A New Year · 11:53pm Jan 1st, 2019
I had to pull out of the Sparity contest, sadly. Lots of info follows.
I'm not losing my mind at all!
First, our largest party of the year 
is January 12th. Here's a link to details.
As for me?
I've been sick the past two weeks. I'm finally better today, which I know because the myofascial pain in my teeth returned. My pain disorder disappears when I'm sick. If only there were a way to confuse my trigeminal nerve into thinking I was sick all the time, I'd be cured and off the horribly disabling narcotics I take.
I barely made my Jinglemas entry in time, but the Sparity contest entry remains incomplete. I love the idea behind it, however, and aim to finish it eventually.
The slightly worse problem than the illness and pain disorder is that my depression has returned. Things tanked on the 21st of December, two months after my last ketamine treatment. This matches my previous experience with ketamine. I'd hoped it would last longer this time because the treatment was spread across six weeks, but alas.
I'm still better off than I was before (for now), but I'll need to let the doctors know things have slipped so I can get in the queue for experimental treatments.
Anyway, between illness and depression I haven't gotten much done over Winter break. My motivation to write and work is crap right now. I don't know what to expect next from me in terms of my writing, but there are several unfinished projects in the works, and I still need to finish off Twilight's Secret Journal and Geldings.
My resolution for the new year is to magically rid myself of the two things that have pretty much stolen fifteen years of my life: the pain disorder with the narcotics it necessitates, and the clinical depression. I just don't know how to go about doing that, so maybe I'll resolve to start wearing makeup again instead.
Oh, one last thing. I almost always get one downhoof the moment I post a story, whether or not the story is controversial. It just happened with my Jinglemas entry. I'm insatiably curious about why this happens. Is it somepony trying to improve their odds at getting featured by downvoting everypony else the moment they appear? Is it a follower who immediately downvotes everything I post? It's bizarre that the only downhoof appears right when the story breaks, before anypony's had a chance to read the thing.
I'm relying less and less on story votes as a measure of story quality, though. I've seen terrible stories with no downhooves and hundreds of uphooves, and the occasional story with more downhooves than uphooves that's actually worth reading. I almost wish there were a "top critics rating" feature like there is on Rotten Tomatoes. Have a separate voting mark that only counts readers who read the story and have proven they have some level of maturity. I doubt Knighty would consider implementing it, though.
Hope you feel better!
4989557
Thanks. You too (re: your recent blogs).
Bloody depression. Kill it with fire.
A while ago I wrote a browser plug-in to hide votes across the whole site, because I was finding all the vote abuse tiresome. I wonder if the current generation of Fimfiction userscripts has something like that.
Ooooh that's an excellent idea! I would really love to see that. If properly integrated it'd be a great community feature too.
Either someone out there is creepily dedicated to hating you, or there's a bot.
4989583
Well, it could just be random luck.
Still, it'd be nice to be able to see who downhoofed you. If you're going to vote somepony down you should sign your name to that shit.
It's a downvote bot from dummy alt account.
4989609
Depends on how often it happens. Once is bad luck, two is coincidence. Three? Three's a pattern.
4989623
Hmm. That sounds a little crazy.
I don't think anypony would go to the trouble of writing something that complicated to downhoof even my stories. I'm not even sure it's possible to do something like that, and the mods here would probably detect something fishy going on.
It doesn't bother me, either way. I'm just curious about it. Again, it's probably just weird luck.
I get this too.
:( Good luck with the illness and depression.
As a reader, I basically find upvotes/downvotes to be meaningless since they are anonymous. What I really want to know is, "Do people in the target audience like the story or not?" The upvote/downvote system doesn't work for that since there's no way to distinguish between "I like this type of content but the execution is bad" and "I don't like this type of content."
4989623 There are scripts templates out there that a child could slap together. Woudln't take more than a couple of hours and the pay off works. This thing wouldn't raise a flag. Also, the mods are out numbered by a lot of users. Assholes with petty grudes means you're doing something right: Rustling the jimmies. Not like you're in their face. They can't ignore and walk away from it.
I'm just saying you're not doing anything wrong by writing your stories.
4989609
Been playing a lot of Stellaris and listening to Vitas.
That teeth thing sounds yucky. I've had tendonitis in my wrist for the past two years. Chronic pain sucks.
And how exactly would that be checked? Would they have to take an exam? Because the things we can actually measure, like follower count or amount of stories are not exactly a sign of maturity...
4989951
Maybe have it count only authors who have the ability to bypass the approval queue.
4989970
It's currently anyone who'd ever posted a story and had it approved. That's not much better than the general vote.
4989989
It isn't. Some users aren't permitted to use the auto-approval process because they've shown they can't write stories according to the rules.
Even limiting it just to authors would be an improvement, though. I don't want to replace the rating, just have a separate one.
4990013
I only know Evictus got that treatment, though I suspect he's not the only one. Still, the fact that someone can write stories competently enough to get auto-approval doesn't necessarily indicate their maturity.
4990024
I agree, but an imperfect filter might be much better than none.
4990087
I'm not sure if it's an imperfect filter. I feel it's hardly a filter in the first place. I had insightful comments from people with no stories at all and pretty nonsense ones spouted by, one would think, experienced users. My hypothesis is that there'd be no statistical differences between the upvote/downvote ratio between those groups.
I have to admit I get my mind blown a bit each time you mention you're writing your awesome stories while having all these things. I mean how badass is that?! And stories seem to be only a part of cool things you do that I'm exposed to.
4990419
Heh, you're too sweet.
I really don't do much unfortunately. I slowly write stories and I teach at university. Before the crippling issues I deal with, I was able to do a whole lot more with my life than this. But maybe someday I'll break the cycle.
4990553
Still, significantly more than I do
And still, that's definitely something to have preference for.
I think the upvotes / downvotes barely work at all. Consider that a number of excellent works of art were completely flunked even by accomplished critics when they came out. As feedback, for me the comments are much more important. An upvote or a downvote don't tell me what i did right, or what i did wrong. A discussion in the comments can help me discover new aspects about what i've written.
As far as finding decent stories goes, checking friends favourites seems like a usable idea to me. That's how i found Mission of Mercy, then because i found it intriguing scrolled through your other stories to see if there were others that i might like (a number of them have content / subject matters that i don't really want to read about, which is no judgment about their quality but unsurprisingly i'll steer clear of them nonetheless).
Buster Knutt not very long ago wrote a tutorial on how to get featured on FimFiction (not sure if he deliberately left out one of the key aspects: choosing good clickbait cover art). If traffic and upvotes, which determine what gets featured, are appropriate criteria to determine the quality of a story then here is a guide on how to create masterpieces.
It's interesting, though, that a large quantity of the downvotes my stories got were on the first day as well. Might indeed be a bot. Also possible that there's some people who just randomly open whatever stories appear under "Recently Published", then get upset because the content is not what they were looking for, while those who get to your stories when they have been out for a while are probably already aware of the tags (and perhaps also able to read the synopsis?).
Good luck with your health problems. Perhaps the "magic" necessary to rid yourself from them might just be a new treatment ... while it is incredibly frustrating to wait, there is constant progress in all fields of medicine. So here's hoping someone cooks up a solution that rids you of your problems.