Jan
26th
2015
- Member Since 11th Apr, 2012
- offline last seen Yesterday
Bad Horse
Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.
Bad Horse
Joined 11th Apr, 2012 ·
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I have read neither. I'm such a rebel!
I think part of the reason that they've survived so long is that everyone released a bunch of unpopular More Most Dangerous Game contest stories this weekend instead of folks releasing whatever they normally would, which likely would have lead to more turnover in the featured story box; only two stories in the box right now haven't been there for 4+ days.
I generally approve of how the box functions for me as a reader, but I do wish it had a little more churn.
Meh. They'll never get the Featured box right.
2749251 Stories don't get into the box by being popular as much as they get popular by being in the box.
There is IMHO no reason not to have code saying
if (been in box for more than 6 hours)
remove story from box
Something else just as worthy would come along.
Would it make you happy if I threw together a quick crackfic with a misleading title for the feature box?
It is very interesting that Sapidus3 has managed to get all of his last 4 or 5 stories in the box. I don't know if this was luck, or if the strategy of releasing a lot of decent stories in a short time (and all with mass-appeal descriptions) is the key. He has only 500 followers, but they are all this-month followers. I have 1000 followers, but only about 200 still follow me actively.
I still think it shouldn't be possible to get all your stories in the box, no matter how many followers you have, because if it passes moderation at a time when all the stories currently in the box have been there less than 3 days, it has no chance. I'll wait & see what happens.
2749318 Didn't you already do that?
2749341
Or, very occasionally, the Mane Six playing a silly card game.
2749349
It's pretty much all I know how to do.
Yeah. I approve of most of the tweaks Knighty made to the algorithms during the big wave of changes a few months back, but my visits to the front page have severely plummeted ever since I realized that the 7 featurebox slots typically only see 1-2 changes per 24 hours.
I don't really have issue with 'Once popularity > X, you prob hit the feature box every time'; I do agree stories that sit there for 4-5 days are a bit silly though.
2749345
The last story I posted that didn't get featured was Famous Last Words, though I'll be somewhat surprised if Ruin Value makes the box. Dawn, Dusk, Through Glass, Mistletrapped, and Apple Shampoo all got featured.
Basically, the steps are to get your followers + promotion to give you enough heat to get you into the popular stories box, then with the popular stories folk to read your story enough to push it into the featured story box and then hope it takes off. Sometimes it does (Mistletrapped, Apple Shampoo) sometimes it doesn't (Dawn, Dusk, and Through Glass didn't get 100 upvotes before they fell out of the box, though Dawn likely would have been more successful had I not released it at 1 am on a Monday morning). About one in four stories that makes the featured story box doesn't get even a thousand views, and the proportions on that are actually probably even worse than that as that is including the stories which updated and get the bottom three slots (as all of those stories are, by definition, stories with a lot of views/upvotes). Amongst stories which make the top seven slots, I'd wager that things are even worse - the sixth and seventh slots in particular seem to experience a fair bit of churn when there is real competition.
And yes, recent follower count trumps long-term follower count, though there's other things as well, such as whether or not your followers are all following you for the same thing and whether or not your hooks are good - his stories have been tightly focused on similar subject matter (Luna/Celestia/Twilight, and a lot of stuff about Twilight's relationship with Celestia) and to be fair, one of his stories, Mysterious and Metaphorical Meanings of Marks didn't make the box at all.
I think also that getting cross-promoted in other peoples' blogs can make a big difference, as can people just randomly mentioning your story on Skype or whatever; each instance may only get you 5-15 views, but if 50 people do it, that's huge.
It would be nice if I knew the relative impact of each form of promotion I give my stories; tracking external promotion is easy, but internal promotion from blogs/reviews and whatnot is harder to see. From what I can tell, my review blogs give someone on the order of 15 views and 5 upvotes over the next day or so, though it varies. This may not sound like much, but the median story on FIMFiction gets on the order of 100 views in the week it is posted.
One of the reasons I do my Read It Now Reviews is because by looking at recently released stories and (potentially) promoting them you can help give them a boost into the featured story box; when the Writeoff Association is impressed with a story and we all say "Yes, you should go read this", that story is pretty likely to come close to if not actually end up in the featured story box on the back of that alone.
The other thing that makes a big difference is having followers who read your stories now as opposed to later; someone who reads your story a week after you post it won't help you get into the featured story box at all, even if they're a reliable reader. Not that that is a bad thing, really, but when you consider your follower count, if someone is likely to read your story in the next two or three days, they're more likely to bolster your popularity. I suspect given your target demographic, a not-insubstantial fraction of your readership exists in the "I'll read it when I have time" category.
I dunno. I don't really have a problem with something sitting around in the featured story box for a few days, though I do feel that a week is probably excessive; four days seems like a long enough period of exposure. Then again, "I'd Do Her" got more than 450 new people reading it yesterday (possibly because it had been stapled to the featured story box for so long everyone wanted to know why).
2749393
RainbowBob doesn't hit the featured story box every time, and he has vastly more followers than almost anyone.
Obsolescence and The Abyss are pretty much guaranteed to hit the featured story box every time. Not sure who else is.
I absolutely hate how slowly the feature box changes now.
"Mister Gore, there is CRAPPY SEXUALIZED FANFIC on MY INTERNET!"
TWO BOOBS! That's what he takes us for!...
(Still bites, though, man. Sorry)
2749299
Six hours as the maximum time feels a bit short when you consider that not all the people surfing this site live in the same time zone and many have jobs and so on, 12 or 24 seems more reasonable.
2749490
Well, I'd imagine Rainbow has a lot of people like me who enjoy -some- but not all of his work; so I follow him but a good portion of it now is 'glance at story description, pass on', whereas someone like Obs, yea, I'm virtually guaranteed to read it.
Aka that popularity can still come with a dilution effect; I think SS&E has hit that point as well, as he did reach a point where stuff stopped getting insta-featured, right around when he was doing his 'Can I fling anything out and get it featured??' phase
2749561 So what? There are 150 stories a day. Something else just as worthy will come along within 6 hours. The box focuses an extraordinary attention on a small number of stories that are not generally the best stories anyway. Better to divide it up. Better still not to have a featured box at all.
2749619 When SS&E doesn't instabox, it's because he released a bunch of stories at the same time and dividing his readers between them. Like this last batch; he posted 3 in one day and only 2 of them hit the box.
I'd be curious to see how much of the 'heat' that got the two fics mentioned in the OP was 'organic' traffic vs. followers. In other words, 'earned media' vs. 'invested audience'.
Also:
That's one of my beefs with the feature box algorithms - that exact tactic seems to work far too often, usually at the expense of other good stories that have to rely solely on organic growth to get traction.
2749760 Still, I think you're over-selling the feature box. Take a quick look at the stats on Changelings, Love and Lollipops. I released a chapter a day for 11 days, it never got about 3rd (I think) and stuck there for quite a few days, but even after it dropped from the box, there were still an awful lot of hits from the "Popular Stories" box and referrals. (80 or so from spacebattles.com, to my amazement) I think people look at the box *first* but then go to the Popular Stories and browse once they do a "Meh, seen 'em all" noise, making that critical short description of your story even more critical.
Still, a 2-3 day limit on the box would make a lot of sense. (Not six hours. Sometimes I post at night, and most people only tag the site once a day, so that cuts out 3/4 of the readers for even the best story. Or peaches.)
read the first, it was not bad just out there
have not read the second and most likely never will
2749760
He may be getting back into a better position on it; that, or my memory is flawed but I could have sworn 6-ish months ago a heap of stuff wasn't making it.
Now if only he'd finish End of Ponies already.
2750135 Eh, I don't really know what I'm talking about. He could've gotten those view counts without the featured box.
2750288 I was just guessing about the third from the view count.
Door Matt is referring to his story "Cards Against Equinity".
You know, if you had code that said "return fics WHERE heat=lots AND featuredtime<6 hours" , you could do more with it. Instead of '6 hours', check it against a user setting.
Addicts could set it to six hour churn, less frequent checkers could set it to 24 or 72 hour churn. You would have to have a database field that's tracking 'featured time', and I'm not sure what performance ramifications that would have, but it would be an interesting feature. If you wanted to get really cute, you could try to write something that guesses what the churn time should be based on how often someone visits the front page.
2750700
That's Equiniti with an I, thank you. Strangely enough I got a PM today from someone asking me to change it to a Y.
My spellchecker tells me it's an I though, and I'm more inclined to trust a soulless machine than my fellow man.
2751132
"One of"? I'm responsible for all of them basically, since I wrote the original.
2751111 Equinity is a word. Equiniti is not, which is why it could be trademarked and used as the name of a large financial and business company, which is used more often than the word "equinity" and hence is well-known to Google's spellchecker.
2749357 I know that feel.