My Experiment · 1:26am Sep 17th, 2012
Some of you approximately 5 ponies who follow my posts might be aware of a story I posted called "A Billion Burning Celestias." If you haven't and you are looking to kill a few minutes anyway then have a look I guess. If your time is extremely precious to you (first of all why are you following me then?) then whatever you do don't look at! Avert your gaze! It will burn your eyes!
That said, I did enjoy writing it, and it was something of an experiment. But what good is an experiment if you don't learn anything? I don't know, but thankfully I'm not in that situation. I definitely learned a few things.
1. Moderation around here actually is pretty chill. Some run ins I have had with a certain mod had lead me to question this, but really that was my fault and not his. However getting this through has shown me that it really isn't that stringent. I thought for sure they would think it was some sort of inside joke or something, but somehow it passed moderation.
2. There is not a simple linear relationship between likes and favorites. In fact, how many favs vs how many likes a story has mean two entirely different things. What exactly those two different meanings are, I don't know. I know the difference in terms of a individual but what exactly it means for a story to have more likes then favorites vs more favorites then likes, I don't know. I do know that previously it had seemed as though number of favorites is always roughly equal to 1.7 * number of likes + 3. However The one story mentioned above got far more likes than favorites instead of the other way around.
3. My ability to attract views via an image an a description is less than it should be. For a story that was just posted "A Billion Burning Celestias" obtained about twice the views of any of my other stories. Considering neither the image nor description for that was particularly interesting, that tells me something. More specifically it tells me an area I can improve on.
4. My stories are also sub-optimal at getting people to care about them one way or the other. Most of my stories have no or close to no dislikes, but one thing that really stands out about the experiment is it got way more feedback in terms of total thumbs. People had strong opinions about it. If there is one way in which the experiment was a success that would be it. However by comparison my other stories don't generate nearly as many total thumbs per view. This means there are far too many people who are indifferent toward my work. Is this a result of poor intros? Do I just not get my reader engaged quickly enough? I don't know. But I do know that there are too many people on the fence.
5. My writing while not great can only suck so much. "A Billion Burning Celestias" is pretty much as bad as its ever going to get, and you know what? It still got more thumbs up then down. Some people even added it to their favorites. That means its okay if I take chances in my written because even if it does turn out poorly, moor people will probably like it then dislike it. Honestly that is really very encouraging. Especially since experimentation is so vital to becoming a better writer.
Anyway the more scientifically inclined among you may have noticed that this isn't an experiment in the strictest sense of the word, nor can I scientifically draw any of these conclusions especially considering the low number of trials. To you I say lighten up.
