A Fix We Still Need on This Site

Just a moment ago, I clicked on the Statistics button at the top of the page, and now I am just about livid, but maybe not for the reason you are thinking.

When I was shown this site in 2012, there was an amazing feature I had never seen on any other site, which was a word counter: every time a user clicked a story, it added the word count of that story to the word counter. To me, this was beautiful and encouraging – it encouraged users to read more, because even if a user didn't enjoy a story to their highest hopes, reading it counted toward their book experience points, or at least that is how I thought about the counter.

I don't think I have ever gone into the details, but let me explain why this feature, which seems to have been removed from the site, meant so much to me. Thanks to the school system, I used to be scared of reading, I would get physical pain from the mental stress of trying to read, so very often, if the first paragraph or two of a book did not blow my mind with sheer awesomeness, I dropped it, and didn't even give it another thought. However, I'm honest in a weird way because I didn't want that word counter to give a false reading, so when I was about to click off of stories that didn't interest me right away, I asked myself was it worth it to click back and mark the story as unread and lose all XP I would have added to my counter or would I rather just finish the story. Most of the time, this got me to trudge forward through the story, many times discovering that it was worth the read.

It was a positive and encouraging system that just by being there caused many people to read more, and not just pony fiction, but for me personally it helped to break the fear that reading had over me. I can honestly say that I have read more in the past three years, than I have in the ten before finding this site. I was not one of them, but I also believe that writers were inspired by this system, because with people eager to read, authors could publish their work with greater confidence that it would be read without getting blown off. Now... What I mean about that is, a common fear among writers is that their stories will not be read because they do not catch the attention of the reader fast enough. Good stories take time to get to the good part, because in order for that good part to be enjoyable, back story must be set up. Young writers especially fear this, because young readers, and people who are gun shy toward reading, do in fact neglect stories that are not written with an explosive introduction. The counter gave writers enough peace of mind to not hyperventilate while writing.

But now there is this statistics page that shows not what the user has read, but a year-to-date chart of information that all equates to a user's popularity! … And why does this anger me so? Because like before, when you put a counter in front of someone, they tend to start obeying that counter. For the word counter before, no one told me I had to make that number go up; I just like to see it go up, so it stands to reason that users would now want to see their story count, story views, and followers and blog posts go up. This is all a problem, because a truly great story may take a year to write while the author works out in their mind how all the details work together. One author told me how his characters' knowledge of medicine and computer science was an on going process, because he himself was having to learn more and more about these things to accurately write the characters who used them. Others are massively long with deep existential details, such as Background Pony, but if you get a foal to think that they should get their story count up, they are not going to think about writing good stories, neither will they write long stories, oh no no no; they will write short pieces of crap that are written desperately screaming so loud for attention that the feeling of reading them is as jarring as being in the mosh pit of a heavy metal concert.

I will not link anypony to garbage, but on this site there was, and hopefully isn't anymore, a story where the author has become a changeling that falls into the middle of ponyville. He proceeds to act stupid and hateful, but because this character was the author, is allowed to get away with everything, constantly “outsmarting” all of the other characters, because the author was too twelve to realize that such behavior would never be tolerated by any living being.

I don't know if this story was on the site before hoof, stupidity will happen either way, but with this statistics system in place, users who have no real passion to create through writing nor interest in sharpening their skills as a writer, will start posting whatever falls out of their brain just to get those numbers up, flooding the site with litter, making it so that the passionate reader has to wade through more garbage that wouldn't have been there had the system not been in place to find the real and passionate authors on this site.

I cannot possibly think of how the previous word counter feature could do any harm to a person's self esteem but I have explained how it has helped me personally; I cannot see how the user statistics can do any good, but I have personally witnessed this same neurotic personal statistics system destroy an artist over the last five years as I have watched him obsess over these statistics, constantly putting himself down because he was not as popular as who ever happen to out rank him. This is extremely sad, because the artist was talented and when left to his own devices, would create works of art that brought him true fans.

The major difference between the two, besides the obvious effects, is that the user has direct control over how many stories they read and any attempts to abuse this system for whatever stupidity a person could come up with will have no effect on any other user's enjoyment of the rest of the site, but the current statistics system is beyond the user's control and can be abused by flooding the site with stories to increase the chance that one of theirs is clicked, and by creating multiple accounts and clicking on stories in the first account to boost their submission views. This behavior does effect other users' experience of the site, because featured stories are chosen based on being newest and by having high view counts and/or upvote to downvote ratios.

To Knighty and the staff of FimFiction, please remove this pathologic statistic system that only aids in making users hate themselves and/or the other users on this site, and please bring back the word counter that was on this site previously, so that we may all enjoy a positive and encouraging experience on this site.