Just clarifying something real quick; · 3:17am Sep 10th, 2017
Last blog post wasn't meant to be targeting Titanium Dragon specifically. But since it's become a bit of an immense clusterfuck going on way more than a day later, and I have been made aware of other users who've been a bit more targeted than I ever intended to be, I thought I'd clear that up now.
I got a general problem with the culture and mindset, and while the dude in question is an example of it, he's not actually the point of what I was trying to say. My disagreements with him are many, but personal, and I do not plan on using my platform to make personal attacks. Also just making it about him specifically misses the actual point I did want to make, which is that I think telling your own audience that another author's story is bad and not worth reading is kind of a dick move. Rage Reviews, for instance, and Trainwreck Explorers would be more egregious examples of what I was actually trying to get across.
People still disagree with that and make good points and that's fair. I'm happy to be disagreed with so long as people actually understand what I was trying to be wrong about.
I just want people to be nicer, damn it, even if I personally am really bad at it.
I say we teach all of them our peaceful ways! By force!
You can be good at it when you really try, to be fair. It's just often not worth the effort to you it seems.
I mean the only way this problem goes away is if the site administration starts actually moderating such activities with nuance and that's a non-trivial solution to an ever present problem.
Fandoms are generally safe havens for people who think themselves the King fish of small ponds. Fans just want content and aren't altogether that discerning about the source. People enjoy preening and thinking themselves superior. It's just the multi-variable calculus of being a twat converging in an especially vulnerable coordinate space.
People like TD will always exist, as will the toxic lechers who think themselves so justified in carrying out some crusade against the subjectively 'not-perfect'. In a way, the current reaction is the means with which we find common ground in the fundamental human dignity that rejects such behavior as, frankly, disgustingly self-serving.
Basically, idiots exist. I don't find the energy within myself to call them out, but I have faith the community will eventually shun them just because their ego masturbation is so undeniably repellent. I trust smart friends to make smart decisions, and I trust them to have well thought out attitudes when it comes to disliking such vapid despicability.
The "press" is nothing without the people.
Asshole reviewers (or, er, "reviewers," as the case may be) aside, I'm still curious if you understand and/or accept that the act of making something available to the public is consent for the public to comment on it.
4663814
I totally agree that's it's consent to its first, initial audience. I disagree with it being used for a reviewer's secondary audience, I think that's bad etiquette if you don't at least warn the author straight up. Same way Weird Al never made a song parody he didn't ask permission for first, even though he was never legally or even professionally obligated to.
And, like I said, I totally get why people would disagree with that, but I still think that the idea that it's important to tell as many people as possible that a story is not worth reading is kind of a shonky thing.
That's not what criticism is; That's intended for the author. Criticism I'm 100% behind unerringly. It's when it's intended for the reviewer's audience primarily that I get a little twitchy.
4663828
Weird Al does indeed secure the permission of the original content creator for the derivative work he produces, even though he is under no obligation to. No author on this site has secured the permission of the original content creator for the derivative works we've produced, even though we are likely required to. (In other words, it seems a flawed analogy. Weird Al really is a saint, though.)
Here's a much more apt comparison: You mentioned Tycho Brahe in your last post. Surely enjoying his work is hypocritical of you? He and Gabe and the rest of the Penny Arcade team have literally made themselves rich by reviewing other creative works, positively and negatively, without permission.
4663846
I'm going to be way more of a hypocrite now and copy paste Harwick's comment on the last blog here without his permission, because it's absolutely perfectly what I mean here:
4663851
I got a chuckle out of your opening line, but all in all you didn't really answer the question:
Do you have a problem with Penny Arcade's business model?
Both Titanium Dragon and Penny Arcade have built an audience and try to offer that audience advice about how to invest their time with other peoples' content, directing them towards some works and away from others. Now, here on FIMFic, we're working at an amateur level: an audience measured in hundreds, currency measured in intangible views and upvotes. Penny Arcade has an audience measured in millions, currency measured in actual dollars and cents. They are literally, in the original meaning of the word, profiting by telling their audience which content they think is good and which content they think is bad. You are upset that TD earns a few dozen views by suggesting a story one person wrote isn't worth his audiences' time; you must be apoplectic that PA makes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars by suggesting a video game made by dozens or hundreds of people isn't worth their audiences' time! Are you?
I think you were rather mild about it, honestly.
4663865
I thought that answer made it clear that I thought it was a false equivalence, sorry. While I take fanfiction seriously, obviously, and while I personally can handle criticism, mostly, I don't think this is a professional environment, and stuff that I'm okay with happening at the professional level I can be not okay with at the amateur level.
4663873
But... Professionals must hold themselves to a higher standard than Amateurs, Numbers.
Amateurs aren't getting paid, aren't leveraging their reputations for anything. They have less obligation to give a shit.
4663873
Ah, okay. So we're back to, you feel fan fiction is "just for fun" and therefore the standard social contract does not apply, and you expect people to somehow divine that:
I just think it's a bit much to hope that everyone who knows "this was made available to the public, so it's okay for me to write a commentary on it" figures out that suddenly there's an unwritten exception to the rule.
4663915
Thats basically the gist of where I'm coming from here yes.
Like I said,all I want is for people to know I'm wrong about the right thing.
4663919
Haha, well, okay. I do finally feel as if I understand... well, no, not understand. I feel as if I can successfully articulate both sides of the argument, now, and that's something.
Our debate has been interesting, entertaining, and enlightening, at least on my end. I've enjoyed it, but sweet Celestia I need to get some sleep and then get some actual work done tomorrow. I do have one final thought, offered up for your (and others') consideration:
The theme of the original dramablogs was "you are not important." At one point, Crystal Wishes articulated this in a slightly different way that I felt was much more honest and satisfying: "you are not special."
I submit to you that fan fiction is not special.
From my point of view this is a really weird situation to see causing so much excitement and drama. I've been following TD for reviews for years and have read many stories he pointed out (both positively and negatively, given that I know his tastes and mine do not perfectly align). He's been a convenient filter for stories worth reading that I might have otherwise have missed or passed over.
I could certainly see authors not always liking the results, but from the perspective of a reader it has been a very useful service.
4663851
I want to extract part of that Harwick quote because I think it really gets at a big part of my problem with this whole kerfuffle:
This is a hugely personal statement—and to me is a really, really poor general governing principle. The fact that one user (or even a significant subset of users) feel(s) this way in no way contradicts the value of negative reviews. What would contradict that value is a blanket assertion that no one benefits from having people provide such reviews, that the up/downvote system is sufficient for all quality assessment purposes.
For example, I'm not participating around here nearly as much these days, but back when I was participating more I can't imagine having the forbearance Harwick expresses, to look at the first thousand words of a story. I'd be hard-pressed to look at more than the first hundred for most stories, unless given a compelling reason to do so. Having content filters tended to be very productive for me. And you can't have meaningful content filtering unless you allow assessments to have significant variability. There's no way to reliably identify the really good stories without giving low ratings to some stories. And, frankly, that works even better for identifying top-tier content when you've got reviewers calling out middling-to-good stories for not being good enough.
I've been preaching Death of the Author when it comes to anything put in a public space for years, and I'm not about to stop now. There's an ecosystem here—or an attentional marketplace if you're some sort of crypto-capitalist or something. Obviously there's a niche for negative reviewing, or the ecosystem would just tend to weed it out. (Though WRT TD in particular, I think he's especially good at making decisions that help expand/improve his niche, like the posting-in-other-people's-comments thing. Those may be unpopular decisions, but I think they're extremely effective ones, which is why it's hard for me to get too bent out of shape about them. I care a lot about people using maximally effective tools in their writing, including knowing how to self-promote with art and summaries. It's hard for me to get upset about someone using divisive but effective tools for self-promotion in related writing endeavors. If there was enough backlash about it to keep it from being effective, I'm sure he wouldn't do it. But I'm pretty sure it's a winning strategy on net in the attentional marketplace.)
ETA: Everyone who's going to read this has probably already read it, but it occurred to me (10 hours later) that an example might be helpful here. So, for example...
There are a number of shipping stories I really enjoy. Bookplayer's "Lost Time" and HoofBitingActionOverload's "Spring is Dumb" come quickly to mind. But if I were to base my reading choices solely off of upvotes/downvotes, I'd probably never have read either of these stories because they're both well south of the approximately 100:1 upvote/downvote ratio you need to be a top-tier story on Fimfiction.
A lot of my favorites are stories at that tier, sure. But many are not, because they deal with controversial topics like romance or religion (shout out to DuncanR's "Appletheosis"), or provide interestingly depressing takes on these characters (like a lot of Bad Horse's oeuvre).
Or, one of the ur-examples of the failure of upvotes/downvotes, Hoarse Voice's "Biblical Monsters". Many people loathe that story. it's got a u/d ratio around 10:1, which would never put it anywhere near my radar if I had only votes to go off of. But it's one of the best stories I've read in this fandom, hands down.
Truly good stories benefit from the reviewing culture here. In many cases, good and middling stories may not—and a lot of the good writers on this site have regularly put out good-to-middling content, myself included, so they're going to take a hit from that reviewing culture. I have no problem with that. Overwhelmingly, my reaction to negative feedback is to think I should have / could have done better and avoided it. There are some rare cases where a reviewer and the material being reviewed really are a fundamental mismatch, but I think people take refuge in this excuse far more often than it's actually warranted. It reminds me of back when I pre-read for EqD and people would complain about being told their comedies weren't funny, saying that comedy is inherently subjective. Sure, it is—but generally it's pretty easy to tell whether a comedy works even if you don't particularly like the type of humor being presented. And if an author's comic niche is so focused that readers outside that niche can't find anything to enjoy in a story, I'm pretty content with the idea that said story isn't a great story.
I think this is the heart of the issue.
I don't believe the "culture" and "mindset" that you're describing are an accurate reflection of reality. I suspect that you may be projecting feelings and motivations onto ponies you don't know. Text-based interactions give a meager picture of a pony, and it is easy to fill in most of somepony's persona by projecting one's own theories. This is a perfectly natural thing to do, especially when one is involved in an emotionally-invested conflict. However, looking at subjective impressions and treating them as fact is neither logical, nor fair to the ponies being stereotyped by those impressions.
Let's take a moment to think about this rationally. I don't believe there is any such thing as a "culture" of Fimfic reviewing. Reviewers aren't a cohesive group, by nature. They all do their own thing, because reviewing is inherently subjective. The idea of "Fimfic reviewer culture" seems like pure fiction to me. Labeling an opinion and behavior as a "culture" can end up (intentionally or not) identifying those who don't behave in the desired manner to as a problem to be corrected.... but that isn't really a "culture". It's more of a difference of opinion being shoehorned into an "us versus them" framework.
If you think you can determine somepony's "mindset" based on text-only interactions, you're a better observer than I, and I have a degree in psychology. We don't have a clear picture of what's going on in other ponies' minds, especially those we've never met. When somepony suggests they can determine another pony's implicit motivations through such a flimsy context, I am immediately skeptical. I am especially skeptical when people who have met the person in real life come to the exact opposite conclusions.
At the end of the day, you have one opinion, and somepony else has another opinion. That's perfectly fine. But I honestly feel that any systemic issues you're seeing in this are imaginary. I need evidence in order to believe things, and I'm not seeing convincing evidence that there is a self-reinforcing culture of reviewers here, nor that the people you have not met but imply are motivated by horsefame over friendship are anything like you are envisioning them to be.
4663915
4663919
I feel like there's a very simple solution to this, which is for people who don't want negative reviews to add a note to the description or the author notes to that effect. Most reviewers I know would happily honor that by not reading the story; there are more than enough stories authors want reviewed who are willing to risk it.
It would look unprofessional, because it is unprofessional, and that would turn some people off (it's basically the same spirit behind "concrit only" and "don't like, don't read") but I think we could all agree that anyone who reviewed in that case was being a jerk, even if we still felt the reviewer had a right to do it.
4664145
That could work! They could also just message or leave a comment on the reviewer's page asking them not to review any of their stories.
And for some it might even be preferable to just ask them to limit their criticism to the comments section of the fic itself instead of making a blog about it somewhere else.
4664254
Most reviewers have that policy already, the only problem being that many people don't know about specific reviewers until they've been reviewed. And I don't think it's fair to ask reviewers to destroy a piece of their work after they've done it, so it should be up to the authors to make it known that they don't want the reviewer's efforts.
So that certainly is an option if you know you don't want a specific person reviewing you, but the blanket statement should protect against anyone, even reviewers you've never heard of.
This would just be well served by having a checkbox when uploading that is a 'Hi, here is my preference for reviews' that is easy to see.
Aka:
1. Prefer not to have reviewed at all
2. Constructive reviews only
3. Please contact me before uploading
etc, etc.
It needn't be a site rule to follow such (I can think of authors for whom I can ...give fairly colorful 'This story is seriously what the heck' commentary), but it would be a decent etiquette thing where it's 'If you breach this, you should probably have a good reason for it'.
4663928
I think the fundamental difference between here & Penny Arcade is the latter is reviewing commercial works, inasmuch as they offer commentary. There's something of a significant difference, because with fanfiction you can simply go look at a thing for free; with commercial products you have to pony up first, and if you don't like it you are out $50.
You're out time in either case, but since you are out time in both cases you can kind of remove it as a factor (Though if time is your principle goal, sure, reviews can benefit).
And...well, the other part is a lot of people here aren't, yea, good at taking criticism. Is it better that we have unbridled criticism, or that we focus more on encouraging authors to develop their craft? We've all seen people upload one story, get mad negative feedback, and vanish forever, I'm sure.
4664045
I agree with basically everything you're saying, except one little snippet I want to highlight:
Actually, I disagree with this. I do think there is a culture of Fimfic reviewing, but not necessarily in the sense it's been put forward during this kerfuffle. My idea of the culture of Fimfic reviewing is essentially the fact that lots of people review stories. From my experiences with fanfiction in other fandoms, I've never seen anything like the amount of legitimate reviewing that happens here. MLP has some honestly excellent writers in the fandom, and a lot of good writers who appreciate the overall quality enough that they're willing to invest their time producing reviews.
I agree that I don't see any particularly cohesive attitude to those reviews. You've got positive-highlighters (RCL, SA, EqD), you've got pure-negative bashers (I don't know them and wouldn't name-drop if I did, but I'm aware they exist), and you've got a lot of people trying to provide recommendations on various levels (Chris, PP, TD, many others). There is a thriving ecosystem. But I do think it's meaningful to say that there's a culture of reviewing, nonetheless, in the sense that reviews are genuinely valued in this community (or we wouldn't have so many people providing them like this). I think that's a huge positive for the pony fiction community, and part of why it sustains an overall higher level of quality than many fandoms. You can actually be rewarded, here, for producing truly exceptional work.
4664317
The counterpoints to this are:
Dealing with negative reviews is a part of a publishing writer's craft, just like spelling and formatting. If you want to ignore those things and just focus on writing, there are plenty of ways to connect with hand picked mentors or groups that don't involve publishing it. By publishing it, it's fair to expect that people feel it's ready for a public reaction, including criticism.
Look at it this way: you'd never suggest this is a problem for writeoff, because you assume that by submitting a fic to writeoff, people know they'll be critiqued. People submitting to FiMfic should feel their stories are more polished than writeoff stories, and be even more prepared for people to react to them.
At the same time, personally I care just as much about helping reviewers develop, and part of that is writing a negative review. Reviewing is an artform, and one that benefits just as much from the hobbyist community and personalized comments here. I might know better, more professional critics for movies reviews, but the only people reviewing fic are other novices, so they get to try things out and learn, and we get reviews of fic of comparable quality to the fics themselves (for better and worse.)
All of this works together as a training ground for everyone. And like I said, I have no problem if people opt out, whether by noting it or by choosing not to publish here. But acting like criticism isn't part of writing, or like reviewers aren't part of our community, is putting the feelings of one group ahead of both their practical artistic development and the feelings and development of other artists.
I'm trying to think of something slightly witty and stupid to say in pink italics and I got nothing.
4663957 4664045
When I compare fimfic reviewing to most other fandom fic reviewing--say, Twilight or One Direction--I notice so many stark, consistent differences that I have to say there is a culture of fimfic reviewing. Negative reviews don't exist in those fandoms. Useful reviews--useful to anyone, author or reader--are rare. Comments amount to group hugs and cutesy you-go-girl talk that gives me estrogen poisoning.
If we don't have a review culture, explain this: Why do all MLP fanfic websites have downvotes or the ability to give bad ratings, while no other fanfiction sites do?
Reviewing at all is seen as bad manners in a lot of fandoms, and it is much less common in most fandoms for fic writers to claim or try to write well.
4664571
You know, I actually hadn't realized this until you mentioned it just now. This really shines a new light on a lot of the idiosyncrasies I remember here: the "legitimacy" of certain types of downvotes, downvoting etiquette, etc. It almost seems like there might be three factions: hugboxers who'd be perfectly happy to never see downvotes, pereferencers who will upvote or downvote for whatever whim they may be feeling, and elitists who have strong opinions about what are and aren't justified reasons for downvote usage. (I'm in the last category because of course I am.)
It's interesting, too, that we have a system that records both instead of doing a reddit-type thing and having downvotes just counteract upvotes on a 1-to-1 basis.
My quick-and-dirty intuition on this is heavily centered on gender norms (as it sounds like yours might be, from the estrogen comment). I don't know if that's the case, or if there might be other driving factors, or if it might be a well-nigh accidental result of how someone decided to code the main hub for pony fiction back in the mists of time; but it's definitely where my correlational mind leaps given that one of the principal differences between the pony fiction fandom and other fanfic communities is the gender split here. (I feel like I have to say something about correlation and causation here, but I also feel like everybody should know what I mean if I say the word correlation because most people in this conversation know that caveat and many of them ought to know that I'm the last person who'd confound those two.)
4664600
What is this "gender split" you're talking about? I've got a more even ratio of male to female friends who like ponies than almost any other fandom I've been in, from Star Wars to DnD.
...a lot of female Harry Potter fans, though, now that I think of it.
4664615
Fanfiction tends to be notoriously and overwhelmingly a female pursuit. Whether or not members of a particular fandom are male or female, writers for a fandom tend to be female.
As a quick example, there are 44.7k stories on fanfiction.net about Star Wars (top in all the movie fandoms). By contrast, there are 219k stories about Twilight, and that's not even top in book fandoms. Top goes to Harry Potter with 773k—which you just mentioned having a lot of female fans.
[ETA: To put this in context, do you think that Harry Potter is approximately 15x more popular than Star Wars? Or, more pointedly, that Twilight is about 5x more popular? Something has to explain these differences in story counts, and especially with Twilight it's easy to write off many of them out of hand. It can't be fanbase—Star Wars clearly has a bigger overall fanbase. It can't be depth of worldbuilding or number of characters that can be written about. Arguments could be made that Twilight will win out on characters needing further development/resolution (which is one common theory for why people feel the need to write fanfiction), but I don't find that alone to be a very sufficient explanation of that 5:1 story ratio in Twilight's favor, especially when I think we can assume that Star Wars has considerably more people overall interested in the intellectual property.]
It's certainly not the case that all fanfiction writers in other fandoms are female, but I'm pretty sure it's been observed that the gender ratio for fanfic writers in the MLP fandom is noticeably different from the gender ratio in most of the fanfiction community at large. Certainly, anecdotally, I'd never even run into another male fanfiction writer until I joined Fimfiction, and this place is positively lousy with them.
4664571
What you're describing is the result of a larger culture in the website, not a culture isolated or specific to reviewers. (Note: the conversation here has kept distinct the idea of "feedback and downvotes" from the idea of "review" from the very beginning.)
I'm not trying to split hairs when I say that. I literally don't think there is a collection of reviewers here cribbing from each other to determine appropriate behavior. I've seen too many different kinds of reviewers on Fimfiction doing their own thing.
If anything, there may be a reviewer culture on the websites you mention where everypony does things the same way. That isn't the case here, from what I've seen.
4664615
I've got a more even ratio of male-to-female to female friends.
I’m gonna be honest, as much as I dislike what I’ve seen of Titanium Dragon, I do agree with his essential argument on this score. Bookplayer’s point is significant, I think, and I don’t see a difference between reviews of two different stories simply because one is published commercially. Setting aside the literary value that I feel reviews have (that they are part and parcel with the discussion and improvement of the writer’s craft), I am a human being and there are only so many hours in the day. My time is valuable, so I’d like to get good use out of it.
4664643
This is an interesting point. I don't have experience in other fanfiction areas because none of them appeal to me. FiM is almost unique in its enormous cast of developed characters, richly textured world, lore, and even its own alternate physics and interpersonal dynamics. So maybe my viewpoint here is highly skewed because I don't have a basis for comparison.
I would guess that TD was raised male, because he has the direct forcefulness that girls in Western culture are admonished and shamed for exercising. His bluntness in reviews matches his general personality. I suspect I may be overly blunt in my reviews as well, though I'll do my best to be respectful—although in my case it's mostly a lack of awareness of how I sound and an overly-assertive posture with my own theories and ideas (yeah, I was raised as a boy too, and fourteen years with tits doesn't remove much of that).
On another note, I'm a teacher. I don't think hugboxing helps people improve their literature. If FiM is a rare place that reviewers are critical, I definitely lucked out.
4663957
Sorry, just wanted to say about the up to downforce ratio; my preferred metric of choice is actually upvotes to views for that reason. It's more consistent.
Because it'll apparently get deleted if I respond to it in the original venue 4665055:
As has been suggested, you seem to interpret others' actions in the worst possible light -- and what a strange fandom to do it in. What I suspect is closer to the truth: you have struck a nerve that has piqued many peoples' interest, even if they don't necessarily have something to contribute to the conversation beyond offering silent support or disapproval for the points made therein. We return to the thread to see what new points have been made, even if we haven't been looped in via a direct reply.
4665064
As I said early in the previous thread, I'm not comfortable with my threads growing to be perceived as spectator sports in that fashion.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing that people are still interested, I just think it's something I need to be really mindful of, and I'm trying to curtail certain aspects of it as things keep escalating behind the scenes here.
4665065
And as I said earlier, you can't control how people respond to things posted for public consumption. Stories will be reviewed, blogs will be commented on, comments will be voted on.
It is no longer your thread. You are responsible for starting it, but after that, it became ours, yours and mine and everybody elses' who participated via comments or votes. The blog post belongs to you; the conversation it inspired does not.
4665069
Right. Which is why I wanted it to continue in here, where there was less commentary on Titanium Dragon, insinuations that it was still just a personal attack, actual personal attacks committed in my name for some fucking reason, people attributing those personal attacks to my intentions for the original blog even though I wasn't the one making them, and this thread is basically a cleaner, less hostile slate for that conversation to continue.
You know, the stuff that wasn't actually super relevant to that conversation, but was seriously impacting the tone of it.
There's two conversations going on; the one in the comments section, and the stuff I'm getting in PM and private. And I'm sorry that the stuff that's publicly facing looks as shitty and shady as it does.
4665078
I mean, it seems like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater by refusing to engage with any comments, rather than only engaging with the ones on the topic you're trying to discuss? Personally, I was really interested in where things were going with bookplayer's attempt to establish common ground for a productive discussion.
It's also possible to carry on a public conversation on its own merits, without involving private/out-of-band knowledge.
4665078
I don't think your problem would be niceness, but solid argumentative force. Sometimes you try to hit the ball so soft that it's hard to guess what you're aiming at...
Maybe you get confused in your focus too?
And people guess, and however innocent, it's hard to deal with misunderstandings if your skill focus is about being nice.
Skill at being nice is only damage control in arguments. Arguments are more about social intellect and charisma, and are very tricky in real time. Being nice is just applying a curve to what you say. Not the most important.
Sorry if I'm swinging on a presumption, but whatever. Maybe your mind is worrying about too many things at once? Learning is hard when your approach is steep.
4664497
Belatedly : Sure. I get all that. But then, I think, we look at it from different sides of the divide. You, and a shitton of my friends here, have aspirations to professional publishing, and this is in some sense practice for that. Great! That's fine, and I encourage it, and yea, reviewers being dicey is part of that.
But we have a lot of other users, like, say, teenagers who are sticking up their first thing ever with no idea of how many sharks are in the water. I wouldn't want to see them held to the same standards, and I think it'd be beneficial to everyone to allow people to, without stigma, be allowed to indicate how they desire criticism/reviews - hence why I like the idea of a simple flag during upload that lets you state 'I'd prefer reviews be handled like <Method>'
Then you have people like me; I don't really ever want to be published, I don't care much about appearing professional, I'm here to have fun and hopefully write things other people find enjoyable. I find all my stories fair game for reviewing, but there are certain users I honestly would prefer not engage in my comments if possible, because they tend to act like jerks when they do. In the end, I want to have fun, and I want to learn what others liked/didn't like so I can be better at making what I make fun for everyone, but I don't give a whit about making money off it because...well, we all know how hard it is to make it in that world, and I don't want to give up the economic security I have now in a field I also enjoy.
So it's...like, just, I guess, not all of us want the same set of standards and I think it's okay to allow people to indicate what niche they want to be in without judging them for it if they want to occupy a less rigorous ring.
4665935
Like I mentioned on MrNumber's other post, the "stigma" isn't about what you or I think, and it isn't about what the author wants, and it isn't about being nice or mean.
It's about what readers want to read. Period. Readers are going to hold everyone to the same standard, which is "do I want to read this?"
It's fair for readers to see a story where writers aren't striving to be professional, or don't have confidence in their work, and consider that a reason to skip it because it's less likely to be good than one where the author is striving to be professional and is confident in their work. Readers have limited time and a lot of potential stories. That's all the "stigma" is, and it's totally fair.
And there will be some individual stories that don't deserve it, just like there will be some stories that readers will decide not to read for other reasons that they really should read.
...that's actually one of the reasons we have reviewers.
As to making opting out a check box... sure. I mean, everyone's still going to see it, because reviewers would have to be able to see it, so it's basically a reminder to put Do Not Review or what have you, but it does the same thing.
But good luck getting Knighty to add something.
4665935
...what do you think this stigma is, other than readers passing them over?
What are any of us going to do other than not read their fics?
4666068
Well, we could frown disapprovingly from our ivory palaces. That's actually a thing some people care about, I think.
There are a couple things going on here: the "wanting readers" game and the "fimfiction politics" game. The stigma of choosing to not look professional does affect both of those things. I don't really care about the fimfiction politics game, because I think it's dumb and it doesn't have anything to do with becoming a better writer, but that doesn't mean people can't or don't play it. And I do definitely think that there's a fimfiction politics premium on seeming like a Serious Writer™—but that seems like it's largely a signaling exercise to me.
Point being, the stigma may be perfectly well calibrated for readership goals (i.e. people who want to read more professional work are appropriately incentivized to avoid work that comes with "I'm not trying to be professional" tagging). It's not necessarily well calibrated for the fimfiction politics game, because being a Serious Writer™ doesn't actually have any non-signaling political worth, but it does have signaling worth. So you'd lose political clout by opting out of reviews, because people value this Serious Writer image thing, which puts you in a bind when you want the image but you're not really trying to be a professional writer.
To be clear, I think signaling is a useful and valuable thing and I don't mean anything negative with this. I personally think playing for political points in online communities is dumb—but I know a lot of people love doing it, because I've been around the internet for 20 years, and it's been a fixture of basically every online community I've been part of in that time. I'm not 100% sure that Serious Writerliness is a signaling tactic for that goal here, but it's a little hard for me to imagine it wouldn't be, because the community seems to generally value people who express those intentions or project that aura. And I definitely think the stigma of indicating a preference to not be reviewed would cause people to lose some of their writerly cool factor, which would probably be something people would weigh in deciding whether or not to do it. "How will other people think of me if I express this preference?"
4666138
I'm trying to stay out of this as much as possible at this point, but I just want to add that I totally agree with the signalling point, and want to add that it also signals, regardless of anyone's intentions here, "The author doesn't believe this story stands up to scrutiny". I mean, why else would they advertise that, right?
And there are people who get very aggressive on the internet when they smell blood like that, unfortunately.
4665977
It's fair for readers to skip stories if they see it and go 'Person is being pretentious' and, certainly, that would occur in some cases. But...I'm not really concerned about those authors. I'm willing to let them get a pass if it lets new authors have a somewhat safer route to dipping their toes in the water. That's all. It may cost them some readership, but I'd wager the readers most likely to skip because 'Hi, not after external reviews' is flagged have considerable overlap with the readership that may well pounce on said author's mistakes in a less than constructive way.
I will caveat carefully and say 'Overlap', meaning that there will be plenty of people who would pass on it who would otherwise give constructive feedback, but right now the automatic judgement is 'Post positive comments only === Special snowflake' and part of it is because we don't have a mechanism in place to do so in an acceptable fashion.
Merely creating the option would begin normalizing it.
4666138
This is a lot of it, yea. Right now the two forms of signaling are tied up in one another, like, a lot. To signal unwillingness to participate in one signals the other, which is an issue to me.
I guess, to me, it's a question of 'How do you create a system that offers ideal incentives for as many people as possible?', because in a lot of cases the difference between success & failure can be as small as one incentive that is optimized or badly tweaked. Take Derpibooru's recent brief removal of downvoting. That saw a lot of backlash because the community lost the ability to see what the community thought of a work collectively. Upvotes without downvotes obscures a ton of information - is this popular because it's just universally liked, or because it's super controversial but everyone's seen it? Without the downvote, you don't know.
At the same time the existence of meaningful downvoting does incentivize some non-optimal behavior; a couple downvotes can plunge a story from 'Top 10' to 'Top 1000' for example, so a few malicious actors can easily fuck over a story's positioning on the popularity charts. Reducing the impact of downvoting would go a long way towards reducing the incentive to do so; I somewhat do feel that for every X upvotes a story gets, for example, one of its downvotes should stop counting for its ranking on the all-time charts to mitigate that effect somewhat. It wouldn't remove the utility of downvotes completely, but right now to my knowledge 2k upvotes 1 downvote is way more popular then 2k upvotes 10 downvotes, even though mathematically they each achieve a > 99.5% approval rating.
4666138
I think that’s a pretty obvious conflict of goals that an individual needs to resolve or rise above. Yes, Serious Writers have a bias against unprofessional things… that’s part of what makes them “serious.” If you care about impressing them, asking not to be reviewed will look bad if they find out you did it, whether you did it publicly or privately.
That said, Serious Writers also have a bias against mane six shipping, HiE, crackfics, fluff, sadfics, colored text, teenagers, and dozens of other things that people have managed to overcome to some extent or another in gaining reputation. So it’s not like that stigma is a death sentence, it just means you’re going to be starting with a people-taking-you-seriously-handicap because you’ve asked that reviewers not take you seriously. Which is more fair than some of those other things on the list.
4666154
I do actually agree with this, but I also think those people are more rare than we think, because they're going to be noticeable when they do show up. And that it takes a lot more than "don't like, don't read" to flag them down, so I don't think "Do not review" would do it by itself. I actually have an account for testing out not having follower things, and I'd be happy to test this if you'd like.
More likely, it would be one of a number of warning signs that would attract the sharks. Would that be the tipping point, or the spelling, or deleting comments, or the ponymaker OC cover art? I can't tell you, I’m not a person who looks for people to bully.
...my guess is that you’re better off destigmatizing ponymaker cover art and "tag salad" first, if you want to tackle that subject.
4666178
I think I went into a lot of what I had to say about this stuff above, but I did want to add that you need to keep in mind that 99% of the readers on the site are not here to leave constructive criticism, don’t troll, and don’t care about Serious vs. Unserious Writers. They just want a good story, and Knighty optimizes the site to try to provide them with one.
I remember discussions about whether we should be able to opt out of the feature box, which we both know can be a much bigger Kick Me sign than negative reviews or putting Do Not Review (not to mention several popular authors wanted to “give up their spot” back in the day.) Knighty has always refused, because the feature box is about helping the silent 99% find out what stories people are excited about, not getting attention for authors.
So even if a checkbox would normalize this behavior and help some (though I’m not sure it would,) it’s probably not going to matter to the masses except as a warning sign of a newbie author, and it might not be in line with Knighty's optimization goals at all.
4666264
If it doesn't matter at all to the masses, then it arguably doesn't hurt the optimization goals at all. It and the feature box bit aren't comparable especially since the option, as envisioned by me is a 'I would prefer <Thing>', so it's indication of preference, not hard rule.
4666360
The short and obvious answer here is to take it up with Knighty. I'm sure not going to complain if it happens.
The longer and more realistic answer is that it's not going to happen.
First, regarding the optimization, if Knighty is in this for the readers, why would he want to discourage reviewers who make it easier for people to find good fics without him having to code a line?
Second, as far as I can see he doesn't include anything on the story page that isn't directly related to telling people about the fic itself. I suspect that's an intentional design decision.
Third, it's something that authors can convey themselves in the description. You're asking him to do extra work for something he might easily feel people could do just as well themselves. ETA: yes,I understand the normalization argument, but I doubt its a strong enough stigma to overcome this in Knighty's mind.
Fourth, this isn't exactly something people are clamouring for. Right now there are maybe 50 users on the site who know about it and think it might be a good idea, including me. ETA 2: ...and probably 45 of those are people who never intend to use it.
And fifth, even if I was wrong about all of the above and Knighty was in love with the idea, I'm sure he'd get to it right after the new tagging system we've been waiting three years for.
4666396
For each:
1) Reviewers lack content without authors; if it's 'Upload under caveat' vs 'Not upload at all', #1 at least has something to read. Some currently might swap, yes, but there's other methods besides reviews to plug a thing.
2) Possibly, but some elements are functionality, etc; and arguably this does tell in part about the story
3) Yes, but normalization, yes.
4) It's a new idea that's < 1 week old, so unsurprising
5) Maybe so, but that's a reason to advocate now rather than in 3 years when the tagging system shows up
4666404
Knighty is not hard pressed for content. He's hard pressed for ways for people to find anything in the mess of content we have. Reviewers are more useful to him than even the most popular writers in that regard.
You want to argue that? I'm curious, because the only thing I can think of that it tells you is that the author is not confident in it, which is not something a content aggregator really wants to encourage them advertising.
Hey, go for it, girl. It's all you.