Thumbs? Ponies Don’t Have Thumbs! · 1:33am Jan 29th, 2018
Earlier today, as in between three and four AM, I posted my new story An Occurrence. My first action after doing so was to attempt to add it to the TCB Submissions folder, but I noticed I couldn’t because it wasn’t yet “published”, which I guess means that the site wasn’t finished processing it, so I come back twenty minutes later and find that my story has a thumbs-down vote on it. I did a double take. I’m not used to anything I post being read until days or weeks after I post it, but curious enough is that this one was no exception: the view count on the story still read zero, meaning that someone voted on the story without ever reading it.
Well, I’m not one for taking dislikes personally, but I do take offense to the ability of users to downvote a story without so much as clicking on the story to at least pretend that they have read it. But I’ve come back to FF after about ten to twelve hours and what I find is really upsetting. Right now, this story has 88 views, 2 thumbs-ups, 3 thumbs downs, and 4 favorites. Anyone can see the views, thumbs-ups, and thumbs-down, but there is no counter for favorites, so the only reason that I have this information is that it I get a notification – a notification that does not stay.
Take a moment to think about this, what does an artist really care about? Does an artist care about the anonymous public approval or disapproval of a story? No, because an artist knows that he or she is not going to please everyone, and that doesn’t matter, because thumbs-up or thumbs-down the story doesn’t stay with the person voting. But… for an artist to know that a user has favorited his or her story – to put this work of art in an easy to reach shelf when he or she can read it again and again, that act moves an artist. The problem is that as time goes on, it is easy to forget what is not numbered in favor of what is.
The problem with FimFiction is that it is popular enough to attract petty individuals, who have tens to hundreds of puppet accounts all for the purpose of upvoting their own stories and downvoting stories of authors whom they don’t like… And why is that? Well, any reader on this site is likely to be swayed into reading one story over another based on the number of likes and dislikes it has. If a story that’s a hour old has two hundred likes and four dislikes, the average reader is likely to read that story rather than the story that is an hour old and has two likes and dislikes, even if the description to that story is slightly more appealing than the one with the massive thumbs-ups, and unfortunately, this works even more effectively for petty users wanting to drive a user off of the site by down voting all of that user’s stories so that potential new readers will recoil in horror at how so many people could dislike a story. In most cases the people doing this don’t have a problem with the author’s stories themselves, but want to be spiteful because the author has view points about something that sometimes has nothing to do with My Little Pony at all.
The fix to this horrible horrible mess is to remove this thumb system completely. The oldest story archive I know is also the least dramatic because the only opinion system it shows are the favorites a story has. The only way you can know a user is dissatisfied with a story is by opening the story and reading the comments at the bottom. There is a little bit of a ranking system still, but unlike the thumbs system, it is completely positive: when a user favorites a story, the user can give it one to five stars. When a user goes to check his or her favorites, the user can choose to arrange favorites by number of stars that he or she give the stories, but this is not a like/dislike system; if a user gives a story one star, that story still appears in their favorites folder for fast retrieval to be read again as any favorite would. Stories can be made to list the number of stars, so it is theoretically possible to find the number one most favorited, possibly beloved, story on the site, but it is not possible to find the most disliked story, because the designers of the site did not want to draw attention to disliked stories nor did they want to help create a pariah.
I tend to believe that the only reason websites today have things like the thumb system is because other giant sites like facebook use it, so designers put it in their code without ever understanding why the big sites use it. For facebook, the answer is simple. Many people think that facebook is a “social media site” where the purpose is to come together and share experiences, but actually, facebook was started as a major corporation site, inviting big business long before it opened to the public, and why? To use the website as advertising and market data gathering. On the right side of the page, facebook has ads that you can choose to like or dislike, and algorithms are used to evaluate if a user’s post is speaking positively or negatively toward a product. No, they don’t make you talk about products, but if you do, they are listening. The upvotes and downvotes toward these products and trends tells facebook and their investors whether Bob’s Generic Coffee Filters are selling better or worse than Not-Bob’s Generic Coffee Filters. The whole thing revolves around competition and popularity all for the sake of greedy ruthless capitalism.
As one person said, “If you are not paying for a product, then you are the product.” It is no secret that FimFiction is making money from the ads used on this site, but FimFiction cannot make money puppet accounts because the ads track the user’s IP addresses, and even though most puppet accounts will be using proxy servers, the first thing all advertising companies do are blacklist all known proxy servers so that their clients, such as FimFiction, cannot create their own puppet accounts to cheat the system. Of course, the puppet accounts do still drain resources from FimFiction, and that is why, you would think that FimFiction would be interested in preventing any benefit from having a puppet account.
Once again, I ask that the administrators of FimFiction to remove this vile voting system and replace it with a favorite counter that will encourage authors to post their works here by giving them positive affirmation of their skill without fear of aimless and reputation damaging judgment.
[I think I understand what this post is trying to say ...]
but I have slightly different point - ponies of course don't have thumbs, yet they have (very canonical {and cute} <and informative!> ) ears .. therefore .....
https://tabun.everypony.ru/blog/rough-blog/167689.html#cut - I hope pictures still works without russian language knowledge ..?
Yes, one can easily notice facebook and few other sites (vk.com for example) moved to more fine-grained 'reaction/emotion iconsets' too ... May be if Fimfiction about to stay - at some point it will be upgraded in this area of emotional feedback too?