In Despair of the Feature Box · 4:31pm Dec 26th, 2017
A fine and belated merry Christmas to you all, my good ladies and gentlemen. May you be well fed, well watered, and preferably somewhere nice and cosy.
In spite of my above sentiments, however, my own levels of merryness have taken a bit of a beating of late. You see, I keep looking at the feature box, and it keeps reminding me what a hopeless clusterf**k it is.
On the plus side, I now have two fics I feel moved to Rage Review. Those reviews will appear in the next week or so, in accordance with group rules. Sadly, they are too recent for me to post reviews now. I will leave the task of figuring out which fics these shall be as an exercise to you, my good ladies and gentlemen.
Until then, let's talk about the feature box. Fuck me, the feature box.
I'm looking at it right now. We have:
Some inoffensive looking Slice of Life fics. These I have little issue with. I may or may not read them.
Several crossovers. Their quality is suspect at best, by the looks of it, but they're hardly anything too unusual.
The usual Equestria girls fics. May or may not be cute.
And finally, an utterly wretched reminder that this site is friendly and welcoming to material which barely does enough to legally distinguish itself from actual child porn.
On top of that, our beloved feature box was recently host to not one, but three Anon fics. They were garbage. I know it. The readers know it. The author of the three knows it. And yet there they were, taking up three slots which could have highlighted something remotely worthwhile.
Does the feature box have a real role to play these days? Or is it just a convenient way of seeing what's popular in the world of trashfics and (low quality) pornography at that given point? What sort of detritus have you seen lurking within? And what, if anything, can be done to fix it.
I leave the floor to you, my good ladies and gentlemen. For interested parties, the Rage thread is here.
Remind me to never piss you off.
The Feature box is and always has been nothing but a popularity contest. It is extremely rare I have ever seen anything worth reading show up there.
Hitting the feature box is typically a combination of already having a lot of followers, hitting whatever is the current hot topic/genre/story device, and/or having a sufficiently titillating premise and description. We're-pretending-it's-not-child-porn, aka "foalcon", is a sure-fire guarantee to hit the box at least briefly, as is just about anything with a Sex tag. They may not stick around in the box as long as other types of stories, but they'll at least hit it long enough to be noticed.
I feel like a lot of drama could be avoided if Knighty just renamed it to "Popular Stories" (which I guess means that other box would have to be renamed "More popular stories") or "So Hot Right Now". Because calling them "Featured" implies something more than popularity -- that these are supposed to be the best the fandom has to offer.
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What could the feature box be other than a popularity contest? How could it be populated in a way that didn't favour the lowest common denominator?
That's not rhetorical. If there's a real suggestion for how it could be made better, we can take it to Knighty.
It can't be through moderator blessing. There simply isn't the time for human beings to do that. It has to be some combination of views, upvotes and downvotes over time. You could factor in something of existing reputation, but that's unfair to talented new authors, and they're what keep the site alive. You could bias by tags, but that's asking people to game the system by choosing the wrong tags.
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The feature box in general is just kind of pointless without actual human curation. There are already boxes for Popular Stories, New Stories, and Latest Updates. The feature box is basically just the popularity contest/LCD version of the Popular Stories queue. The site would not be any worse off if it disappeared entirely. If something is needed, then a human curated list from a group like Seattle's Angels or Royal Canterlot Archives would be preferable. Seattle's Angels Reviews show up in the News box already, so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to port them over to something like a curated feature box. That way, stories that do deserve to be featured would be more likely to show up there, and would stick around long enough for people to actually see them.
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Honestly, I think it’s a complete pipe dream to make a Feature box that’s both (1) indicative of actual quality rather than popularity, and (2) chosen by algorithms rather than human beings. If you want a “Quality Fics” box, then bite the bullet and get a bunch of humans to curate it. If you’re married to the idea of algorithmically chosen fics, then it’s going to be a popularity contest, and you need to own up to that fact.
You know, when I managed to get a story in the Featured Box, I was actually proud. Granted, it was at the bottom of it and it only lasted a couple of hours tops. But at the moment, it felt like an achievement. Now I look at it and it feels shameful.