The fandom's changing approach to fanfic · 9:32pm Jul 5th, 2015
Every few months, I take a statistical snapshot of my stories in an effort to track, over time, what factors help drive traffic to them (both in the moment and in the long tail). I noticed something interesting while compiling this round's stats.
Here's all of my stories which have been featured by Equestria Daily, the ratio of their views to upvotes, and their publication date. (I've added in the raw number of Equestria Daily referrals, from the story stats page, to the right.)
14.91:1 8/20/2012 No Regrets (1793)
7.86:1 4/7/2013 Fugue State (1593)
6.69:1 3/2/2014 Thou Goddess (884)
8.70:1 8/4/2014 The 18th Brewmare of Bluey Napoleon (629)
5.99:1 12/25/2014 Hearth Swarming Eve (613)
5.06:1 2/20/2015 The Iridescent Iron Rat (427)
[i]8.06:1 ( n/a ) Cumulative average of all my (non-Mature) stories[/i]
Granted, it's a small data set, but there's a few interesting intertwined narratives that leap out here.
In the early days of the fandom, Equestria Daily was pretty much the gatekeeper. It sent a large flood of outside referrals to a story — readers without FIMFiction accounts, who could contribute views to a story but couldn't vote on its quality.
1) As FIMFiction became the site for MLP fanfic, Equestria Daily's viewers who were interested in fanfiction got accounts here. The distinction between "outside referrals from EqD" and "existing FIMFic readers who happened to see you on EqD" became increasingly tiny. In fact, as early as 2013 that realignment seems to have been completed — look at how the ratio of readers to voters plummets right at the beginning.
2) As FIMFiction became increasingly central, fewer fanfic readers kept using EqD as a primary source, and fewer bronies without existing interest in fanfic kept clicking through to stories from there. Note how the number of raw referrals uniformly drops over time. (Some of that is due to the long tail accumulating extra clicks over time for older stories, but the EqD tail is pretty tiny once a story falls off their first page or two.) This is part of a general trend of fandom fragmentation: we find the things we love about the MLP creative community, and hang out there. Fanfic in particular is hit hard by this. It's a big time-sink relative to, say, comics or music — it's hard to be a "casual" fanfic fan because reading takes so much time and focus relative to putting a song on in the background or skimming a page of images.
3) There's a third story these statistics tell, which has nothing to do with EqD: The fanfic fandom — at least, given the view from here — is slowly undergoing the same fragmentation.
You can get a fuller sense of that with the link at the beginning of the post: I have the views:votes ratio for everything I've published (with the Mature/fetish stories highlighted in red; that audience seems to play by a different set of voting rules, so they create major outliers in the overall dataset), and it's been persistently decreasing over time. Over time, my "average" story has been accumulating roughly the same number of upvotes (in proportion to time published), but on a far smaller number of views. In other words, the average Horizon reader is much more likely to be a Horizon fan.
Possibly that's self-inflicted, in whole or part, based on my slow and erratic story publication schedule, as well as the fact that I don't write the sort of story that camps atop the featurebox and draws in new readers. But I'm seeing the same thing in fellow readers and reviewers — there's more of a clustering effect than there used to be, I think, and it's not just us. RCL features only get a few hundred views, and an Equestria Daily feature is down to approximately that level; gatekeepers just aren't moving significant amounts of traffic any more. The FIMFiction front page could never be relied on for picking up readers, and follower counts are joining it in irrelevance. (Take Sharp Spark's excellent Philip K. Dick homage "Do Changelings Dream Of Twinkling Stars?", for example. Four chapters in as well as an announcement blog post, and it's got 218 views out of 572 followers. As an all-OC tale with a sci-fi crossover and a [Dark] tag, it was never going to pick up much outside attention on the front page, but the readers who follow Sharp Spark should be willing to click through based on writing quality even if the packaging doesn't pull them in. Consider this a story recommendation, by the way: I'm enjoying it thoroughly, and it deserves more eyeballs.)
So what does this mean for authors wanting to draw in new attention?
Nothing good, I'm afraid. Writing for the lowest common denominator of the featurebox has always worked (see: the featurebox), but if your average story isn't featurebait, then picking up followers who enjoyed Twilight Sparkle Memes A Meme 3: Deeper Into The Meme-trix isn't going to move the needle on your next story Literary Introspection 6: This Time The Prose Is Purple. Outside features and good word-of-mouth — my old standbys — aren't doing as much as they used to; posting a story as its feature goes live on Equestria Daily is still a tailwind, but it didn't push any of my 2015 stories into the featurebox.
I wish I had some words of wisdom or a snappy one-liner to end this post on, but I think I'd rather just turn it over to discussion and see what the rest of you have to say. I ought to get back to work on Mark of Destiny — it's long past time I finished up some editing and pushed my backlog of old Writeoff medalists out the door.
I'm just at this moment thinking[1] about a long-form story and this is massively demotivating for me. I mean writing for writing's sake is all well and good but I do also want someone to read my story. Given that it is one of those anti-bait stories[2] I fear it is going to be profoundly unpopular.
*glum*
[1] The sort of thinking where I have a thousand words of story and five thousand words of various notes.
[2] There's OCs in it. It's [adventure]. There's hardly any memes.
3209898
Unless I am dead, comatose, or unable to access the Internet, I suspect I will read it. So that's one view, at least.
Another way to judge this is by examining the "also liked" stories sidebar that appears alongside your stories. Using "The Iridescent Iron Rat" as an example, I count the following "Also Liked":
1. Verse Averse: Tales of the Versebreakers, by horizon
2. Hearth Swarming Eve, by horizon
3. The Destruction of the Self, by Cold in Gardez (yay)
4. Records of an Academy Disaster, by Farenheit
5. Intern, by GaPJaxie
6. Dubious Enchantment, by bookplayer
7. Wassail, Wassail, by Skywriter
8. Daring Do and the Weapons of the Ancients, by FanOfMostEverything
There's a couple trends here, but they're all in line with what you're saying.
The first two are obvious -- people liked those stories because they're fans of horizon.
Four of the others are Writeoff entries, just like Iridescent Iron Rat was.
The final two -- Skywriter's and Farenheit's -- don't have any obvious link. But that's only one quarter of the stories in the "also liked" section that have no immediate tie back to you.
I genuinely worry about this. The Destruction of the Self has four of my own stories in the "also liked" section, and all but one of the rest are Writeoff stories. This tells me that The Destruction of the Self had a fairly narrow audience -- people who like Cold in Gardez.
It's not all doom and gloom, though. Big Princess Week, my latest feature-box disaster, has zero stories by me in the "also liked" section. This is probably because it's a rather unusual story for me (though, historically, it harkens back to the comedy stories I originally became internet famous for), and the 'also liked' box is filled with a bunch of other stories that shared the Feature Box with it. This suggests that the people who liked Big Princess Week are, generally, people who like stories in the feature box.
There's probably some interesting meta-analysis to be done using the 'also liked' section and a network diagram. Hell, I might give it a shot tonight (assuming you or Bad Horse doesn't beat me to it).
I think Equestria Daily is more of an issue of advertising than anything else; Ruin Value, which was on Equestria Daily on March 9th, got 1,119 referrals. Through Glass, which was on Equestria Daily on January 16th, got 700, and The Legend of Falling Rocks, Buffalo Brave got featured on December 29th, 2014 and earned a mere 275.
The real key is, I think, how well your story description (and cover art) grabs the average reader. The Legend of Falling Rocks, Buffalo Brave simply doesn't have as grabbing a story summary as Through Glass, which in turn didn't grab people as well as Ruin Value.
Having a good cover also makes a big difference; people tell me at times that they literally only read my stories because of their covers, and I think it is hard to argue that my best covers are for The Stars Ascendant, Dying To Get There, and Apple Shampoo, which are my three most popular stories.
I think that there's a huge number of viewers out there who will click on your story if you tell them why they want to read it. It is probably true that to some extent you need to "give them what they want", but frankly, I'm pretty sure the only reason that The 18th Brewmare isn't more popular is that its story summary is very esoteric. I thought it was funny, but I suspect that the average reader is like "Wuh-wuh-what?" If your story summary had been instead "Prince Blueblood tries to get stallions the right to vote so that he can pass a bill legalizing prostitution," or something more similarly straightforward, I suspect your story would have had several hundred more upvotes. I think that being excessively clever or coy in your story summary (as I did with Falling Rocks) is often a mistake.
Look at CiG's most recent stories; Love and Other Bandages has an order of magnitude fewer upvotes than All the Mortal Remains. Compare their story summaries:
What is the first story about? The summary doesn't really say.
What is the second story about? Twilight Sparkle finding a vase in the ashes of her tree house (which she totally isn't sad about the destruction of, really!) and trying to solve the mystery of how it got there.
If someone is just casually browsing, the first is going to get clicked on because it is a Cold in Gardez story, the second because it tells a story that sounds interesting (and because it is a Cold in Gardez story).
Making the featured story box is a huge boost as well, but there are other ways to get tons of views - The Collected Poems of Maud Pie were never featured, but they hung around in popular stories for a week and had massive word of mouth across multiple websites, and people still periodically reference back to them. Plus it got into the RCL. But the real key is to tell people why they want to read something, to put a strong hook right there in your summary - if you don't, no one is going to care.
And I think that's the real key - when people have the choice of a thousand things to do, you need to tell them why they want to do the one you want them to do.
It is probably true that Equestria Daily isn't the driver or gatekeeper that it once was, but I think that many forms of promotion are helpful.
We had four writeoff writers in the featured story box this week, and at one point, we had three in the box at the same time - and zero clop. I don't think that Opportunity in the Community was a lowest common denominator story, I don't think that Twilight Spackle (Estee's story currently in the box) is either, and Blink got over a thousand upvotes and it is a story about destructive teleportation. Hell, my current featured box story contains jokes about quantum mechanics and people are laughing at them in the comments.
And arguing about whether or not souls exist, but, well, welcome to the internet, I guess.
I dunno. I mean, sure, LCD stories make the featured story box, but I think that if a top-tier writer wrote a story every day, you'd see very few LCD stories in the featured story box. The top-tier writers simply don't write consistently often enough to dominate the featured story box. And sure, Bad Horse has a hard time getting featured when he writes stuff like Anonymous Dreams, but we managed to get JediMasterEd's Beneath Our Feet, What Treasures featured, and a lot of people liked that - and it was his first story ever!
And I hardly think that was a LCD story.
It is true that writing LCD stories isn't going to get you a ton of people who are reading "Introspective Pony Literature: Wherein I Write a Form Parody of Finnegan's Wake", but Darf could have told you that. I'm not sure it is the end of the world anyway; even if there is a smaller audience for such stories, is that really such a bad thing? Maybe a bit disappointing, sure, but public preferences are what they are.
But I think there are still plenty of people out there who like introspective stories like All the Mortal Remains, if only they know which stories to read and which ones are just pretentious garbage.
3209912
Thank you.
3209927
It's really a general problem all over the 'net. All those 'also liked' algorithms have a scary tendency to create bubbles within larger communities.
Not sure if it would have anything to do with this, but I have stopped starting to read incomplete stories. Unless they catch my eye, or really catch my eye (I'll read it then), I pass over it or put it into my read later.
3209898
If your popular friends promote your story, that's probably about 30 views per person, which is about 150-300 views, depending on how many of your bros promote it. I could get you another 70 hits from Reddit, and you have 1000+ followers. Between all that, it would make the featured story box, no sweat.
We got JediMasterEd's story featured, after all.
And if your story is any good (and, let's face it, I don't think you've ever written a bad long-form story) you can bet that your buds will promote it.
To be honest I stopped visiting EQD for anything but music. The images I get from derpibooru, the fanfiction I get here.
Despite the problem of LCD of feature box, I try to routinely go through "new stories" section to see if anything catches my eye (even for simple read later). But the biggest factor for me are recommendation from authors I already enjoyed and of course their own future stories.
In the same time I don't know what really is important to authors not being one myself, but personally the trend in views to upvotes would be positive for me. It means more people who tried my story enjoyed, even if overall sum of likes is lower. I suppose it is old conflict of precision vs recall.
BTW I hope I don't bother you with asking, but is there any chance for The Case Of The Cowled Changelings in near future?
3209912
Bah, you casual! Being dead or in a coma is no excuse.
3209927
I think this is mostly a factor of "The less popular your story is, the more of your own stories end up there because the larger a fraction of your audience is just your own followers".
My most popular stories have none of my stories in their "also liked" column, while my stories with under 300 upvotes tend to have lots of my own stories there, with more and more of my own stories dominating as the vote count gets lower and lower.
The also-liked column does make a big difference to at least a fraction of the audience; "To the Sun" was briefly the most "Also Liked" story for Dying to Get There, and it got that story enough heat to make it the 18th hottest story on the site and put it in the popular stories box. Of course, at this point, the #1 also-liked story for it is Blink (and vice-versa), and I'm sure we've been driving each other views.
3209898
Don't be discouraged — you play by a different set of rules than us mortals. Your shorts collection has over 4,000 views, which is more than most featureboxed stories, and an order of magnitude higher than ... well, pretty much everyone except for Cold In Gardez, and even there it's no contest.
If attention makes you more likely to post new stories, you have my
swordsignal boost.3209927
I signal-boosted Academy Disaster around the time Iridescent Iron Rat was published, so that's one of the two outliers explained. 3209912 and I run in the same circles and have a great deal of audience overlap, though I'm not certain why that particular story would be correlated (other than the fact that the two stories came out less than a month apart). Actually, publication date seems to be the single largest factor in "Also Liked" — perhaps an artifact of the algorithm, or of audience churn, where casual readers stick around the site for a month or two, upvote things during that period, then vanish again, having left their mark on the statistics.
Go wild with the meta-analysis! I probably won't get to it.
I don't know quite how much I would read into that, without actual numbers behind the associations; all you can say for certain is that any links which would drop new readers at you are of a smaller magnitude than the link of "someone already following you" and/or "someone involved with the Writeoffs". The former is pretty huge; the latter is a fairly well-defined sample size, probably about 50-100 people who tend to vote in clusters because they've already read the story when it medaled in the Writeoffs and know it's worth their positive vote (again). Any other link -- such as a person clicking and reading and liking your story in the Featurebox, and then clicking and reading and liking another FB story afterward -- has that big significance threshold to overcome.
In a way, it's like the problem the Hugo Awards had this year with slate voting. You have a bunch of chaotic data from everyone expressing individual preferences in a wide-open field, and then you have a small bloc of voters who are much more in lockstep with their preferences, and who are all but guaranteed to have read and liked other Writeoff finalists that were published around the same time. The slate overwhelms the numerically superior but scattered preferences of the rest of the voters.
3209952
Those are good things to keep in mind, and hopefully they'll help me do better in the future; but in terms of what they mean for my data, I don't think it's a major confounding factor in the conclusions here, because all of my descriptions were written by me, so I'm largely comparing apples to apples.
From another angle: Compare Bluey Napoleon, which has probably the worst summary I've written, with Iridescent Iron Rat, which has a rather descriptive summary. Both got EqD features, did equally well in the Writeoffs, and got some outside attention (your signal boost, Illya Leonov's reading, etc). Looking at my data snapshots:
- Four months after Bluey Napoleon's 8/2014 posting, it had 1386 views and 175 upvotes
- Approx. four months after Rat's 2/2015 posting, it has 1269 views and 251 upvotes
Out of the people who actually read it, Rat is markedly more upvoted. Both were seriously critically acclaimed. The major differences between them are posting date (and genre, but I have no idea how to control for that). The same trend shows up in my older stories — a lower ratio of views to upvotes over time.
To be clear, "writing for the featurebox" isn't the only route to the featurebox, and I'm really glad to see that so consistently proved. But it's the dominant strategy (as we're all implicitly acknowledging by noting how unusual "no clop in the featurebox" is).
See also what I noted about the Writeoff voting bloc. I think that's becoming a much more significant factor in giving Writeoff stories a hoofhold on the top. (Though in this case, I don't think it's a bad thing, because the stories that the Writeoffs sift to the top actually are of good quality -- you're basically using a subset of FIMFic voters as a filter for the rest. And the Writeoffs are irregular enough that we're not dominating FIMFic's reading lists. ...
... actually, I wonder if the Writeoff stories clustering in the featurebox isn't contributing to the constant inflow in the group. We've hit critical mass that we're actually getting advertising out of posted stories going big.)
3209966
I hear that from a lot of people, and to be honest, it shapes my own reading more than I'd like (because I do a lot of reading to evaluate things for the RCL, and incomplete stories are ineligible, so often I'll just skip straight over them in favor of something I might be able to recommend if I like it).
In terms of my personal statistics, most of my stories -- and all my EqD features -- are one-shots, so I don't think it makes any difference to the specific data set I present.
3209986
Yeah, I only visit EqD sporadically myself these days. If I notice that a story is EqD featured, it makes it much more likely that I'll read it (I trust their fanfic team as a gatekeeper), but most of the time I notice that from a story's description, or I'm already following the author because my tastes and the Prereaders' have a lot of overlap.
I'm getting pretty upset at myself with my increasing story backlog. Kicking all those old stories out is a near-term priority. I'm starting with Mark of Destiny because I think it's closest to being done; Cowled Changelings went through an edit pass and ended up worse, so I need to take a deep breath and re-rip it to shreds. Depending on how painful/painless the MoD editing process is, it's either second on the list, or down around fourth, but in either case it's been way too long and I need to just PTMFA within the next month or two.
My feature box story was about pretty pony princesses acting like big cats in a nature documentary.
I'm, uh... I'll just go home, now.
I think a lot of people spend too much time looking at numbers and doing data analysis and trying to figure out how the statistics line up.
I just read stories, man. I imagine that's all there is to it for most people.
Speaking as the pre-reader who approved it and got lucky enough to read the entire thing, it really is incredible and only builds as it goes.
3209898
I'd be willing to print out your next long-form story and hand it out to random people in Harvard Square if you want, though I can't legally force people to actually read it. Don't let anything stop you from writing it! I certainly want to read it.
At least some of this is probably just followers of his that are either not around anymore (haven't logged on for days to weeks) and the people who don't like reading incomplete stories. I now know about the story, which looks awesome, and put it on my RiL but I'm not going to be actually reading it until it finishes up.
I suspect another major factor is that ~0.5% of people who upvote our stories actually end up following us as a result.
I just did some math and I think that we may have been overestimating how successful clop is. Mature + sex stories make up 13.7% of stories submitted to the site in the last year, and the featured-story bookshelf is 13.5% mature + sex stories. While it is true that it is a bit harder for a mature + sex story to get featured (19.3% harder, in fact) because they are in competition against absolutely everything while non-mature stories can be featured without beating all the mature stories above them, even taking that into account, they're still less successful than human stories (no mature or sex tag) and teen + sex tagged stories, with an overall advantage of only 17.6% (total, not percentage points). If you don't mind only ending up in the non-mature featured story box, clop is only more likely to be featured than Anthro, Dark, Tragedy, Sad, mature stories without the sex tag, and Everyone-rated stories.
107 stories published in the last month have been featured, out of 1,749 stories published in that same time interval, suggesting an overall featuring rate of 6.1%, though this is likely an underestimate because some of the stories will be featured in the bottom three slots in the future, or may well make the box proper but haven't just yet. Still, that suggests that being me (5/26 mature box featured (19.2%), 5/26 non-mature box featured (another 19.2%)) is more advantageous than writing clop (15/283 = 5.3%). In fact, that suggests I have a 300-600% advantage over some random person writing clop.
I suspect the true reason for the featured story box being full of stories of questionable quality is that a lot of the best writers just hardly ever write. Just looking at the list of people I follow, if the best 36 of them each wrote one story per month, I'm pretty sure that the featured story box would be chock full of their stories on a constant basis. The only reason other people are even allowed in the featured story box is because the people posting in this comments section average significantly less than that. I believe I am the only person who has commented on this blog post who actually averages publishing north of 1 story per month since I started writing in August 2013, and then only barely (26 stories in 23 months). Thus, what you end up with is simply the stories which make it there because there's nothing better and peeople are likely to put them there via the vagaries of chance and fortune. Sure, not even the best writers can be assured of the featured story box every single time, but even if you only have a 25-50% chance, you're vastly more likely to make it than the average user.
I mean, let's face it - most of the writers here are probably disappointed when their stories DON'T make the featured story box, whereas most people are overjoyed to ever make it.
This is probably why we're seeing ever-increasing numbers of people entering the writeoffs; turns out being on the front page helps.
Plus a lot of the big-name writers here advertise it.
It is also worth noting that people are tremendously slow in publishing their stories; right now I have Forever and Again and Again, Falling in Love, I Want to Go Home, The Perfect Cure for the Common Cold, The Best Medicine, Time is Closing In, My Faithful Students, The Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Jonagold Apple, As He Lay Dying, Why Doesn't the Sun Shine?, and No Time for Regrets as unpublished writeoff stories. You have a similar number of writeoff stories which aren't up yet as well, as does Bad Horse, as do a number of other folks. Only 4/50+ stories from A Matter of Perspective have been published, and The Price of a Smile, Phantom of the Genre, An Old Coot, Star Bright, A Butterfly, Dreaming, Time Enough for Friendship, Dream a Little Dream of Me, Flies and Spiders, and Cycle of Tides are all things I could easily see ending up in the featured story box.
If you assume that the average story dwells in the featured story box for 3 days, that would mean that we'd compose ~16% of the featured story box slots this month.
3210283
Hey, you made like, 5000 people chuckle a bit at that story. That's pretty good for some random thing you came up with in the airport.
You know, I was thinking of this very thing over the weekend, for somewhat obvious and narcissistic reasons. I couldn't really come to any conclusions as to what quantifiable things have changed, though I think your musings are pretty on point. It definitely feels different than when I first started writing here, but how much of that is the fandom and how much is me? Back when I began, an EQD feature was definitely serious business though and launched me as an author. I wonder how very new authors catch attention these days?
Anecdotally, I feel like the feature box has behaved differently since a site update months back: it seems a little more rigid now, with a moderately catchy story making it into the Mature FB having the potential to stick around for a very long time. Princess Week (which was excellent and deserving of the box) stuck around there for what... about six days? I recall it coming out on Sunday and watching it linger at the bottom on Friday/Saturday. I'm not sure if the feature box actually changed though or if it's just my imagination.
(And thank you for the story plug. I'm admittedly a little disappointed it hasn't caught a broader audience, particularly during the time it's posted serially and reactions/speculations are be the most fun. But it seems to be pretty well liked by the people who do read it.)
This sounds startlingly like the shift to novel self publication; it's probably more than just novels, but that's what I've been paying attention to.
3210927
Yes. The featured story box used to have a hard cap of four days. It doesn't anymore. This means that a story can stick around for quite some time, though it becomes increasingly difficult over time as you end up getting essentially everyone who might read your story to read it, and eventually the trickle of people left aren't enough to sustain it. I'm not sure if there is an actual hard limit to how long it can stay in there anymore, or if it is only possible to lose your place via, well, displacement, though old stories (defined as stories older than a certain amount, though what that is, I couldn't say) can't get in the top seven slots. so presumably there must be some cut-off.
I really have no idea how I got my start - some folks liked me, I published some stories, they got some upvotes, and then Shotgun Wedding got featured. Not sure how much outside help I got in terms of promotion on my early stories, though I think the fact that I was active in some shipping groups may have helped.
I think getting a recommendation from one of the larger centers (Equestria Daily, the featured story box, multiple reviewers) can make a big difference, but in the end, it is all on you to actually catch peoples' attention in the first place.
Trick Question has been doing quite well for herself and she's a new writer, and I think she did it via the get-featured route as well.
3209981
Well, I've only ever written one long-form story. So never writing a bad one is good just not as impressive as it might sound.
Still. Thank you.
3210138
I wasn't trying to solicit offers of signal boostery (or swords), honest[1], but thank you very much.
[1] I only mentioned it because I had just chatted to someone about that exact problem and I was feeling, well. Glum.
3210401
Thank you. Seriously, guys, you needn't offer me help or anything. I was just being complain-y.
That said... I do love the idea of someone handing out MLP fanfic to random people in the street. Forget your basic unicycle-riding bagpipe playing Darth Vader in a kilt—this is truly surreal.
3211092
Congratulations, by the way, on what's already your second most popular story (and which will, by the end of the day, have accumulated more views than anything I've written).
3212276
I live in Oregon, the state where Portland is located. "Keep Oregon Weird" is mentioned in state-sponsored ads,
3212932
Thank you!
It took me a couple months, but I finally snuck into the weather factory and took another one of these:
img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20150427164640/mlp/images/2/25/Rainbow_in_a_room_full_of_jars_of_lightning_S5E5.png
Probably going to have to go back after this to
stealborrowresearch? some more.The really crazy thing is it actually has nearly 1k more views (and 400 more upvotes) than Blink does at this point, suggesting that there is a large audience of people who are reading and enjoying Dying to Get There without having ever read the (well, now other) major teleportation = death fic.
I will note that it actually has more upvotes than The Stars Ascendant does at this point, despite having 3,000 fewer views, per your note with regards to a higher votes:view ratio over time, but looking back at day 4 of The Stars Ascendant, the vote:views ratio on the story was pretty similar (5.27 for Dying to Get There, 5.47 for The Stars Ascendant); it seems like in the long run, views seem to outpace votes on stories. I'm not sure if this is because people are less likely to upvote new stories, or if this is because of false views due to spider bots or something else, or because non-site users are more likely to look at old stories, or what, but it is a strange phenomenon.
3213091
This seemed odd, but my data backs you up. Here's the cumulative views:upvotes ratio on all of my non-Mature, non-trollfic stories on each of my snapshot dates:
)
2015/07/05 8.06 2014/12/03 7.79 2014/08/27 7.37 2014/06/05 7.17 2014/03/04 7.19Over time, I've accumulated a higher ratio of completed/abandoned stories which are only getting votes on the long tail. (That tail's a lot longer than it seems: my most-viewed story in 2015 is not actually one of my newly published ones, but Hard Reset 2, which hasn't updated in about a year.
3214237
That's pretty crazy.
...my goodness, I just realized that it has been more than six months since Hearth Swarming Eve went up.
I think the time flies are swarming again. Pesky bugs.
Speaking of which, I'm still shocked that and The Iridescent Iron Rat aren't more popular than they are.