Feedback vs. "Feedback" · 4:40pm Mar 20th, 2018
Let's talk about feedback, something we can never get enough of. Sometimes.
This is actually the good kind. I'll explain.
I like to write stories with ponies in them. I also like to write on specific thematic content:
psychological mindclop
moral ambiguity
extremely disturbing
vaguely sexual
Lately some of my stories have been getting low scores, but it isn't because my writing is getting worse (I don't think). It's at least in part because I'm taking more risks with the boundaries of my content. Most of my stories have good ratings, but three recent ones fall far below all the rest:
Pictures of Me
Innocence, Equestria
Storytime with Carrot Cuck
The first two are my two most recent stories, actually (I posted Pictures of Me just yesterday). I have another story I'm working on right now that's of a similar vein to Innocence, Equestria, in that it's a highly sexualized T-rated story, so I don't have high hopes for its rating.
That said, the point of this post is to bitch about how the feedback of a downvote is the poorest-quality feedback you can receive. Fimfiction's system allows you to downvote stories without reading them, so it's impossible to say whether a downvote comes from somepony who was offended by the idea of the story, or somepony who actually didn't like the execution.
In particular, I don't have very much in the way of negative comment feedback on any of those three stories, so I'm left wondering if there are fatal flaws and the readers are the ones doing most of the downvotes, or if it's just resistance to the potential content that are forcing downhoof clicks.
As an author, you just can't know. Even saying "I hate this story" and nothing more is useful feedback by comparison.
The popularity and rsting of a story is not, and has never been, about the quality. It's frustrating, but a fact of the website. It sucks
4821018
Hear hear.
For the longest time I've been thinking any vote should only be possible with a reason. Even if it's just one small sentence. Then you could get a sense if they're genuine, useful, or full of crap. On the other hand, you might not get any votes then at all. So many people don't have the time or the nerves to write anything.
My personal favorite, in terms of feedback, is getting a notification that someone added a story to a bookshelf named 'shitcanned for lgbt bullshit' when I get downvoted. At least then I know I've offended someone who deserved it.
I think someone proposed, like in 2013-14 for knighty to either:
1) Allow story rating only after a comment is placed; or,
2) Allow a ‘Critique’ feature to run concurrent with comments. But only people who leave a critique would be able to rate a story.
I don’t think it’s going anywhere, but I digress.
4821018
There's definitely a correlation, though. If you write very well, even if the topic offends ponies you're not going to get more downvotes than upvotes. There may be a rare exception but most of the upvote/downvote ratio is legit. The problem is that you never know how much you're off by, so if you rely on it to determine quality it will mislead you more often than not.
Amen to that, my friend. Even if those topics aren't entirely my cup of tea, it's not couth to moral-downvote on impulse.
Hmm. You raise a good point about the issue of drive by voting.
I'm not sure what the best way would be to deter it, though. You can't really prove if someone has read a story or not (and in the case of truly terrible stories, that would be downright mean). Maybe just put the vote buttons at the end of the story?
At the same time, if we set the response bar too high, I worry that it might result in stories get stuck in a sort of unranked limbo.
That said, when people really like a story, I often see "not being able to upvote a story more than once" complaints. It's flippant, but on reflection, there may actually be something there.
What about a system where commenting on a story gave you get a second vote?
4821045
I would be happy with just removing the option to vote on a story from its title page.
An even better system would weigh downvotes by how many downvotes/upvotes the voter had made.
Honestly non-voting readers have always been more of a problem for me.
4821103
To be honest, I'd prefer to be able to rate by chapter, that way one would have to at least skim through to the bottom of the work, and might just find something of interest along the way.
Reddit has this same problem. People just downvote stuff they disagree with. It's an unfortunate limitation to voting-based systems.
4821142
Like a user-ranked system? Such as the one on Newgrounds.com, for instance?
It's a multifaceted problem. I self-select out of a lot of stuff where I might get hung up on separating the story's overall quality from enjoyment of the the subject matter. The Writeoffs have been a good exploration of not doing that for me, leading to some interesting finds that I might not have chosen otherwise.
But in Writeoffs I feel like the focus is generally much more on critiquing the writing and delivery rather than on enjoyment per se. The question of what is the "best" story is very different to me than whether I "like" a given story (except for those happy occasions when they line up).
All this rambling probably goes to say that not every reader applies this level of thought to how they might rate (or vote on) stories. But it's also hard to be sure. Maybe it'd be nice if instead of a single downvote button it was a dropdown with some canned options like, "The quality of writing is technically rough," or "I didn't feel the plot had a satisfying resolution," or whatever. You still might get people who select unhelpful or inaccurate options relative to their actual beef with the story, but maybe it would at least make people stop and think, and give authors some kind of information.
4821280 How does that system work?
4821230 I've looked into the user rating problem. It's a tough problem, but there are at least 4 categories of solution:
The first 2 approaches, esp. the second, produce echo chambers, where people are steered towards the kind of thing they've already express a liking for. The last 2 try to produce objective ratings (each user sees the same rating for any given story).
There may be a way to use blockchain, but I'm unfamiliar with its reputation algorithm.
Well, I never did consider the up/down voting to be feedback to the author. That's what comments are for. I considered votes a way to recommend stories to other (potential) readers.
4821161
The issue with rating by chapter would be that would incentivize unnecessary chapter splitting to garner more votes.
4821363
So the general idea is you just filter out people who always downvote certain tags? That sounds pretty interesting. I wonder if it'd word well in practice though.
4821666 No--tags turn out to be surprisingly useless in recommendation systems. The reason is that a good machine learning system will make its own tags from the data, and its "tags" will almost always be more useful categories than the ones devised by humans. (That's a surprising statement, which overturns most of Western philosophy if you think about it deeply, but it's factually true.)
There's no general idea--each of the 4 approaches I listed is a different general idea. The only thing they have in common is presuming that each user rates a story with a single number (or upvote / downvote).
4821363
It’s like this: the more the user engage with the website (ranking animations/games, posting on forums, etc.), the more experience points (really) he gets. The more leveled up the user, the stronger its voting power in ranking said animations/games.
4821712
That's good for the website, but it makes the frequent-user problem worse instead of better. That's the problem that frequent users already have more weight on ratings, because they rate lots of things, so most of the ratings on an item are by frequent users. Sometimes the "typical" frequent user has a different taste. On fimfiction, the story read stats indicate that clop readers on average each read more stories than people who don't read clop, for instance.
4821711
I guess I don't understand what the "data" is if not the tags?
4823695 Just user ratings of stories.
4823699
Yeah but what distinguishes one story from another I guess is what I'm confused about, if not tags.