Also Liked Stories - The Collected Poems of Maud Pie edition · 6:19am Dec 11th, 2014
I'm sure a lot of you are aware of the new "Also Liked" stories feature, which is something of an improvement over the previous "related stories", and seems to give out a lot better recommendations, even if they do seem very heavily tied to the same author or time period that the story was released in.
That being said, I have to say that The Collected Poems of Maud Pie probably has the best list of Also Liked stories I've seen yet:
Bitter Harvest - A story I have already reviewed and which is a top-tier comedy fic.
The Wrong Fork - An excellent little vignette from PoweredByTea (though I repeat myself) about Rarity, Celestia, and pretension.
Heart is Where the Home Is - A great story about the loss of a home from Skywriter.
That's All - A fun little story about Pinkie Pie accidentally destroying Applejack's hat, and Pinkie Pie's reaction to it.
Bad Horse's Bedtime Stories for Impressionable Young Colts and Fillies - Fractured fairy tales by Bad Horse told by a wonderfully terrible narrator.
Breaking News and Weather - A story told entirely in front pages of newspapers from around the time that Rainbow Dash did the Sonic Rainboom.
In the Place the Wild Horses Sleep - A pony children's story heavily reminiscent of Where the Wild Things Are which absolutely everyone but me adores.
While a very eclectic collection of stories, I think that they're all worthy reads and that the algorithm did a very good job of picking them out. Of course, that is likely because every one of you who liked this story has already read and enjoyed all of those... but if you did enjoy The Collected Poems of Maud Pie, you might want to check these out as well. They really are nothing like The Collected Poems of Maud Pie, and yet, perhaps that is what makes them special - they're highly unique stories.
So had you already read all of these? Because that's pretty much the only drawback I've found to this new recommendation system, that it tends towards stuff so popular you already know it (or towards the author's other works -- I saw one story where all the Also Liked fics were by the same guy). Still works better than anything else feasible, it seems.
2646303
I suspect it is more useful for new users than veteran users - if you find a new story that you like, the other liked stories is helpful. Once you've been on the website a while, you're more likely to have crawled through those stories already.
I've actually read all those, except maybe the Bad Horse collection, and yeah, they're all great. You're in good company! :D
I didn't adore Wild Horses, I just thought it was a really good children's story. However it apparently is the most reviewed pony fan fiction ever.
As a possible explanation for why those stories in particular got chosen: five of the seven, like Maud, also earned Royal Canterlot Library features.
I just learned I have some of my stories have no stories that are also liked. This is interesting in that the site doesn't just gather stuff liked around the same time, but there is a strict rule about the stories listed have to meet, and no stories meeting that criteria is possible. This also means that if the timing was such that most people liked your story and no others, only reading updates for example, you could get some very odd results. Not to mention that if your story released close enough to something popular enough it's inevitable it will be on the list regardless of how good/bad/related it is.
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A story has to meet a minimum number of likes before it will display "also liked", because otherwise there isn't a large enough sample size on it. IIRC it requires something on the order of 10 likes. Knighty briefly mentioned it in his post. So stories with very small numbers of likes won't really display anything or show up anywhere.
2650164 Ah, didn't see that. Though I'm not sure it's that simple since I have one story with 8 likes, and 5 dislikes, and it has one also liked story, but a 13 and zero story has none. But in the end it probably doesn't really matter.
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My guess is that the 10 is a rough number; I would guess that the actual number requires some number of people who liked your story to like another story, so with 8 people, if all of them liked another story, maybe it would show up, while the 13 people didn't have enough agreement on also liked stories to show up.