5926433

I much prefer when RCL finds unheralded authors.

The feature posted on our website yesterday is for an author with 139 followers. The feature crossposted to FIMFiction yesterday is for an author with 19 followers. I think we've only featured about 10 of the site's top 36 authors by follower count (the first page of search results). Although our stated goals don't explicitly include underappreciated author promotion, we do our darndest to bring attention to them and read/nominate stories from lesser known voices -- because it's a service both to readers and authors to broaden the community base.

That said, I don't agree with your assertion that the contest failed in its goals.

You quoted my comment from 5897513 about this not being a popularity contest, but skipped over the part where I noted we wanted this to be a democratic process despite the warts of direct democracy. All along, this was about getting readers involved. Yes, you're right that authors with ~100 followers faced an immense uphill battle compared to those with 1000+ followers. However, the need to "correct the record" is also weighted toward the more popular authors for two major reasons: 1) authors with huge follower counts (and an RCL feature) statistically have written more stories; and 2) readers will have more opinions on more well-known authors. When we get complaints about having featured the wrong story, we hear 10x more complaints like "You featured Bookplayer but the feature wasn't a romance?!" or "You featured Aragon for a non-comedy?!" than we do for authors like Casca. (And, yes, lots of complaints about SS&E's feature being for a co-written fic. The popularity angle aside, it's very hard to argue that that nomination was misguided.)

We are gatekeepers, and that means one of our main jobs is to ignore popularity and present stories based on our best judgment. But another of our jobs is to engage readers -- and a contest full of pre-selected, pre-vetted obscure works doesn't do that as well as what we did here. (Not to mention the problem 5926413 points out about using us as a first-pass filter.) And you know what? Looking at the nominations and the voting on the thread, I think that part of the contest did exactly what it was designed to do. It warms my heart to see posts like 5926340: Even if they have strong opinions on one particular story, they dug into the nominee backbench, shaped the other winners, and got some great story recommendations along the way. That's quality reader engagement.

And 5926016 beat me to the point about follower count numbers. If you order RCL-inducted authors by follower count, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places in this contest went to ... 1st, 13th, and 14th. Half the top 10 weren't seriously in the running; the other half weren't even nominated. What that tells me is that the public has a point: we were mistreating some, but not all, popular authors with our previous features, and now we're going to get to fix that.

if this was a popularity contest, why did our other winners come from outside the top 10? Why did fourth place go to an author with less than 1000 followers?

We should keep the dialogue about refeaturing going now that the contest is over -- clearly there's interest in re-spotlighting lesser known authors as well. This contest couldn't be all things to all people, and there are certainly problems that our approach couldn't address, but for what it did, I think the result justified our faith in the process.

cc: 5926418 5927164

Incidentally -- I just confirmed with SS&E that he is declining the refeature. (We were first contacted about that before Pasco's post, so this thread had no apparent bearing on the decision.) So our third refeature will go to fourth place, HoofBitingActionOverload's "Spring is Dumb" (5895696) (pending acceptance).

(I want to stress that I am NOT bringing this up in the context of the discussion above -- the author decision has no bearing on the voting results -- but it is definitely relevant to the contest as a whole.)

5927539 I also probably could have told anybody that SS&E would decline the refeature, haha.

5927529

Cheers for the cc to this. Sorry, I should clarify, because my previous comment didn't make this clear; I meant it when I said my grievances were addressed. When I said I had problems, I mean I had problems, with a more emphatic past tense.

5927529 I never did read this reply, but now that I was looking for something else (and this ended up not being the right place to look for it anyway), I glanced over it.

For someone who likes statistics, I don't know why you're trying to make them follow the most rigorous outcome possible. No, the vote totals weren't going to fall right in order of follower count, but there's still going to be a very heavy bias leaning toward those people. Half the authors nominated are in the top 100 most-followed authors, plus a little. (At the time, the median follower rank of nominated authors was actually 116th.)

if this was a popularity contest, why did our other winners come from outside the top 10?

Because not all the top 10 are RCL-inducted or are actually authors or were nominated? Because of the other point I made about still actively publishing stories? If you haven't posted anything recently, people don't know who you are, and it's harder to get support. Like The Descendant. He's 7th in follower count, but he hasn't posted anything in almost 3 years. And he's the only other person in the top 10 who was nominated, so it'd be impossible for all 3 winners to come from the top 10, wouldn't it? Or because the author's original inducted story is already indicative of their style (I'd say this is true of Lucky Dreams and likely true of The Descendant, among others). But again, implying I must be wrong unless the stats fall in line perfectly isn't illustrative. Statistics don't work that way.

Why did fourth place go to an author with less than 1000 followers?

Because he's still someone who's posted a lot until pretty recently? Because it's not easy to get 1000 followers, so making an arbitrary cutoff at 1000 is disingenuous? Because he's still 254th in follower count, which is no small potatoes and well within the top 0.5% of site users?

I'll use Casca as my example again. 134 followers, which ranks 2778th. He had absolutely zero chance. There were 34 nominations, with Titanium Dragon making 8 of them and Ice Star 4, so there wasn't even a very good cross-section. I have to think most of the voters were uninformed, too. For 28 authors, a fully qualified voter should have read enough of every one of them to know what their style is and whether the nominated story is a better match. Not just to say they've read a bunch of skirts' stiff and agree "Austraeoh" is a better fit, but that it's a better fit for him than any of the other 33 nominated stories are for their respective authors. It's the constant struggle of third-party candidates. They may well be a better choice, but nobody knows who they are, so they confine their votes to what they know.