like crap and thinks they can write isn't going to mind reading someone else writing like they do.
But the point of this blog was supposed to be making fanfiction more accessible to people who don't read it, and with that in mind we need to consider two sets of people:
(1) Those who read for pleasure but avoid fanfiction because they think it's low quality
(2) Those who do not regularly read for pleasure
As far as I'm concerned, (2) is basically a lost cause. There's a structural issue with these people we can't hope to address. But we can, potentially, be more friendly toward (1). That involves doing our best to kill the canard that all fanfiction is crap—and again, I think EQD does a good job by, in essence, making a safe space for fanfiction. Things that show up on EQD may not be the best of the best, but ideally, they should be things that meet some quality threshold and which some people are willing to stand behind and say, "We think this is worth reading."
The question, then, is whether a better system can be devised. If someone wants to join the world of fanfiction, how do they know where to look for things that aren't crap? The Feature Box is imperfect, but it's something. Are there other things that can be done? I think this remains an open question—that is to say I'm still not convinced anything presented here really would do the trick.
Because it always pops up, I feel the need to address this particular canard from 1161683. And apologies for singling you out, but you are the one that said it here.
Grammar problems are highly correlated with and symptomatic of overall story problems, but it's not really that hard to judge story quality on things other than grammar. Plenty of stories are just plain wordy and involve ugly (if grammatically correct) constructs loaded with adverbs and wiggle words. Plenty of stories are listless and not all that good at moving toward their narrative goals. Plenty, and I mean plenty, of stories fail at keeping their canon characters in anything like their canon characterizations. This is just a start.
I keep hearing about EQD pre-readers being overly hung up on grammar or overly subjective. Well, if one doesn't accept that a story can legitimately and objectively fail at the sorts of things mentioned above, all decent criticism is going to look subjective or nitpicky on unimportant issues. But you can objectively screw those things up—or at the very least you can screw them up in a consensus-subjective manner. Yes, if the EQD pre-readers were limiting themselves to grammar considerations, they would be failing in their role as fanfic aggregators. But they're not limiting themselves to those sorts of considerations. They're just in the business of pissing off most of the people who interact with them. In the business of. The majority of people are never going to be happy with their standards, but I think it's important to try to recognize that they aren't random or even particularly arbitrary. If a story is top-tier work, it's going to make the cut. Decisions are only arbitrary when a story is flailing around in the pool of "good but not really good".
1161100, you put a lot of thought into this idea, so I kind of hate to shoot it down, but I feel like I have to. I'm pretty sure that any reviewing/scoring system with a form of "institutional support" is doomed to the exact same problem faced by EQD and their pre-readers. This ties back into the whole issue of people not having a good handle on their skill level for writing. When you can't tell how good you are, any time you pour your heart into a big project and get negative reviews, a lot of people are going to take the easy route and say the institutional reviewers are just arbitrary and their opinions aren't worth much. When you have taste-makers and a user base whose self-esteem is to some extent tied up in not agreeing with those taste-makers, this is always going to happen.
This is one of the things I liked about PoweredByTea's idea of reviewing committees. If you get together a number of groups with similar interests and have them review stories, then users can find groups whose taste agrees with their own. And beyond that, you can start getting at overall organization by quality by letting these reviewing committees become more or less visible based on the extent to which users find them useful.
But at the end of the day, this is pretty much just extended Fimfiction group functionality coupled with some better organizing of groups in general. And the point 1160853 made earlier about getting users to review in the first place stands.
If the users won't participate, a crowdsourced reviewing solution is impossible. If you do it without making the whole thing user-centric, if you run the institutional route, I just can't see how you avoid the EQD problem.
Even if the solution is supposed to make fanfiction more accessible to first-time readers, if the existing userbase doesn't buy in, any solution is doomed to fail.
1161683
Actually, this is one of the biggest things I, and several other authors I hang out with, have been screaming for.
WE NEED BETTER TAG DIVERSIFICATION AND FILTERING.
If Fimfic's going to insist on allowing content that people find objectionable (rape/foalcon/trollfics/etc), then getting more readers to be willing to hunt for stories that aren't on the front page means that they need a good way to quickly and easily filter out what they absolutely don't want to see.
1161927 Allow me to clarify, because on re-reading my comments, I'm not sure I speak well for myself:
I picked grammar as an example of a standard that becomes increasingly subjective as the standards increase. I could probably have made the same argument about pacing standards or characterization standards or any other standard we care to name, but I felt it was a good example to use because we've all heard both sides of the argument, probably several times, probably at least a few time it was presented well.
The example would have fallen apart into a mass of metasyntactic variables way to quickly if I decide to cite pacing standards. Grammar is an example, is all.
Also, EqD is really only an example as well. I could make almost the same argument about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and how they give out their annual awards (the Oscars). Since the academy is made up mostly of actors, the judgements in non-acting categories tend to be acting-centric. Which is how Kramer vs. Kramer was found to be a better movie than Apocalypse Now. This is a more extreme case (the best, not just one of the best) but the same idea applies: higher standard = more subjectivity.
My thesis is: any standard that will narrow down the field of fanfiction to anything like a manageable level will involve significantly subjective standards, which people will argue about because this is the internet, and a lot of decent (not great, but still worthwhile) stuff will be right at the edge. Which ids the fundamental complaint about EqD. "I loved that fic! Why can't the prereaders see how good it is!"
(because it might not be the best it could possibly be, a standard they only apply to fanfics, btw.)
We probably all us informal reviewing groups by now; a number of other users on the site whose recommendations we take notice of. The problem is that this is a barrier to new readers, yes? Let me sleep on that.
1162000 This I generally agree with. Not quite fully—I don't think it's that hard to look for the whole package and counterweight what works and what doesn't—but I'm also aware that I'm weird, and my idea of what's hard doesn't extrapolate well. AMPAS has all sorts of problems, and I've just about given up on the Oscars because their criteria seem to leave a lot lacking. Add that to the internal inconsistency (the prevalence of make-up awards for actors who should have won on previous occasions but didn't, and now everyone regrets it in hindsight), and the Oscars are just a mess. So I think your analogy here is well taken.
But at the same time, my attitude tends to be that EQD is in a justified position of power. They're not there to serve the authors. They're there to serve potential readers. And so missing some good stories is forgivable, while posting truly bad ones is not. There are a few stories I've seen them publish that I'd have rejected for having serious problems on structure and/or characterization, but even then, I think those stories still make it into the top 10% here pretty easily.
An issue with heralding any one place as somewhere to find quality fanfiction is that the definition of quality varies a lot depending on whom you are talking to. EqD fulfils the needs of a certain audience, but just as well there are lots of readers who don't like what the pre-readers like, and just as well there are things that EqD's family-friendly policies disallow that some pre-readers would like to put up.
The goal of EqD I think is less "recommend people quality fanfiction" but more "recommend people fanfiction that they would like to read". In fact, I'm sure I remember at least one pre-reader stressing this distinction in the past.
In that vein, I think that the solution to a lot of people's problems would be a strong recommendation system -- one which replaces the feature box. The system finds stories similar to those you've liked, and recommends you those. Everyone's happy, right? At least in theory.
Unfortunately, recommendation systems are very hard to do right. Not so much to make the recommendations good (which is actually quite easy), but to make them good and scalable. A naive calculation of item-to-item similarity uses linear correlation and has a time complexity of O(n^3). In other words, the time it takes to work on data sets as large as Fimfiction's is entirely impractical. To get better time complexity, you have to sacrifice accuracy. The exact methods for doing this are really complex stuff -- I was reading through academic journals trying to find a good solution -- and heavily dependent on the data you actually have available. So in this case, the solution is more technical than political.
I talked with knighty about this before but sort of got side-tracked by other projects. He said he's definitely interested in such a system (if it works). Fimfiction does have a considerable amount of data, so with a smart enough solution I'm convinced we could get good results. If Netflix is any example, it'll also help small-time players get a little bit more exposure than they currently get.
If enough people demonstrated interest in it, I guess I could dive back into researching this.
That said, this doesn't really solve the problem of attracting people who don't read fanfiction into doing so. I think attempts similar to Chris' fanfiction reviews would do a good help there.
1161927 If a story is top-tier work, it's going to make the cut. Decisions are only arbitrary when a story is flailing around in the pool of "good but not really good".
This will probably sound like whining, but you have a fundamental disagreement with jmartkdr that you don't seem to be aware of. If you look at the things EqD has rejected, whatever your standards are, you'll find some work you think is top tier that's been rejected. You don't seem to accept that point. But even if you did, you'd still be a long way from jmartkdr's position, because you believe there is such a thing as a "top tier story". If you believe a story can be objectively good, and jmartkdr believes that's subjective, you're not going to get any further talking to each other.
I believe stories can be objectively competent, but not objectively great.
His point about grammar isn't that rejecting things on the basis of grammar is persnickity; his point is that it isn't objective. EqD has their own set of grammar rules, apparently based on the Chicago manual of style and the presumption that grammar should be prescriptive rather than descriptive. They often speak in their letters as if these rules were accepted and universal, but they are not. They ask for grammatical corrections of things that are not wrong. And if /grammar/ is subjective, how much more so story!
I disagree with your assessment that "it's not really that hard to judge story quality on things other than grammar." Many people would say that darf's recent Ulysses tribute was a terrible, terrible story--ungrammatical, incomprehensible, boring, etc. I liked it, but I can't say they're "wrong". Many people think stories with OCs are bad stories by definition, because they have a particular ideology about what fanfiction is.
1162159 Fair enough. There are certain cases, darf's story being a major one, where writers are trying interesting stylistic exercises, and these things can be hard to judge.
But most of the work being done here is traditional narrative, 3rd person limited voice, past-tense structure. Your bread-and-butter of writing. Most of the work being done here is of a form that I, at least, consider relatively easy to evaluate based on a pretty well-defined set of criteria.
Now, yes, if one party says "this is subjective" and the other says "this is objective", that's pretty much an impasse. But most of the anti-EQD arguments I see seem to suggest that there's no rhyme or reason to non-grammatical concerns, and I don't feel like it's out of order to point to a list of non-grammatical concerns that someone in the position of a publisher is going to want to look at. There is a degree of subjectivity in evaluating those things, but there's a degree of subjectivity in all measurement.
...though, looking back at your post, maybe I'm missing the point here, about grammar standards. And maybe that's myopic of me. But grammar problems with EQD is also something that's just outside my experience. The biggest grammar thing I've hit with them, out of the four stories I've sent them, was instruction to change my misused hyphens to em- or en-dashes on my first story, and this wasn't an issue that prevented them from taking the story. And it was a fair cop, I was misusing punctuation there, and I didn't know better.
Ah, I don't even know what I'm on about at this point. Sorry. I just tend to react badly when I feel like people are suggesting that grammar is the only thing that can properly be evaluated on stories. It's a hang-up of mine, and sometimes I get uncivil when it comes up. And to be fair it doesn't seem like that's really what 1162000 was arguing anyway.
I don't think I've personally experienced the dichotomy of fanfiction vs other fanwork nearly as much as some of you seem to have. The venue from which I initially discovered most of the efforts of the fandom was Reddit, and there I found fairly balanced (in terms of audience size to post rating) exposure being given to art, music, and fiction. People there are used to viewing what they're interested in and ignoring what they're not.
I've visited Equestria Daily maybe 10 times, ever, and I can't really put my finger on why. It wasn't my first experience of the fandom's internet presence, and it never particularly stood out to me, beyond people occasionally bitching about it for one reason or another. I suppose I was never really interested in a highly curated experience, or being subject to the tastes of what is essentially a completely random self-selected group of curators. I can understand the desire for such, limited time is, after all, a significant problem for a lot of people, but beyond technical issues like the greater time investment required to consume fanfic, avoidance of fanfiction mainly seems comes from preconceived notions, and those are generally only affected by words from trusted friends, something which you are probably not to the majority of people everywhere.
I should make it clear that I don't really see myself attempting to change the general perception of a medium, and I don't have any notions that I will have any influence towards such ends by making myself the center of, or a cog in, some kind of organization, website or otherwise. I simply seek out content that entertains me. It seems reasonable to me to assume that anyone willing to devote the amount of time required to actually read fanfics is probably going to put in the effort neccessary to find the ones that they're interested in reading. If the image of fanfic is going to change it will be through becoming popular of it's own accord, and that is accomplished by the existence of quality examples of it, hosted in easily accessible places. I only got into pony because doing so was easy. I haven't expanded into using various web sites and services out of a desire to spread pony, but rather out of a desire to consume more of it. I like FimFiction primarily because of it's size and function as a large scale aggregator of ponyfic. I took interest in this site when it became evident that it was the most expedient means of tracking the medium as a whole. Well, almost. I'm not irritated by any particular lack of functionality on FimFiction, but rather by the fact that it's gravitational pull hasn't yet become strong enough to pull in all the notable fics in the fandom. I'm disappointed, for instance, that I can't put Fallout Equestria on my Read It Later list. You can probably see why I would not be particularly interested in new sites dedicated to further segregating fic listings based on their own definitions of quality.
I believe that a low barrier to entry, such as the one used by FimFiction, simply a check for basic technical competence and actual relevance to the site, is inherently a good thing, relative to my ends, which is to consume, and subsequently ramble about, quality fics. Why, you ask, would you think that a lack of standards would result in more quality fiction? Simple, it results in more fiction.
People who would otherwise have been intimidated by having to undergo some kind of highly subjective review process in order to simply be made available for viewing à la Equestria Daily will have the motivation to actually put their crap out there. Okay, you say, but it's crap, right? Sure, but people who post their first crap because of the low barrier to entry will be exposed to criticism of their work, not from some shadowy cabal of whimsical reviewers, but the general community. Instead of simply being given a target to lash out at, (those darn pre-readers didn't let me publish my work) they'll be given the general opinion of anyone who bothers to read it, which is much more difficult to simply dismiss as too arbitrary. As a result, they may be encouraged to improve, and then you may eventually have a new writer of quality fiction that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Put more simply, and making less absurdly specific assumptions, if you take Sturgeon's Revelation literally, the amount of not-crap increases linearly with the total amount of things. Assuming any kind of mildly competent rating system, you have the ability to filter this mound of things and access the increasingly large amount of not-crap. Say what you will about "the Reddit problem", but I've found the up/down ratio on most fics to be fairly indicative of their quality regardless of any particular tastes, and sticking to stories with at least a 10:1 ratio with descriptions and tags that I like seems to prevent any spontaneous eye bleeding. I don't have a problem with seeing descriptions of fics I don't like.
I admit to being somewhat baffled by the actual behavior of the feature box at times, but it did initially introduce me to your work, so it's doing something. If you think it's there to represent the "best of the best" and show off what FimFiction is capable of being, (Which is almost verbatim what I saw someone posting on their blog to complain about the erotic stories say) well, it may not actually be designed to do what you think. It shows items which were recently posted, and quickly acquired a high positive rating ratio, with the intention of exposing things which appear promising to more people with the intent of collecting a larger rating sample. Things fall off the list once the influx of upvotes is no longer enough to counteract the effect of the time decay function. It seems to be ordered similarly to, but not quite the same as the popular list. If you want something that has statistically significant sample of ratings already and is thus much more likely to be actually good, try working through the top rated list (which is oddly, not actually visible anywhere on the front page) for extremely long term results.
I've seen a bunch of complaining in this thread about some kind of "lack of good reviewers". This raises a question. Why exactly do you think people would want to be reviewers? As somone who makes a habit of "reviewing" fics in a sense, I think maybe I could talk about why I do so. I review fics because I like hearing the responses of the authors that wrote them. I don't view it as some kind of quality control mechanism, that's what the votes are for, but simply a form of feedback, and most importantly, it gets the creators of stuff I like to talk to me. That's pretty much it. I don't write reviews in the hope that some randoms will read them and become interested in reading the fic. I would not join some kind of "approved reviwer" group. I don't need pressure to talk about stories for serious business purposes, it's enough work as it is.
As far as technical improvements I'd like to see on the site, I'd mostly like better comment handling features. Watches should have an option catch comments from users, and users should be able to retrieve a list of their own comments, as well as possibly those of other users. There should be an option to order story comments by their rating in order to pull out the most insightful comments about a story. 1161100 suggested the ability to subscribe to "reviews" of fics. (Though in an incredibly overcomplicated way, in my opinion) Improving comments would be a more reasonable step in that direction, as it would increase access to commentary about stories and decrease the effort required to keep up with it. Increased granularity in the tagging system would also be cool, though I can see it being a pain for existing content. It would also be nice if the filter tool would allow you to (intuitively, if it does so already, I have no idea how) exclude tags as opposed to simply include them.
As for the expanding discussion on what writers should do to appeal to audiences, well, it seems to me that the general characteristics of prose have been pretty well established over the past thousand years of the use of the written English language. If you have to vastly alter your approach to writing to reach the audience you want, then what exactly are you writing for? This strikes me as seriously over-thinking things.
Exactly what the point of all this was is actually not terribly clear to me. It's probably somewhere between a defense of the status quo and a declaration of apathy, but I've spent far too long writing it to just throw it away now, so there you are.
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After trying to keep up with two separate 50-comment threads yesterday—largely involving smart, opinionated people writing incredibly long passages—this is a sentiment I relate to on an intimate level. I... yeah, well, I've talked too much already and it's left me exhausted.
I'll likely have more to say about all this in a week or two, though it's going to go in a very different direction from what I expect people are thinking, after this thread.