This is why the featured box sucks · 12:27pm Jan 6th, 2015
I need you to read this post completely. Don't just quit halfway through. It's important.
So I was staring at the featured box a minute ago, and on a whim I decided to check out the top ranked story. No idea why. Just for giggles, perhaps. The featured fic is Sapiddus3's "Misunderstanding." I shall now reproduce the story description here, in all it's glory:
Rarity, Twilight, and their friends are eating lunch, when AJ notices Twilight staring at a stallion. In the ensuing conversation, Twilight soon learns that her friends are all crazy ponies and have somehow gotten it into their heads that she is in a relationship with her mentor and idol Princess Celestia.
This is... the dumbest idea for a story I've ever heard. Just the worst. a premise that has been done numerous times in the past and therefore requires a particular degree of wit, creativity, or experience to write about in an effective manner, assuming the author wishes to do more than simply pander to an already willing and eager audience that has very formulaic expectations of the genre. But as I've said in the past, the idea is the cheap part: it's the execution that matters. Even the worst premise can be crafted into a magnificent story, if it is handled with wit and passion. So I decided to check the story out. I simply had to know if it was really that bad. At the very least, it's short.
Folks, it's bad a little lacklustre.
To clarify, it's not "the worst thing evar." It won't induce suicide. It's not an affront to God and King. It's just "regular" bad. And when I say this, I'm setting aside any negative bias I have for the uninteresting plot (I despise rom-com crack fics, but the parody element elevates it somewhat). I'm judging it entirely on the writing ability of the author. The story characterizes almost every main character as unpleasant, crude, or mean-spirited. The plot centers around a ridiculous leap of logic (Twi and Celestia must be gay because they hugged once) that a genuine, understanding friend never would have misunderstood. All of this ties in fairly well with the parody elements, calling attention to cliches common in the genre. However, technically speaking, the sentences are poorly constructed, and have a halting, clumsy gait. The humor is slightly more crude and childish than the description might lead you to believe, at least compared to the official cannon of the show. And although I am the very last person in the world who gets to complain about apostrophe related atrocities, here I am, pointing out the elementary difference between "her's" and "hers" in the very first paragraph which is no longer visible, because the author fixed it after reading this review.
I'm very disappointed in you, Duncan R. It's obvious you didn't read all the material before writing your book report. Please see me after class.
I feel like I'm being a bully here. If I don't like it, then I should just decide not to read it. If other people like it (and the comments shock me by suggesting they do), then that's okay. It's not the end of the world. But how the hell did this hit the top of the featured box?
There are two things that readers can appreciate in a story: the technical quality of the writing, and the characters and events in the story. I've long held the opinion that the first is more important. But here we have a story that's even lower: I think people supported this story entirely because of the genre and character tags it has. As long as it contains cheap Twilestia innuendo, they don't care what happens in the story, or even how well the story was executed. I find this deeply disturbing.
So I clicked my way over to Sapius3's user page and scanned the rest of their stories. They have a bunch of shorter one-shots, and one monster fic, "Equestria's Twilight," that's pushing past 100k words. This has all the hallmarks of a classic first novel. It happens all the time: somebody decides to get into writing, and instead of starting out small, they pick the biggest, grandest, most convoluted magnum opus they can imagine. But since the new author doesn't know how to plan out a novel, or make the individual scenes mesh well, it turns into a hot mess. Predictably, this author gave up on it a few years ago. Because that's what happens when you bite off more than you can chew. It happens all the time. Dear god, I still get the shudders when I think of my own first novel... it was a train wreck, and I will never allow it to be exposed to the light of day. I slammed it out as quickly as I could, locked it in the attic, and moved on. It was a good learning experience.
I assume that's what Sapidus3 did. A scan of his blog reveals that he actually abandoned this fic a couple years ago, and only recently picked it up again. He had to assure people that he hadn't committed suicide in the interim. That's not a good sign.
So what do I think of this monster fic?
I'll start by telling you that this story has everything working against it. It's like it was designed to piss me off. It's tragedy, dark, AND sad. It's about the end of the world. We see Twilight filling in for a dead or ailing Celestia, and being super-emo because she'll never live up to her mentor. I was fully prepared to hate, hate, hate this fic from the very beginning.
Ponies called it the “Twilight Years of Equestria,” and she was certain whoever had come up with the term had thought themselves to be incredibly clever. Equestria was dying and soon the sun would set forever. The former paradise was seeing its final years under the rule of Princess Twilight Sparkle.
Wait. The... what?
I thought it was Celestia's rule that ended. So now we're skipping to the end of Twilight's rule? That's... weird.
She rose from her throne and plodded over to one of the balconies, her hooves weighed down by decades of memories. Twilight’s forlorn gaze went up to the empty evening sky. It brought so much pain to her heart, but yet she was drawn to stare into its abyss. The sun had nearly set, just a hint of orange and red peeking above the horizon, and there was no sign of the stars or the moon. The darkness was wrong, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Wait. No stars or moon? Is Luna missing too?
Also, there's a ton of super-depressing emotions here... but they're not overwrought, and it never quite explains why she feels this way. We're seeing these emotions long after they've lost their edge. It's just the way things are now.
It was not the night for petitioners, and the princess had told the guards to send away any visitors for the day. It was the third time that month that she had canceled court. With each passing year, she found herself more and more prone to turning inwards. Luckily, the guards and palace staff never questioned her decisions. They understood.
Whoop: back to work. The backstory is given in one brief, succinct sentence. You probably didn't even realize it was backstory, but it sums up how she's felt for the past few... wait. They understood what?
Equestria was coated in a blanket of snow that gave it a serene sense of beauty that betrayed the true state of her kingdom. It was easy for her to imagine that Winter Wrap Up would be coming soon to uncover lush fields of green. However, eventually when the snow melted, withered and dying grass would be revealed instead.
Twilight looked out at the setting sun. The cold and distant sphere of light was barely capable of illuminating the land. Even in the warmth of the palace, she felt herself shiver. In some other time, the New Year’s celebration would have marked the approach of spring. Now, it just meant another four months of winter. Sometimes farmers would still come and plead for longer days and brighter light, but most had learned that their cries would fall on deaf ears. The first time a pony had thrown himself on his knees, begging her to try just a little harder, Twilight had wept openly in court. Turning them away greatly pained the Princess of Equestria, but the pathetic orb of light that was Equestria’s new sun took all of her strength to maintain. She had nothing more to give.
Aaaaaah stop the feels
You're not supposed to let me realize this sort of stuff on my own! You're supposed to have Twilight whine and complain constantly! Stop it!
This is what good writing looks like.
In fact, I'd even call it great writing. Fantastic? Excellent? Superb? Maybe not. But it got me to read the first chapter of a story that has all my least favorite tags, and a premise I'd normally turn my nose up at. But I read the first chapter, and it didn't feel like a horrible chore. That's half the challenge of being an author. If I hadn't checked the dates, I would have assumed the author wrote this one later on in their career, after they'd had time to improve. But "Equestria's Twilight" came out years before "Misunderstanding". Maybe it was heavily proofread and edited? But even then, at least the author went to the trouble of finding an editor and actually followed their advice.(1)
As I said earlier, Sapidus3 apparently abandoned this monster fic for the longest time and only recently came back to it. This is one of those rare situations where I think this was a good thing. if anyone out there wants to read a sadgedy about Twilight actually buckling down and trying to fix a crap-sack dystopia, instead of immediately whining and sobbing while listening to Linkin Park, give this story a chance. It does have its share of problems: the dialogue, in particular, is a little lackluster, and could have been interspersed with a little more descriptions of actions or body language. Despite my earlier complement about subtlety of expression, there are a few heavy-handed moments later on. Also, there are probably millions of fics with a similar premise. Some people might turn up their noses due to complaints of unoriginality. But, speaking as a neonate to such concepts, it gave me an excellent first impression.
Why is this story not featured? Whyyy?
I strongly suspect that it was featured, at some point in the distant past. But that still doesn't answer my second question: Who let "Misunderstanding" out of the basement, and how did it get all the way up on the roof?
Super special review update!
After reading a particular comment, I decided I ought to do "Misunderstanding" the benefit of the doubt, and actually read through it completely. I need to start doing this more often. Although most of my opinion above was formed from the quality of writing, I will admit two things:
1) This story is more of a parody of the genre, which somewhat significantly improves my opinion of the plot. In my defense, It would have been nice if I'd actually picked up on this tidbit from the beginning... the description makes no mention of the word "parody" or "satire," and I'm not very smart.
2) The ending... yes indeed, the ending made me giggle.
(1) Sure enough, his(2) blog states that Sapidus3 very recently did a major re-edit of some or all of the story. The improvement in skill is evident.
(2) I'm just assuming Sapidus3 is a guy. I flipped a coin.
Yeah, I'll be honest. That was me, too.
I think I've gotten smarter -- the idea of starting a new long fic frightens me. I'm sure it'll happen again someday, but until then I'll enjoy this blessed reprieve.
Yeah, popularity and quality sometimes seem like they are on opposites sides of the spectrum. Especially in the feature box. Glad to hear that Equestria's Twilight seems good. It's been on my read later list for a while now and I'm just waiting for it to finish up.
I've still got my big pony story sitting around, waiting for me to work on it again.
Which is disappointing and intimidating, because it's still the best thing I've done in many people's opinions, and it's also the second thing I did after joining the fandom. With any luck, I can come back to it and start working again in a couple months, but I'm frankly a bit scared of it at this point.
Then there's this piece of steaming feces which breaks two rules (no meta; no circlejerk) just by existing. Won the featured box almost instantly and is still on it (the three bottom ones reserved for updates stories).
I don't want to be that cynical bastard... but I... I... this is just plain stupid.
Also known as "shipper logic." Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along...
W-What? That's absurd. No one would do something so reckless and short-sighted. *shovels more dirt on top of a conspicuous mound in the backyard*
Regarding Misunderstanding, I can't read that at work, but from a glance at the summary, it sounds like a fairly classic formula. Pony says A, friends assume B, pony clarifies "not B, but C!", which friends misunderstand as D. Soon enough, you've reached absurd levels. As a trope, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but like you say, execution is everything. The unfortunate reality though is that the readerbase is extremely forgiving compared to the writerbase on this website. Typos, cliches, and other sorts of issues—mechanical or systemic—won't always end up mattering as long as the lowest common denominator finds what they were looking for, and that's why the FB tends to be comedy one-shots and clopfics. As usual, it's never been safe to assume popularity => quality, and popularity (over time) is all that the FB tracks.
The silver lining is that quality does, more often than not, become popular. It's a flawed system though, thus the existence of review groups to try to smooth over the bumps. And further, there's the "but my magnum opus has 2000 views and this FB dick joke has 8000 views" disparity, but... Frankly, I think that issue is unsolvable. There is no one to blame there except for the readerbase themselves.
I meant to reply to this in a comment, and then this happened. I'm bad at brevity.
On a different note, though:
Guilty as charged, your honor, although in retrospect I remain admittedly impressed by what fifteen-year-old year me accidentally did right. The narration was amateurish at best and "pacing" did not yet exist in my literary vocabulary, but with a central cast of eleven characters, seven of whom were complete OCs and two of whom might as well have been, I actually managed to give them all unique personalities that clashed and contrasted well with each other, compelling approaches to and interpretations of events, and even a couple compelling backstories. Y'know, forgetting the one who I forgot to give a role in the plot and was kind of just... there. That one pinged off the crossbar, admittedly.
2704588
I fail to see how that is either meta or circlejerk.
Because it's long and unfinished. A lot of people won't read long fics, and many of those who will, won't start on one until it's finished.
Alright, well, let's take this from the top.
You mean, people who consider themselves to be good writers whining about the contents of the featured story box instead of writing new stories?
You haven't written a new story in nine months. What are you doing to make the featured story box a better place?
Seriously, every time I see someone complain about the contents of the featured story box, I have this to say to them: do better. Write something that gets into the box yourself. If you don't like what is in the featured story box, write more good stories.
This is a good idea for a story. It has a strong hook - everyone thinks that Twilight is in a secret relationship with Celestia. It is an inherently funny premise, and promises a funny argument between Twilight (who will, of course, argue that she totally isn't secretly canoodling with the ruler of Equestria) and her friends (who are going to, of course, not believe her). It promises comedy, misunderstandings (heck, it is right there in the title), and a silly argument wherein Twilight's friends misinterpret things that have happened in the light of convincing themselves that Twilight and Celestia are secretly in a relationship. Heck, Twilight having something of a crush on Celestia is a not-entirely-unreasonable character interpretation of Twilight in the show. She doesn't, of course, but unlike almost all the other potential shipping pairs, there is, at least, some indication that that COULD actually be the case from character interactions in the show (she gets nervous about Celestia, she wants to spend time with her, she idolizes her, ect. - it isn't a huge leap of logic in the same way that, say, guessing that Twilight and Rainbow Dash want to smooch is). Someone writing a story about Twilight's friends all misinterpreting Twilight's relationship with her mentor, then, is taking this to an extreme - hyperbole is often an excellent source of comedy.
So, strong hook, good idea for a comedy story as there is some good material from the show to base it off of. That's often a good, solid base for a story about ponies that makes people laugh.
And indeed, this hook is what got the story into the featured story box - hooks are by far the most important thing when it comes to getting into the featured story box because they're what get people to read your story.
You're not. You're judging it based on the fact that you don't like or don't understand the hook, or have decided to take personal offense at the idea.
It is a funny leap of logic. Have you never read Shipping Goggles? It is a story where Rarity starts shipping her friends based off of very little. It is funny in part because shippers do exactly this sort of thing, and showing it in an in-world context is inherently funny because it is taking something which happens outside the story (shipping) and puts it into the story; by recontextualizing our behavior as the audience as behavior of characters in the show, it juxtaposes the inherent ridiculousness of our presuppositions with the in-character reactions and self-justifications of our "victim".
Shipping Goggles is well-liked and generally well-regarded, and is based on the same general premise (characters shipping in-character).
As for crude and childish... there's nothing really that crude in there, though I'm pretty inured to such things (banging horns was about the worst thing in there, I think, and that was just funny because it doesn't work like that (admittedly, I was a little bit disappointed that Twilight didn't take that literally and point that out)). Childish? Eh. I dunno, I laughed.
And as far as "genuine, understanding friend" - I'm sorry, but what? First off, friends rib each other all the time. Secondly, if someone seems to be keeping something a secret, a lot of the time their friends will let them pretend like it is a secret, even though it isn't, just to humor them and be nice to them. Nothing here was really mean - they misunderstood what was going on, then, once it came out, tried to be both supportive and support their own point or view, because, well, people don't like being wrong.
And it isn't all just shallow laughs - we see Twilight's insecurities and the actual justifications for why they think the things that they do. Twilight really is in denial, but it isn't really so much about having a crush on Princess Celestia as that she doesn't really even understand her own relationship with her mentor - which understandably leads to confusion with her friends.
Er, the story itself says "hers" in the first paragraph. This is correct. I'm not sure if the writer corrected it or not, but it is a somewhat obscure point - hers is a somewhat rare linguistic construction (I don't think I've used it even once in a story I've written for FIMFiction, despite almost all of my protagonists being female) and making that particular mistake isn't a deal-breaker for me.
It is a bit sloppy to have a mistake in the first paragraph, but I didn't even notice it when I read the story - either I was too interested in it to notice, or they had already corrected it (or it was right the whole time and you're saying that it should be "her's", which is wrong - it is always hers).
Because it is better than what you have written recently (i.e. nothing).
And frankly, it is a pretty good story; I upvoted it. I think it is worth reading. The only story which really competes with it in the featured story box right now is Wassail, which I have yet to read.
Anyway, TL;DR:
0) If you don't like what is in the featured story box, write good stories and get featured.
1) The story has a good hook.
2) The story is funny.
3) The story is parodying shipper logic.
4) Honestly, the characters didn't feel out of character to me.
I don't mind seeing stories like this in the featured story box at all; in fact, I'm glad it made it, given that, at the time it made the featured story box, it was literally the only story in the featured story box that appealed to me. Now Wassail is in there, which puts us at two stories I'd like to read (and frankly, the only reason I'm reading Wassail is because I know Skywriter has written good things).
If you're going to go off and whine about something, whine about something bad, at least. But better still, don't whine about stories making the featured story box; take that energy and redirect it into writing good stories.
I'd just like to emphasize that my main point isn't really that "Misunderstanding sucks." It's that "Equestria's Twilight" is pretty good, but oddly under-viewed compared to it's silly, mindless sibling. Yes, I know it has five times as many views, but it was also written three years ago.
2704441 2704520 2704699 2704813
We should start a club.
Big first novels are nothing to be ashamed of. There's a lot to learn by jumping in head first and aiming too high. And just think how horrible the alternative would be: Aiming too low!
2704588
Wait... isn't that just the title? I thought this was a compilation of shorts, written by multiple authors. It doesn't contain author inserts.
I might be wrong. I mean... I hope I'm wrong.
2704699
I am actually not sure if anything particularly naughty happens. I mostly stopped reading because of the poor punctuation and sentence structure. In all honesty, the plot contrivance actually bothered me the least because it's such an accepted trope in the genre. And it's entirely possible this was a joke or parody, since the story does have the Comedy tag.
But even if it was... I'd rank it up there with the third act breakup.
Yeah... I kinda knew this going in. Any fandom will be more forgiving if it includes a topic it inherently finds attractive. And I have said in the past that a story's only goal is to be engaging and entertaining enough that the reader will forgive all the technical problems.
The solution is to ignore the featured box. The best way to find good stories is to search through the libraries and reviews of other readers with similar tastes. Apparently, there are whole social circles of people who share obscure stories between their good friends.
I forget who I heard this comment from... I know it was a fimfiction blogger who was also opining about the box... but I'm embarrassed to say the idea had never occurred to me before.
I'm sure your right. This certainly has an impact. But on the flip side, I bet people are more willing to read the first chapter of a long, unfinished story if it includes attractive tropes and clichés.
2705276
It is a compilation of shorts, to my knowledge. The original author wrote the original entry as a lampoon of similar fics, and then a bunch of other people thought it'd be fun to do the same with other characters.
2705304
That explains that. I might have to check it out after all!
Hey, author of Equestria's Twilight and Misunderstanding just wanted to weigh in here (first on my stories and then on the feature box).
Criticism is one of the most important thing for a writer as it is how they get better, As long as it's more detailed that "This Sux0rz" or even a downvote with no comment, it can lead to self improvement. As such I appreciate DuncanR's comments regarding both my stories.
In fact I HAD initially made a mistake with "hers" vs "her's" until I had read this review. At that point I realized "oh right, you never are supposed to use her's," and realized I had been making that mistake for... well for a really long time. I went through all of my old fiction doing find and replace, and I suspect I won't make that error in the future (when errors are pointed out in this way, I tend to internalize them and avoid them in the future).
So, as mentioned in the Author's Notes for Misunderstanding it was a exercise in writing a dialog with the entire mane6 (and comedy), and I intentionally used less dialog tags than I probably should have because I wanted to force myself to convey the speaker with the dialog. I think I more or less succeeded with that (for various values of success).
I would like to think the story is not quite as bad as DuncanR makes it out to be, I do share is surprise that it got featured. I suspected it was going to be a post and done with type of thing.
One thing that does confuse me about the review is:
2705276
Vs
I was actually much more appreciative of the original review in terms of feedback until I read that comment. Originally I was under the impression that you had read the entire thing. I do not fault you for not reading it (I regularly will give up fics if the writing is painful), but I do feel that revelation changes the context of the review (originally I was going to say something about differing comedic tastes).
That's all I have to say about Misunderstanding, I do appreciate 2705190 's defense of it (and glad that someone picked up the parody- I suspect it is my failure as a write that more people have not seemed to notice).
I wanted to talk about the difference between Equestria's Twilight and Misunderstanding, though first I really appreciate what DuncanR said (though would love to know what he felt was heavy handed in that first chapter - though I suspect I know what). Misunderstanding had been read through me after writing exactly zero times. I have gone over EqT over and over again (unfortunately I do not have any editors or prereaders). The lesson to take away here is the importance of editing and being critical of one's work. Tearing things apart, cutting things that don't work and rewriting. DuncanR is absolutely right in his suspicions that the last two years have improved the story. When I rewrote it, I was disgusted at the quality and I suspect if I come back to Misunderstanding in two years, I suspect I will feel the same. Personally I need time to distance myself from my work before I can really improve it.
My thoughts on the Comment box (which is really what this blog post was about- I considered not even talking about my stories, but figured... Well it seemed appropriate).
I am not really sure if this is a problem with the Feature Box. I would certainly much rather EqT be in the box that Misunderstanding (I am going to be a bit sad if Misunderstanding ends up better rated than EqT), but the box is doing what it is supposed to.
There is no algorithm to detect quality (well none that has been discovered yet :) . ) Curated lists are the way to find quality. I find the vast majority of the fics I read through groups and libraries of other people. I think it could be good if the feature box would try to pull from your groups, but that would be a different system.
As is the feature box is just a system to show you what people are reading and upvoting now. It does a good job of that, and if you approach it with that knowledge you will enjoy it more (or at least that is how it is for me).
The "problem" (not sure that is the right word) I think is more with user base.
I suspect that is fairly close to why some people even looked at it in the first place. But this could just be indicative that the writers her are not producing enough quality content to satisfy demand. This behavior does not surprise me. It works this way wherever you go.
I guess what I am saying is, yeah it would be nice if the feature box only had high quality fics you have never read before, but I don't see how that is going to happen.
And DuncanR, thanks again for the feedback both positive and negative.
2705190
I once submitted a story to Equestria Daily. When it got rejected, I whined and complained like a petulant three year old. Much later, a different story of mine got accepted by EQD on the first bounce. I was overjoyed about the fame and accolades I was expecting to pour in... but nothing significant happened. I didn't become famous overnight, nor did I get a bajillion up-votes. I was still the same person I was yesterday.
On that day, I grew up a little. I realized that Equestria Daily, much like the featured box, does not exist for my personal benefit. Nor the benefit of any other author.
The box affects me because I read. Not because I write.
The argument you should be making is "Find and up-vote more good stories."
I'm a little insulted that you immediately assumed I was being self-centered and conceited. And as for your claim that I'm an elitist with a superiority complex about what constitutes "good" fiction, I offer you this refutation: One of my favorite movies of all time was, and still is, the 1999 Godzilla with Matthew Broderick.
s30.postimg.org/4r16h5q1d/259919_det.jpg
Your argument is invalid.
2705420
I wasn't trying to say that you were saying that your stories should be featured.
I was saying that the best way to make the featured story box better is to write good stories that get featured.
Reading and upvoting stories, on a personal level, has almost no impact on the featured story box - sure, if you look for good stories right away and read them on the spot, you are helping their heat significantly, and that is good behavior if you want the featured story box to be better. But it is only in aggregate that it gains all that much meaning. And the fact that you're looking at stories in the featured story box already means that you're unlikely to have much positive impact on such things - if you use the featured story box heavily, then you're already likely to be "promoting" those stories as much as other stories simply by looking at them.
Writing and promoting stories are the two primary means by which you can influence the featured story box.
Someone suggested that I read Appletheosis - it is on my RIL - Recommended list - so you are clearly capable of writing stories that result in promotion by others. So... yeah, clearly you're good enough to hit the featured story box.
Promoting new, good stories is the other way to influence the featured story box - remember, only stories which have gone up in the last few days are capable of hitting the first seven slots of the featured story box (the final three are reserved for the last three stories which have a lot of views/votes which have updated - it isn't dependent on heat). This is part of what drives me to do my "Read it Now" reviews - read it later reviews are good for finding good stories in general, read it now reviews are good for finding good stories where reading them now might actually result in them getting featured. I do promote good new stories from time to time as individual blog posts, and at other times include my recommendations amongst my review posts, and a few stories I've recommended in this manner have gotten featured.
Did I do it? Probably not. But I'd like to think that I helped.
EDIT: I'll also note that I had edited that post before you replied to it, just an FYI, you might want to refresh the page if you're going to respond to the rest of it.
(I haven't read the story.)
I used to whine about the featured box until I felt knighty and various mods had proven, conclusively, through their statements, choices, and in rare cases responses to me, that the featured box is not supposed to feature good stories. The mods don't believe that's possible to do. The featured box is supposed to feature stories that are HOT at this moment, the same way that People magazine is supposed to feature celebrities who are hot at this moment. It is supposed to generate excitement and exposure for anything--it doesn't matter what, so long as people have some story everypony's read and they can talk about, it helps create a sense of community.
The way the featured box is implemented is still crap. But even if they did it right, it would still feature stories with popular tags and descriptions promising sex, popular tags, funny awkward situations, pony verbs a noun, and Halo crossovers.
2705420
Incidentally, I did not use the term "elitist" even once in my post, nor would I. I'm sure you're not terribly familiar with me, but I'm somewhat notorious for having high standards. There's nothing wrong with having high expectations for people, and not everyone is going to agree on what kind of story they like, or which stories in particular that they like.
That being said, your complaint that this story had a stupid premise is just plain old wrong - it doesn't. It has a very good premise for comedy. You personally may not enjoy it very much, but that doesn't really mean anything; you, however, were stating as an objective fact that this is a bad premise for a story. But it isn't. It is a good premise for a story for the reasons I pointed out - strong hook, lots of potential for comedy, easy to build off of canon, easy to have Twilight react in an amusing manner.
Indeed, you said that it was one of the dumbest premises for a story you've ever seen. There are numerous stupid stories that make the featured story box every week. This story has a well above-average premise for the featured story box; even if you don't like it very much, it beats out most of the porn story premises, LoHAV stories, most HIE stories, and suchlike.
Being able to distinguish between a premise that you don't like and a premise which is inherently bad is difficult - you have to step back and try to predict what sorts of thing other people like. That's not easy. When a story hits the top of the featured story box, though, it generally is a sign that there is something in the premise which is of interest to people, and understanding why it is interesting is important if you want to understand other people. LoHAV stories, for instance, were of interest because they combined the attributes of the HIE self-insert with gaining superhero powers and the general appeal of superheros/supervillains, plus ponies. Is it high quality literature? No, but I understand why it is that it appealed to some people. It is a "good premise" if your goal is to write a story which a lot of folks read. Is it a good premise for a story which is of high literary quality? Not really. But that doesn't really matter to the sort of person who writes (or reads) a story like that.
This was designed to appeal to shippers, people who enjoy riffing on shipping, and people who enjoy character comedy. And the humor allowed the writer to touch on an interesting subject matter in an engaging manner and not being all melodramatic about it; having Twilight express her lack of self confidence and lack of understanding of her relationship with her mentor in a story like this made it not seem so heavy or angsty.
I personally believe that, if good writers put out and consistently promoted good stories, the featured story box would look very different than it does. But promotion is rare and a lot of good writers only put out stories inconsistently. When lots of good people put out good stories at the same time (such as after Writeoff competitions), the featured story box frequently ends up with quite a few good stories in it.
2705442
Out of curiosity, what would you change about the implementation of the featured story box? Put it under human control?
Or do you just mean weight different factors differently (such as, say, removing comments from contributing to heat (which they supposedly do), or making votes matter more than views, or something else)?
No way! Really? Welcome aboard! It's always wonderful to get feedback about my feedback. If that makes sense. And the same thanks go out to Titanium Dragon, of course.
This is almost exactly what happened to me. Readers kept pointing out I was mangling apostrophes, and that's what finally got through my thick head. I've only recently begun fixing the errors people point out... I should have started long ago.
In that case, yes. I think you can call it a sucess. :)
I think I owe you an apology here. If it was intended as a parody, rather than a romantic or situation comedy, that might change my view of the underlying idea a little (but then, some genres are so overused that even the parody is considered cliche. Scary thought). My comments on the writing quality still stand, but I am willing to finish reading the story and re-think my stance on the plot and events. It's only fair.
I suppose my only complaint is that you didn't use the word "parody" or "satire" in the description. And that's a minor quibble.
You're very welcome! It was very useful to hear back from you. in the end, I hope my review brought a little more attention to both of your stories.
2705461
That's odd... I could have sworn you did, but a quick check reveals no such use of the word. Your comment did sound oddly adversarial, in addition to containing (what I believe is) a logical fallacy.
This might have been what set me off: it has an elitist tone to it. I'm genuinely sorry if I've read too much into this particular comment. I don't consider myself to be an especially good writer, and the quality of my own work has nothing to do with my original post anyways.
Like... a mind control ray?
My point here is that writing good stories doesn't help improve the featured box. There are already lots of great stories that never get featured. In this particular case, writing is not a reliable mechanism for reform.
And in any case, I don't want to write popular stories. I want to write the kind of stories that I would want to read... good or bad, popular or unpopular. I certainly appreciate it when they're popular, but I don't aim for it. My lament is that this goal seems mutually incomparable with The Box.
In the end, I think Sapidus3 and Bad Horse have explained the crucial points fully: I'm willing to stop complaining that the box doesn't do something it was never intended to do. Instead, I'll complain about people obsessing over becoming popular enough to get into the box, to the exclusion of all else. Can we all agree on that?
I would be willing to say that any idea can be done well or poorly. However, I do insist that some ideas are inherently more difficult to use effectively. This is largely a function of how original that premise is. Some ideas become so overused, it takes incredible skill and wit to wring even a drop of blood out of them. I genuinely believe that the default rom-com formula has become so rigid, so strict, that the audience no longer tolerates any significant deviation from the norm. Likewise, the buddy-cop action movie has become so overdone that even parodies of that genre are often considered cliche. People who love this genre don't want new stories, because they don't want to be challenged. They want the exact same thing, over and over, forever. That comes as close to being a "bad idea" as is objectively possible. It discourages creativity, and you can't possibly argue that a good story doesn't requires at least some creativity.
I suppose when I say "good or bad," I actually mean "difficulty curve." Are we willing to agree on this?
Er... ah... I need to disagree with you on this particular point. I'd agree it's effective at gaining popularity with a mass audience, but popularity certainly does not equal "intrinsic goodness."
I think you've fixated on that one particular line of my review to the exclusion of all else. But it's also the one thing I've said that disagrees sharply with the beliefs I've repeatedly stated elsewhere. I'm willing to edit that line of the review and point out my error, if you're willing to respond to what I've said above. Deal?
2705466 I don't know what the algorithm is; it's a guarded secret. But I know it doesn't do any of these, which are the things I would do:
1. Put in a line of code that says a story is removed from the box once it's been there for one day. As is, once a story gets in, it's almost guaranteed to stay for at least 3 days, even if it got in by chance.
2. Use logistic regression to construct a model to predict the probability that each user will up-thumb or down-thumb a story. This will include as features character tags, story type tags, mature tag, and author name.
3. Count each thumb up or down as the number of bits of surprise in the user's given vote. So if someone votes every single story by Aquaman down, or votes every Mature story down, their vote won't count. Someone who votes stories up rarely will count more than someone who votes them up regularly.
4. Compute score as bits up / bits down. Factor in age of story in some hackish way. Then rank and display.
5. If you're NOT using a viewcount-independent ranking like thumbs-up / thumbs, or favorites / views, you MUST use a model to adjust counts according to whether the story was or was not in the box. This is probably the box's biggest flaw currently.
2705604
Good. I'd hate for people to game the system.
Wait. You started your post with a "doesn't." Does that mean the following sentence, exactly as written, is therefore false?
2705587
I think Bad Horse can attest that I am oddly adversarial quite frequently. My post was adversarial, and was more so before I edited it (but not in time for you not to see the original version, apparently).
Re: elitism: it may be that someone else mentioned it somewhere else and you got some mental crosstalk. Happens to me sometimes, too.
When someone's work gets recommended to me, and they make the RCL, I generally assume they know that they're a good writer. Apologies if you do not.
A lot of good stories do get featured, though. It is true that "good story" and "gets into the featured story box" is not a 1:1 correlation, but good stories written by good authors are significantly more likely than average to get into the featured story box.
If every member of the RCL wrote a story a week, I'd wager that the featured story box would be overwhelmingly comprised of their stories.
I don't think that it is; last writeoff, of the first five stories which were posted to the site, four of them ended up featured, and the last was in popular stories for nearly a week. Those were good stories written by good writers.
Well, everyone should want their story to get into the featured story box; what is the point of posting a story to a website, if not for others to read?
That doesn't mean you necessarily need to write a story for the purposes of it being popular, though. I don't write stories that I don't think others would want to read, but I don't come up with ideas solely because I think other people would want to read them, if that makes sense.
Originality is neither necessary nor sufficient to write a good story. The Arena is an excellent story, even though it is just The Lady or the Tiger. A story can have a tired premise and be excellently executed. A story can just be fun to read. A story might be original, but not very well-executed and thus suck.
There may be other stories about Twilight's friends thinking that Twilight and Celestia were in a relationship, but I haven't seen this particular execution of it; it was fresh enough to me, even though I knew what I was getting into.
Don't think that originality isn't a good thing; it is. Originality is a major draw to people, as are "fresh takes" on things. It just isn't the only thing which makes for a good story.
Creativity and originality are related, but a great deal of creativity isn't particularly original; any engineer can tell you that. It is where the expression "Don't reinvent the wheel" comes from. Ultimately, your goal is to construct a good story. That does take creativity, but it does not necessarily require a huge amount of originality.
There is no such thing as "intrinsic goodness". It simply doesn't exist. Good and bad are value judgement which are applied solely in relation to other things. If my goal is to make a ton of money as a film maker, that is a different goal from if I am trying to deliver some sort of message via my work.
I would bet that I could write a clop story that hit the top of the featured story box. If my primary goal was to do that, consistently, that's what I'd do. It isn't, though; I want to hit the top of the featured story box on my own terms, writing the kind of stories I want to write. If I ever wrote clop, it would be because I really wanted to write it, not because I just wanted approbation (or because I was having a fit of pique over someone writing a bad clop story. I give about 50-50 odds that if I ever do write a clop story, it will be this.)
If you are writing to make the story which makes the top of the featured story box, then goodness is measured in mass appeal. If you're writing a story for the approval of good writers, then success means that good writers say "This is a good story". If you're writing a story for the purpose of getting some idea across, people saying that they understood what your story was saying is an indication of success.
Goodness - in the sense of writing a good story - mostly falls into the second category, as the only real way to evaluate whether or not a creative work is good is to have skilled people evaluate it and say that it is good. Dunning-Kruger is fun like that.
I'm not especially interested in you censoring yourself; if you feel that it is a bad premise, leave it. If you think I'm right, then obviously removing it would make sense. But if you actually believe that it is an inherently bad premise, and I haven't convinced you otherwise, then leave it in.
2705631 All of those sentences are things I would have the featured box do, that it does not.
2705604
The featured story box used to have a 4-day limit (anything older than four days old would not remain); that went away, though most stories actually don't stay in there very long. The stories which hit the very top tend to linger for days, but many stories only survive for a few hours in the box. You're more likely to notice the stories which linger for a long time at the top of the box than you are to notice the churn at the bottom. This is especially true of the non-mature featured story box.
As an aside, I'm not really sure that having it stay for only a day is necessarily desirable; honestly, I'm okay with it lingering for a few days, as it means more people are likely to read it. Though I do think that having a sharp 4-day limit would be a good thing, and was a good thing while it was the case, because stories tend to naturally trail off in viewership over time anyway, and I suspect four days is at the point of diminishing returns.
Is this especially important? If people are especially likely to enjoy certain types of stories, is it really a good idea to set up the system to reward or punish stories for doing so? I do understand the idea behind this (if a story is doing much better than stories of its type ordinarily do, it might be worth promoting) but on the other hand, if certain story types are popular, that may be for a reason.
Knighty is, supposedly, working on the implementation of an algorithm which weights votes in this manner, though this would primarily impact user ratings, not the featured story box.
The featured story box cares about engagement over time (views, comments, and maybe votes, though it isn't clear if the last actually matters or not, and if so, whether downvotes hurt or do nothing) rather than rating, with a multiplier based on story length, either up to some limit or logarithmically or both (it favors longer stories over shorter ones).
It is true that stories which get into the featured story box do get a bunch of extra views, though, especially if they're up towards the top of the featured story box - the lower you are in the box, the fewer views you get.
I'm not sure if making it care about people actually doing something more (i.e. voting) is necessarily a good thing; it reduces the impact of off-site traffic on the featured story box, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view.
2705604
It's shocking that (1) is not already done. As is it causes the system to be self perpetuating. Stories are there because they are hot, they are hot because they are there. HOWEVER, I could see your comment about community being the argument against this. It ensure they are well known and facilitates discussion.
(2) Creating such regression models can be difficult. They do have a wealth of data to use, however, creating such an algorithm is non trivial. I've worked on predictive modeling before and to do it right requires a strong understanding of statistics. You can do simplistic versions (such as what percent of comedy stories get thumbed up versus what percentage of all stories, ect) but poorly implemented statistical methods can be worse than none at all. Doing it on a per-user basis (such as computing the likelihood that I personally would click on a given story could add significant server overhead in database queries.) From what I've read performance seems to be a major concern (and they have done a great job at keeping it good).
I've read they are planning on implementing something like (3). What I read didn't sound exactly like what you were describing (what you described would be better), but basically I think they plan on weighting down votes from frequent down voters less and upvotes from frequent upvoters less. I think it would be better to break it down based on tag, character, ect as you said, but that becomes much more complicated in implementation and adds significant server load.
(5) I think something like looking at what percentage of viewers thumb-up/down a story is good. If 90 out of 100 readers thumb-up a story , with the other 10 not voting one way or the other, I think that is way more impressive than a story with 300 thumb-ups but 1000 viewers. I don't know if they do something like that or not already. Assuming their database is built well they could do it in a single sql call.
You're kidding, right? I haven't written anything in nine months. Real artists ship.
Ehhh... I don't think it's purely a matter of production. I think it's more about public relations, and being able to sell your stories--and those of others you like--to the public.
Firstly, there's the shotgun effect. If I released a dozen stories all at once, it increases my chances. Secondly, participation in a competition also increases notoriety by itself. Stories are more likely to be noticed because they were part of a notable event.
Not that I want to devalue the story's individual merits, of course. A good story is much easier to sell than a bad one. But if marketers and advertisers could sell empty boxes, you better believe they'd do it.
To be honest... I don't care if my story gets boxed. I place so much more value on comments and reviews. It's more meaningful to me. I've had my stories featured before, and most of the comments I get are just one-sentence fly-bys... a little discouraging, when all people say is "I like it!" or "cool story!"
...Though I suppose I'm discounting the few valuable, thoughtful comments I got, and the followers I earned through word of mouth. I'm not saying no good came of it. Just that, when giving feedback on a story, "nice" is a four letter word.
On this, I would disagree... mostly because I believe that originality doesn't just apply to the plot and premise. I'm betting that "The Arena" wasn't merely a complete copy-paste of an existing story, with the word "pony" search-and-replaced into it. That story was probably written with a particular narrative tone and voice that sets it apart and entertains in its own right. So it does contain originality and creativity.
And I'm willing to bet that the personal tone and voice that went into "Misunderstandings" was probably one of the things that set it apart from the crowd in your mind. But our earlier argument (no idea is objectively good or bad) was about the premise, rather than the execution. That's mainly why I'm willing to finish reading "Misunderstandings": I didn't get a complete view of the plot and voice.
Spelling and grammar are intrinsic.
This is one of those "I agree with you in theory" dealios. As far as I can tell, anything that might be referred to as "intrinsic goodness" focuses on removing obstacles for the reader. Bad spelling is intrinsically bad. Even if you include intentional spelling mistakes--such as a very young child writing a heartwarming letter--you have to make sure that the payoff from the broken rule is worth more than the obstacle it presents. Good spelling, on the other hand, isn't really good... it's just normal. The standard.
I also believe that any story idea can be executed so well, so cleanly, and so compellingly, that even a person who is not a fan of that genre can enjoy it. My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is proof positive of this. Why do grown men watch a cartoon for little girls? Because, I believe, that show has objectively good qualities. It found a foothold outside of it's intended audience, because it didn't limit itself to being a half-hour commercial for the toys.
Blaaaargh... I keep wanting to split hairs over the words "goodness" and "effectiveness." Something written for it's own joy, or to improve your ability as a writer, versus a thing written explicitly for money or popularity. Stepping back, though, it does sound awfully naive of me. A thing can be effective without being good... but I'm having a hard time imagining something that can be good and ineffective. So in the end, perhaps effectiveness is the fundamental property, and goodness is the inheritor.
Michael bay's movies were all successes. They made millions. They were viewed by many. This is objective.
Were they "good?" That's... subjective. But I have a very hard time believing they made any positive contribution to cinema as an art. They will be forgotten long before their profits are spent.
This line contradicts something I've said elsewhere. Either I'm wrong, or I'm wrong. Much worse to be a hypocrite.
2705763
Not significantly. Typically, a story that's at the top of the box for 3 days gets something like 2/3 of its views for all 3 days in the first days. Something like that. I have counted. Days 2 and 3 are wasted advertising that annoys people for stories they've already decided not to read.
A reasonable question, but since this is a per-user model, I expect most of its power will go into predicting individual preferences rather than cross-fimfiction preferences. It is especially important, because it is necessary to be able to weigh each vote (point 3) by how surprising it is. It lets you ignore the votes of "upvote everything" or "downvote anything with clop" people.
Huh. I wonder if he got the idea from me. What did you hear about it?
BTW, I didn't mention it, but I'm marginally against adjusting scores back towards the average to avoid giving low-viewcount stories a statistical advantage. I'm in favor of giving low-viewcount stories a statistical advantage.
I can't tell what you're trying to say here, but it is very bad that the box currently gives an enormous advantage to stories that are already in the box. Getting in the box now is almost entirely a matter of having a story that gets 20 or so upvotes within 15 minutes of its release at a time when a story is ready to age out of the box, because no story outside the box can otherwise possibly beat any story already in the box.
Mods gave some thought to not doing this, but they didn't like the "thrashing" of having the box contents possibly change every 15 minutes. Why, I don't know.
2705784
Numbers don't lie.
...That's why they make such good patsies.
I am curious about something: Is there anything the feature box does/could do, that a simple search engine couldn't? I can log on, open up a search page, rank by "heat," and filter through to the highest-ranked Fluttershy Comedy written by a left-handed redheaded plumber (or what have you). Is there anything the box does, besides strut its stuff on the front page?
Could we add a personal setting, similar to "view mature," so each user can decide whatgoesin the box? What if I want it to display this week's highest-ranked stories, instead of simply "what's hot?"
Also of interest to me: is there any way to search for controversial stories? Stories that get alot of heat, views and comments, but are ranked low? or have a roughly equal number of up- to down-votes?
Oh god, I just typed "alot." I need to get some sleep.
2705784
Writing an algorithm isn't trivial, but including a regression library is. The regression only needs to be run once per user, and maybe rerun every hundred stories they read. The computational overhead in making one prediction for every vote on every story read on the site is trivial. It should take perhaps one microsecond per prediction, and there are about 10,000 ratings per day sitewide, so less than 1 second of computation per day. That's not really true; looking up the necessary user parms in the database will probably take more time than that. But they gotta look up all sorts of parms in the user DB to serve each page anyway.
2705891
The thing is you wouldn't just be running a single regression per vote. You need to be correlating the story parameters (tags) to what other things they have voted and their tags to the things they HAVEN'T voted for along with comparing it to other users.
Unfortunately you can't just dump your numbers into GSL and have it give you something useful. Perhaps Knighty has familiarity with statistical analysis, but I find when I mention chi squared tests to most people they just look at me as if I am speaking another language, and really it can get a lot more complicated than that.
It's certainly doable, and it is doable in a way that wouldn't crash the site. A big part of it, as I said, depends on how good of a job you want to do with it. There are some more trivial implementations that could work "out of the box" and maybe it would be better than what we have now.
2705875
If every user has the same feature box you can just cache it and update the cache every so often. If every user has a custom box (which I would prefer to see) then you can't do that. I don't know for sure if this is part of their motivation, but I would be surprised if it wasn't a consideration. There is a reason story stats are only cached every 20 minutes.
From what I understand the feature box just sorts by heat (an sql call) and displays the first 5(?) stories. You could easily have different sort parameters that a user could define in their profile, but then you lose the cache benefit. It would be no worse really than if they made they let you set the "most comments" or "most views" page to your home page. It shouldn't be a huge performance hit but there would be one. I don't have any of their server data to look at so I couldn't really say if they are getting enough front-page hits that it would matter.
2705863
Obsolescence. I think Knighty actually mentioned it in a site post at some point while doing something far more controversial. Maybe changing banners or otherwise destroying FIMFiction as we know it, I can't really remember.
The featured story box definitely has a real impact, to be sure, but being in the top slots is vastly better than the bottom ones - 6th and 7th slot give you very little, whereas first through third are huge (espeically first). Mistletrapped, for instance, got as many views and votes (as it had twice as many chapters at that point) on its second day in the featured story box as it got in its first day, and it got about as many on its final day on the featured story box as it did while it was rising through the ranks in the featured story box.
None of my stories which have recently been featured made the featured box all that quickly; honestly, I have no idea what mystical forces propel them into the featured story box, oftentimes hours or even as much as a day later, but it seems to be the case.
There is a fairly significant difference between "not in any box", "popular stories", and "in the featured story box"; the former is pretty much your followers and pure luck, plus any promotion. Popular stories seems to add some views; making the featured story box adds more views, though higher slots make a much bigger difference - I've had stories linger in the 7th slot for as much as a day at times, and sometimes ping in and out for hours.
You're suffering from selection bias here; Dusk got up to the 4th slot at its peak, and yet still has south of 100 upvotes. Through Glass and Dawn never escaped the 7th slot as far as I could tell. You're focusing on stories at the top of the featured story box, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Of my four stories, only one, Mistletrapped, really had much of a sticky effect; the others were all in the box for less than a day. And Mistletrapped was significantly more popular than the others. The Butterfly's Burden also briefly maded the featured story box, but didn't stay there for very long either.
The Stars Ascendant had a more typical "peak", with its first appearance in the featured box getting it 77 upvotes while its second day got it 450. But it is worth noting that even in its third day it got over a thousand views and 170 upvotes, and even in the fourth day, when it got only 360 views, it got another 80 upvotes. That means it got about 250 upvotes on its "off days" - which is as many or more votes than many stories which hit the featured story box get at all. Something which is hyperpopular staying in the featured story box isn't a bad thing, and if people stop being interested in it, it will start dropping. It came pretty close to tapping out FIMFiction from what I can tell - very few stories get 5k views the week they come out. When I used to do my weekly tracking thing, the 5k views stories were very serious outliers. More common is the tale of stories like Mistletrapped, which does well, hits the top of the featured story box, then fades over the next couple days.
The problem isn't realy as extreme as you think it is, I don't think. It would be nice if the featured story box featured more stories that I liked, but I'm not sure that increasing the churn on it in the way that you seem to be proposing is really desirable - people do seem to get value out of those stories lingering, much as we all like to complain about Cards Against Equestria ending up in the box for a week. I'd rather there be a limit (I thought 4 days was pretty good, honestly - it meant that you'd get at least two sets per week, guaranteed) but honestly I don't think most stories are staying for excessive amounts of time, at least from my limited tracking.
*claps dust off hands*
That's that, then.
See if you can spot the changes I made in the review.
2705930
Running a regression is expensive, but done at most once per user, not per vote. Computing a prediction from a regression model is cheap. You don't consider things they haven't voted for; you get one datapoint per story they voted for.
The big problem I see with what I proposed is data is too sparse to construct one model per user. It's necessary to have a per-user model to convert votes to bits, but it has to have very few parameters.
You can easily do one single 20-variable multiple regression across the entire user database, which takes about two seconds for a linear regression (I've done it) and only need be done every 6 months or so. But the utility of that is questionable. It would tell you if comedies usually get more upvotes than tragedies, but then what do you do with that info? The tricky stuff isn't the math so much as figuring out what you want to factor out and what you don't. Like, if an author always gets a lot of upvotes, do you want to add that to the model (be more likely to feature that author), or subtract it from the model (put all authors on an even footing)?
2705968
Ok, I misunderstood what data you wanted to be looking at.
I was thinking more of an Amazon or Steam (with the recent updates) style where it is trying to be tailored to each user where each time they voted it would be updating their personal regressional model.
What you described would probably work, though I would advise against assuming a linear model would work. I've seen people get wonky results from trying to force data.
(This is fun. I haven't had any good statistical modeling questions since quiting academia. After I stopped doing research it was all just crafting user solutions that didn't care about if their demands weren't feasible but just wanted the darn numbers to magically make things happen. Of course the customer is always right.. There is a reason I don't do that anymore either).
2705988
I'll note that Amazon is way better at that than Steam is; Steam shows me garbage all the time, while Amazon seems to go through my garbage to find stuff that I might like.
All this statistical analysis stuff is over my head. However!
I'd bet dollars to bits my memory is right and say the feature box—for all its quirk—is how I found ol' Equestria's Twilight.
2705645
Better Batter Bitter.
2705587
The thing is, for both EQD and the Featured Box, while "making it" is something you can brag about (YMMV on the actual difficulty of said achievement), it's not honestly just bragging rights that someone is going for. These two spotlights garner a ton of views/favorites. For those authors who care first and foremost about the numbers, they're totally incentivized to pursue this by any means.
The clause "writing to make it onto EQD" doesn't really mean anything. Not really. Polish the grammar, avoid the cliche of the month, don't do clop/humanized/FO:E. And be prepared to wait a month+. Point is, I'd argue that there's no real way to milk an above-average number of views from EQD. Crossovers, maybe?
By comparison, if I say the clause "Feature Box bait"...
2705645
My point exactly. Everyone knows "Feature Box bait." Many people claim that they know how / are capable. It may or may not be as easy as they say. Some people have done it, and been depressed by the ensuing air-quotes "popularity." Hell, debatably I tried it once and while it didn't make the Featured Box, it was only a few positions away. While my goal in writing that was not specifically to hit the Featured Box, you'd better believe that doing so would have doubled the viewcount, at a minimum.
2705845
I'll repeat my earlier post: blame the viewers. I can rattle off the names of dozens of movies better than Transformers 3, yet Bay's movies easily gross more. Partially that's because of what Bay does: people like explosion, even if the label "popcorn flick" doesn't even do the vapidness justice. But part of it is what these artsy flicks do: the general population isn't always in the mood for something artsy/quirky/thinky. I would love to see more movies like Primer get made, but the notion of having it compete against a Michael Bay summer blockbuster is sadly laughable.
For another fic example, since RCL was brought up, my entry was RCL, EQD, and Last Roundup, as well as winning a Writeoff, and it's a hair above 400 views. Why?
Shitty photoshop coverartBecause it's a sadfic about donkeys, fuck that noise. There's no automated computer formula that will say "yes but this is good even though it's unpopular", and that's why it's best left to the realm of review groups and/or spotlight groups. And even then, the readerbase may simply not want to buy what the review groups are selling.