• Member Since 12th May, 2013
  • offline last seen 6 hours ago

Kris Overstreet


Convention vendor, compulsive writer. I have a Patreon for monthly bills and a KoFi for tips.

More Blog Posts512

  • 1 week
    Not back to KSP yet, but I did do some space stuff.

    I haven't touched KSP since my early experience with KSP2 was a combination of glitchy game and impossible-to-read UI. I've been thinking about it here and there, but I've had other things to do.

    But that doesn't mean I'm not doing space stuff, and yesterday I finally edited and posted a video of such.

    Read More

    9 comments · 273 views
  • 3 weeks
    My muse is nagging me.

    I've done very little writing the past five months, partly due to being busy, but mostly due to recurring headaches when it's writing time.

    I have a couple weeks off, and I'm going to try to make time to get back on my projects (the Octavia story and novelizing Peter is the Wolf). But my mind... well... it's trying to jump ahead, or possibly back.

    Read More

    7 comments · 202 views
  • 4 weeks
    Life imitates art...

    So, a privately built and operated space probe became the first US lander to soft-land on the Moon last week- Odysseus.

    Read More

    16 comments · 618 views
  • 7 weeks
    Meta-Somethingorother

    "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
    --- probably not Mark Twain

    Read More

    6 comments · 443 views
  • 9 weeks
    Extreme Nitpicky Trivia Help Wanted

    I've finally begun work on that story I promised.

    I need a bit of info for a minor touch, though:

    Does anybody know if, through the entirety of MLP:FiM, any month in the Julian/Gregorian calendar has been named by any character in any episode whatever?

    I'm prepared to make up month names, but if they use the same ones we do I won't bother.

    12 comments · 496 views
Feb
19th
2018

On broken algorithms and ego-boos. · 4:30am Feb 19th, 2018

I've been eyeing the "rating" ranking on Changeling Space Program recently.

This morning it was the 13th most popular fic on FimFiction... going by a ratio of up-votes to down-votes.

I'll repeat that: #13 on the list of most popular fics.

The thing is, it was also the only one in the top fifty or so with a three-digit up-vote count. It was that high because only three people had ever down-voted it.

Well, while I was driving home today, it got its fourth down-vote. It's now ranked #114. Which is more reasonable...

... but, y'know, it was nice to be #13. I could make a list of all the super-popular fics I was technically ranked higher than.

But, on the other hand, it wasn't so much through merit as because CSP's theme kind of self-selects for fans. People uninterested in spaceflight comedy aren't going to even click on a link to CSP, and so they're not going to bother to downvote it. The Maretian and Orderly Transfer of Power are lower ranked because one updates every day and the other had a premise that got it a lot of immediate attention, which included a more realistic number of down-votes with it.

So yeah, the temporary high ranking was a bug, not a feature.

And yet... I'm still flattered as hell.

Comments ( 19 )

Nice man! Or girl, but nice!

The downvotes have immense power to push a story down the rankings. I think I've had about eight fics loiters in the top ten for a while before one or two clicks slammed them down several pages. (checks) I've got two on the top page now, which is a little above average. Keepers of Discord is back on top now and well deserving of the praise, but I expect that page to churn around several times a day for the next... ever.

"So yeah, the temporary high ranking was a bug, not a feature."

I appreciate your pun :)

The rating system is severely flawed, but it's unlikely to change any time soon. A nice fix would be to artificially add ~10 upvotes and ~10 downvotes to everything in the calculation so that a single downvote / upvote doesn't have so much weight, but that's mostly a pipe dream.

To me it doesn't matter if its #1 or #1000, you are a very good author and you write very entertaining horse words!

Speaking of CSP, what are the odds of getting an update in the next couple months?

So yeah, the temporary high ranking was a bug

Well it is a story about changelings, after all. Bugs are to be expected.

4800294
Well, plus, the way the system is rated now, after the most recent change, you actually need some number of downvotes, it seems, in order to rank higher. Two fics with an equal number of upvotes, but one difference in the downvote will see the one with the higher number of downvotes rated much higher with a high upvote to downvote ratio. I had a story that climbed very high in the rankings ... and then the update happened and it dropped like a rock because it had almost no downvotes.

I mean, I get the mentality behind it (no story is perfect, so unless there are bad-reviews/downvotes it can't be a good story) but I don't agree with it, because it introduces what I see as a fairly artificial gating to the system. I suppose it could be seen as a way of mitigating troll downvotes on those sorry sods who browse through "top all time" and downvote for giggles, but it's one that carries a heavy downside too.

Kind of a weird system either way.

I have to wonder if there's someone playing whack-a-mole with highly ranked stories.

KSP is a very popular game with an insane good review ratios on Steam. Old school changelings are kind of popular and people look for them. Plus this fic lacks any “instant downvote” typical cliches among the fans. (Really, some people downvote if it’s labeled ‘human in Equestria’ or ‘Anonimous’ or a number of other tags... Concept that I don’t agree with, because what I might not like, other people might enjoy, so I hardly ever (if ever) I do downvote). In addition is well written and in character, which people tend to love.
That being said, I believe this fic is kind of the perfect storm to get upvote ratios to skyrocket.

Does anyone know what the algorithm actually is, or does Knighty keep it secret?

I would say it's a bug it's not higher.

It's just one of those things where you gotta shrug your shoulders and say "eh...I'll still take it." :pinkiehappy:

I always get a little wistful when everyone talks about their brief stints on top of the rankings. I've never gone the first few days of a new story release without picking up a handful of downvotes; it's pretty much numerically impossible for me to ever get within striking distance of the top 100 unless I write the next My Little Dashie and have the early haters washed out through sheer numbers. My highest ranking story is currently about #700 and has never been better than ~500.

Congratulations, though! A lovely, if fleeting, feeling, and I'm happy you got to have it. :twilightsmile:

4800380
I'm really dubious of the claim that there are some downvotes which raise a story in the rankings. For one thing, your story list sorted by rating is topped by a 311/1 story, and if early downvotes were positive then you should be able to downvote it positively; I experimentally downvoted it and refreshed and it immediately dropped four places to sit just beneath the 315/2 (and, obviously, then I removed the downvote again).

The algorithm isn't quite linear, which might be what throws off your mental math. If you have a 200/1 story and a 400/2 story, the 400/2 is actually WAY higher ranked — but that's not because of the extra downvote, it's because there's a sort of logarithmic effect to accumulating twice as many votes which more than outweighs the additional downvote. I think 400/2 even beats 300/1, but that doesn't stop 400/1 from beating them both.

Mathematically, the ranking is based on the lower end of the 95% confidence interval of the story's "true" score relative to its current vote totals. (This is also why you can meaningfully rank stories with zero downvotes alongside the others — you're basically calculating the chance that the next vote will be up instead of down, and calculating the confidence interval keeps you from dividing by zero.) When you have more votes, you've sampled more of the population, so your confidence interval tightens; basically there's less chance of your hypothetical next voter being a random hater who wasn't represented by previous statistics.

If you can show me any example, anywhere, of downvoting a story only to see its ranking raise, I'll be very interested to investigate what's going on. But I can't even picture the equation which positively weights some downvotes but not others.

4800921
It might be that they've changed it again since I tested this, as that was over a year ago and right after the big site revamp when Knighty let everyone know that the system was changing but wouldn't specify how. Crud, it might have even been a bug under the new system (I know that there were about two weeks worth of kinks when everything bounced for a while). I tested this one after that, but it was still a weird finding. Clearly it's no longer the case, which is good. I thought it was a terrible way of doing it.

It's still quite different in a lot of rankings than it was two years ago, and I have no idea if that's good or bad. Knighty is understandably quiet about the rating system. There are still some strange oddities out there, though if its calculated as a logarithm, that could explain it, because logs get screwy fast when graphed with just the tiniest wobble.

4800558 Fimfiction uses a Wilson Score system, that is then further modified by a custom "heat" system to calculate feature-boxness (yes, I just made that word up, deal with it).

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