3968066

Now see, the problem that I have with this logic is that you are giving the opinion of people who understood the subtlety of a story a higher degree of "correctness" than those who didn't. You are saying that the scores given by the people who "got it" are the right scores, and the scores of those who didn't are therefore considered error and must be compensated for. This is highly unfair, though. Even if the people who didn't pick up on the subtlety gave the story a lower score on average, their votes still matter because they give a score based on a separate perspective. Such a score is entirely relevant, and considering it an error that needs to be remedied strikes me as a form of baseless censorship.

1] If the subtlety is too subtle, then it is the author's fault that most of the readers didn't pick up on it. Like horizon said, there is a fine line between subtlety being missed because it was too deep for the reader and being missed because it was poorly communicated. That said, I do understand that it's impossible to expect that all readers will pick up on 100% of the deeper meaning of a story regardless of how masterful it is written. There is a point where, like you said, the author has to draw the line before the subtlety becomes far too obvious and loses its importance, which leads me to:

2] The "true" score of a story shouldn't be determined by those who understood it's subtlety, because a story's worth doesn't hinge entirely on whether the subtlety is understood. In many great works of writing that are steeped with subtle symbolism, the symbolism itself could be completely missed but the story itself is still thoroughly entertaining. If being unable to understand the more subtle bits turns a good story into a mediocre one, that too can be considered a design flaw worthy of knocking off a point or two.

I know people will read that and blah blah about "gaming the system", but I believe it minimizes the error. An honest attempt to minimize the error is not gaming the system.

You are adding/removing points from your votes arbitrarily in order to compensate for a subset of votes that you don't agree with. That is the definition of "gaming the system".

3968284
Really, I think the correct approach to this problem is, principally, discussing the stories in the thread; many users will change their ratings if they feel like the error was theirs, while others will maintain that the error was that of the story (or still won't like the story - The Door's score wasn't changed by my understanding that it was a rocket, because the main problem with the story was that I had no idea why anyone in the story was doing what they were doing in the first place. The fact that I didn't understand what exactly was going on with the ending was kind of irrelevant, as it doesn't actually matter that much, just as understanding the childbirth metaphor in Crystal Legacy was unimportant because it didn't especially matter what it was that he did that hurt her so much, just that he had abandoned her in her hour of need). Given that we can only estimate based on users who actually leave reviews in the thread, and they only make up a minority of voters, our attempts at correcting in this manner are unlikely to be better than wild guessing, especially if people who have had the story explained to them later change their ratings without saying anything which makes it clear that they did so. And even then, we have no idea if they're really rating stories "correctly".

3968403
The other problem is that Verdict was getting very high scores anyway, so "correcting" for it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Unless people list their scores (and mostly, they don't, even the reviewers), it seems like this sort of adjustment is essentially doomed to failure. Especially given that folks sometimes penalize stories very heavily that they misunderstand (Falling in Love ate a 1 from someone who thought it was homophobic, for instance - and they didn't say anything about it in the thread before the voting was over (and no, it wasn't Trick Question). Not a huge deal as that was a fairly middling story anyway, but just goes to show how big of an impact it can have).

I think that information is far too limited to be able to compensate for it in this manner, and that people's responses are far too unpredictable to really properly compensate for them anyway. I think if you were going to try and "compensate" for stuff like this, your best bet would be to add some arbitrary amount to stories which exhibit certain properties that you feel should be promoted, rather than trying to guess which stories are being misunderstood, because you have no good way of knowing whether or not any specific story is being penalized, and knowing that people value such stories more highly is more likely to encourage people to write those stories, which appears to be your goal judging by your mention earlier in the thread of not wanting folks to be discouraged from writing said stories because they don't do as well.

Also, just an FYI, but I think "scoring adjustments" in voting will tend to be better received by folks if they are phrased in the form of "I reward stories that use subtlety well" (or whatever other quality it is that you're promoting/trying to compensate for) rather than "I penalize comedies and shipfics", because people tend to react better to bonuses than penalties, even if it really works out the same in the end.

3968874

1] If the subtlety is too subtle, then it is the author's fault that most of the readers didn't pick up on it. Like horizon said, there is a fine line between subtlety being missed because it was too deep for the reader and being missed because it was poorly communicated. That said, I do understand that it's impossible to expect that all readers will pick up on 100% of the deeper meaning of a story regardless of how masterful it is written. There is a point where, like you said, the author has to draw the line before the subtlety becomes far too obvious and loses its importance, which leads me to:

It can be a fine line but it isn't always. The Sea Pony was very obvious in what it was; I would pretty clearly assign fault for not understanding that to the reader, as that is the classic sort of thinly-veiled metaphor, and it wasn't muddled at all. That's not to say that every reader is going to understand it (and several of the people who didn't understand it could tell that there was something else going on with it, but they didn't quite understand what) but if you missed that the story was a metaphor for something then you were being careless. People will miss even obvious things which are directly stated in the story; Trust is a good example of this. If you haven't read that story, go ahead and read it, then look in the comments at how many people missed the entire point of the story because they were being careless and weren't reading but scanning, despite the fact that they believed otherwise.

2] The "true" score of a story shouldn't be determined by those who understood it's subtlety, because a story's worth doesn't hinge entirely on whether the subtlety is understood. In many great works of writing that are steeped with subtle symbolism, the symbolism itself could be completely missed but the story itself is still thoroughly entertaining. If being unable to understand the more subtle bits turns a good story into a mediocre one, that too can be considered a design flaw worthy of knocking off a point or two.

Well, ideally competitions are judged by competent people, but we open up judging to the public here, so anyone, no matter their competency level, can judge and vote on the value of the stories. The only way in reality to judge the value of a story's literary qualities is by having a group of experts do exactly that; indeed, it is this which is at the crux of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

If someone doesn't understand a good story, that means they're not a very good judge of its merits. Ideally, with a large enough volume of voters, such will be cancelled out, and the Writeoff is supposed to be open to everyone to vote in. It is not meant to be an exclusive, super-elitist group. However, the idea that everyone's point of view is equally valid is simply wrong; some people really do have more useful opinions than others, because they are better at understanding stories and story construction. But we don't weight different people's opinions differently behind the scenes because the Writeoff is meant to be publicly judged, not judged by some secret cabal.

Moreover, subtlety is vitally important to many stories; for instance, Drinking Alone, Except with Two is an (unmarked) tragedy. If you read it as a straight-up Sparity shipfic, it isn't anything special, and would come off as messed up to anyone but a Sparity shipper (or people who believe that being nice to girls earns you kisses) because the "nice guy" seems to get the girl, despite the fact that the girl doesn't love him. But the entire point of the story is that it is messed up, and that they're only getting together because Rarity is scared of dying alone after ten years of failed relationships, and Spike is conveniently devoted to her, and loves her too much to say no even though he knows it is a bad idea and that she doesn't love him and is only using him as an emotional crutch. That's why I like the story so much, and indeed, it is what makes the story good; the story wasn't especially subtle about it, either, with Spike and Rarity outright stating much of it in the lead up to them getting together, but a lot of folks still missed the point of the story and were happy for Spike and Rarity at the end.

The Sea Pony is another example of a story like this, but even more so. It is a deliberate in-character allegory for the character himself; he isn't going to outright say that it is about himself, that's the entire reason why he told the story the way that he did.

There are indeed stories where subtlety complements the story rather than being necessary to understanding it; I've used symbolic motifs in my stories before, or made use of metaphors which the audience didn't need to understand to understand the story. Heck, one of my stories got 4th place in a previous competition when only one person understood (or at least, commented on) the double entendre in it.

But for other stories, it is the crux of the story, and if you don't get it, you don't get the story at all and it loses a lot of or all of its meaning. Indeed, a lot of parables are told in this very way. I don't think most people are going to criticize the Parable of the Good Samaritan for being a parable, as it was meant to illustrate Jesus' point that the way to be godly was to show compassion to your fellow man. Though of course, many people don't recognize today that the Samaritans were historically a people that the Jews hated for basically "perverting" their religion, as the Samaritans were an ancient offshoot of Judaism.

The Sea Pony is such a story, I feel. Moreover, almost all good stories require that the reader be capable of inference; the entire point of "show, don't tell" is that it makes the reader more engaged by not telling them things explicitly but showing them things and expecting them to understand. If the reader is too thick to infer things, then it doesn't work, and they won't appreciate the story. Indeed, this is why children's stories are generally very telly; outright telling the child what is going on is the way to ensure that the story gets across to them. This is one of the reasons why MLP episodes end with the characters outright stating what they learned in the episode, to ensure that small children understand what happened and what lesson was learned - it is a means of teaching the children by showing them something and then telling them what it means.

As these stories are written by and judged by people who are, we assume, over the age of 13, we generally are assuming that people here are capable of thinking on an advanced enough level to be able to make such inferences, and as such, telling like this is bad in our stories. It is talking down to the reader, and indeed, this sort of telling ends up feeling insulting and redundant to people who understand what is going on.

Some stories can't be less subtle because it would ruin what the story is. Being subtle for the sake of being subtle is one thing, but The Sea Pony wasn't doing that. It just wouldn't be as good if he outright stated that the story was about himself.

I don't think there's anything wrong in principle with scoring stories which use some quality which you feel should be promoted in the Write-Off higher; I do think that strategically voting in response to other people not getting a story is unlikely to lead to desirable results, though. If someone submitted a The New Yorker type story to the competition, and Bad Horse gave it a 0 because it was empty and pointlessly depressing, that wouldn't be a problem. If I gave it a 0 BECAUSE other people were praising it, though, I'd be more worried if I felt like it really deserved a 5.

No one really had a problem with knocking points off The Arena in the last competition for being too similar to The Lady or the Tiger; no one really had a problem with people knocking Fetch for its similarity to Little Apple and similar stories. That's totally us saying that some attribute of a story is important and that you will be penalized for screwing it up, and it isn't invalid to do so. But we didn't do it in response to people giving it overly high scores; we did it because we genuinely felt like it was wrong to do in the competition. I thought The Arena was a great story, but I didn't feel like it deserved a high score in the Write-Off due to its derivative nature.

3969153

The funny-bitter part to me is that on Fetch? I'd never read Little Apple. Had no idea it existed. It was an entire gigantic coincidence that they ended up being so similar; really, I just wanted a doggy-thing for Winona to think of Apple Bloom as. And when the first 3-4 reviews were all 'Someone already wrote this' it was like 'Wait, what? Oh, fewmets!'

3969087

Really, I think the correct approach to this problem is, principally, discussing the stories in the thread; many users will change their ratings if they feel like the error was theirs, while others will maintain that the error was that of the story (or still won't like the story

Yes, that works better. Though I notice many people don't read the thread--can't blame them; it's 19 pages long now. Quite a few post reviews that missed things that someone else already explained.

3968874 Your post is all about valid points, but I already replied to them in after the post you were replying to.

You are adding/removing points from your votes arbitrarily in order to compensate for a subset of votes that you don't agree with. That is the definition of "gaming the system".

Where do you get this definition, hmm? Gaming the system means taking advantage of rules in order to win. Since I can't do this to my own stories, I can't do it to win. And I'm not talking about votes that I don't agree with; I'm suggesting other people do it. If many people decided to do it, it wouldn't be gaming the system; it would be the system.

Having said all that, I admit my idea is probably bad, but theoretically interesting. In practice it's better to just reply to the people you think misunderstood something and explain it.

3969153
3969218
3969269

The eternal dilemma:

We write the story we write, the audience reads the story it reads, and often there's very little overlap between the two. I mean, when I was writing "Dignity," the word "shipping" never even entered my mind. I was aiming for a funny scene between Dash and AJ that I could then expand to fit Fimfic's word limits by adding the other ponies and turning the whole thing into a look at how differently a group of friends can see themselves and each other. So it took me completly by surprise when the comments started building up saying "Hey! There's no shipping in here!"

But I can't legitimately say "The readers didn't understand my story," can I? It seems more likely to me that I didn't understand the audience.

Mike

3969554 But there's a difference between interpreting a given scenario differently, and failing to notice the word "Seattle".

A classic example of a meaning the author was unaware of is "The Cold Equations". A girl stows away on a rocket; her added weight means the rocket will crash, so the pilot has to throw her out the airlock in mid-flight.

The editor, John Campbell, meant for the story to deconstruct sci-fi adventure stories where the hero always figures a way out; this is a story where the laws of physics dictate that there is no way out. (This, BTW, was a story that its writer didn't understand; he kept handing in versions where the hero came up with some clever way to save the girl, and Campbell would send it back with instructions that the girl must die.)

The feminist reading is that the girl is intruding on the domain of men and must be killed for her sin.

An interesting reader interpretation of "Elpis" was pointing out that the story could be read as a condemnation of Celestia's choice. The choice is difficult, and the story doesn't justify her choice.

A famous alternate reading is of "The Turning of the Screw". IIRC, one can read the supernatural events as all being in the mind of the narrator, which gives it an entirely different meaning.

But these interesting readings are somehow in a different category from the people who read "Big Mac Reads Something Purple" and don't realize Big Mac is telling a story about himself, or read "Not so lucky after all" and miss the reference to the show that tells you that the pony wins the bet he places at the end. (I missed it.) The interesting readings are where people notice all the same things.

I think this example is more typical: I had a disagreement with someone who was dissatisfied with the physics in "Elpis". He said that it was bad hard science fiction, and that when I said I meant it to be myth rather than science fiction, I was trying to tell him how to read my story and that his reading of it was wrong.

I was trying to tell him how to read my story. I spend a lot of time on each story trying to tell readers how to read the story. That's what authors do: direct the reader to the desired reading. His reading of it made it a bad story that he didn't recommend, and probably would for anybody else who read it that way. That makes it "wrong" in my book.

We write the story we write, the audience reads the story it reads, and often there's very little overlap between the two. I mean, when I was writing "Dignity," the word "shipping" never even entered my mind. I was aiming for a funny scene between Dash and AJ that I could then expand to fit Fimfic's word limits by adding the other ponies and turning the whole thing into a look at how differently a group of friends can see themselves and each other. So it took me completly by surprise when the comments started building up saying "Hey! There's no shipping in here!"

But I can't legitimately say "The readers didn't understand my story," can I? It seems more likely to me that I didn't understand the audience.

The story was very good regardless. Or at least, I liked it.

The fact that people felt like it was shipping the two characters together probably comes from the fact that somehow people have decided any time Applejack teases anyone clearly she is flirting with them. Which is probably why AppleDash and RariJack are her two most popular ships. We do love our shipping goggles.

I think another part of it was assumptions about authorship; a lot of folks assumed HoofBiting or bookplayer wrote it and thus decided that it must be AppleDash.

I'm not sure that is really a big deal, though.

Besides, Rainbow Dash x Cider is canon.

3969702

I had a disagreement with someone who was dissatisfied with the physics in "Elpis".

Ah. Wow. That's...

That's kind of how I blundered with "The Sea Pony," now that I think about it. I mean, I knew the narrator's story was an analogy for his life, but I couldn't figure out what his actual profession was: I kept trying to tie it to something sea-going, y'see, but it didn't track if he was a sailor or a stevedore or even if he worked on a press gang, kidnapping other ponies and selling them to ship's captains who were short of crew. My conception of My Little Pony didn't let me make the leap to "he's a career criminal" till TD pointed it out to me even though we've seen career criminals like Caballeron's henchponies in the show.

That's always been my problem: I've only got my brain to read stories with, and my brain's got all kinds of odd filters in it.

3971170

It's like Bad Horse says: I spend a lot of time setting up my stories to read the way I want them to read. To run into a wall that I didn't even consider--readers are going to look at the the beginning of this story, assume it's a romance, then downvote it when it turns out it isn't--well, I guess I'll know better next time.

Mike

3972004
Honestly I'm a bit surprised it ended up so far away from 110% score-wise.

3969281

Where do you get this definition, hmm? Gaming the system means taking advantage of rules in order to win. Since I can't do this to my own stories, I can't do it to win.

While I can agree with the first part of the definition that describes it as "taking advantage of the rules", the remainder is far too narrow to be complete. Winning is not an inherent part of gaming the system, but rather one motivation for doing it or a desired outcome of it. There are plenty of other reasons one might game the system, such as pushing a personal agenda or perpetuating a strong bias. In your case, you are using the lack of structure around the vote-casting in order to give or take additional arbitrary points to stories that you believe need to have their global average adjusted to accurately reflect what you believe should be their "correct" score.

I.E. You are taking advantage of the rules (or, in this case, lack thereof) in order to manipulate the global average closer to what you believe it should be. You are gaming the system.

And I'm not talking about votes that I don't agree with; I'm suggesting other people do it. If many people decided to do it, it wouldn't be gaming the system; it would be the system.

If many people decided to pick up your system, that would only perpetuate the artificial inflation/deflation of scores to the point where the global average would cease to be an accurate representation of the actual group consensus. Rather than comedies being, as you say, unfairly inflated, they would instead be unfairly deflated. Stories with any depth of subtlety would suddenly be marked abnormally high, regardless of the actual level of quality of the story itself. At that point, scores would be completely meaningless.

Also, you seem to be missing the point. Your system's effectiveness depends on an unbiased objective base score that you would then add points to or remove points from to reach your weighted final score. The problem with this is, as has been said many times throughout this thread, an objective scoring system is impossible to achieve. Thus, you have been using your personal subjective score as your base, and have been trying to veer the global average towards it. Do you see the problem here?

3972061

Also, you seem to be missing the point. Your system's effectiveness depends on an unbiased objective base score that you would then add points to or remove points from to reach your weighted final score. The problem with this is, as has been said many times throughout this thread, an objective scoring system is impossible to achieve.

Objective scoring is a complicated issue that has literally zero to do with this discussion. I have been assuming you don't vote with a random number generator. If you really believe that everybody's scores are uncorrelated, and all scoring is completely subjective, why do you care about the scoring?

Thus, you have been using your personal subjective score as your base, and have been trying to veer the global average towards it.

I feel like you're not even listening.

3972004 I don't think anybody down-voted it for not having shipping. I don't remember any comments to that effect.

3972077

If you really believe that everybody's scores are uncorrelated, and all scoring is completely subjective, why do you care about the scoring?

All votes given by individual people are ultimately subjective. Even experts won't necessarily assign a particular story the same score. And I've already said in past posts why I care about the scores. (Spoiler: It's not because I care about winning the write-off.)

I feel like you're not even listening.

Is it not your policy to read a story, arrive at a score based on the story's merits, then add or subtract points based on your criteria of if the story is one that the "uninformed" or "amateur" reader would vote lower or higher than what you would say is the "correct" score? Is your goal not to correct the "errors" made in the global average by the voting of people whose scores you feel to be wrong?

3972107

Is it not your policy to read a story, arrive at a score based on the story's merits, then add or subtract points based on your criteria of if the story is one that the "uninformed" or "amateur" reader would vote lower or higher than what you would say is the "correct" score?

That is not my policy. I've described a proposed policy in detail in this thread, which I have never used in a write-off, which I already admitted in this thread is probably not a good idea, which only vaguely resembles what you just described.

What I did in the write-off was to take one point off each comedy, from the score that I thought it should get.

3972111

What I did in the write-off was to take one point off each comedy, from the score that I thought it should get.

How is that not what I just described? You took a story, decided what score you would give it, then removed a point purely because it was a comedy. Am I incorrect in my impression that your reasoning for doing so was because you feel like most people will give it an inflated score by it's nature of being a comedy, so your intent was to try and "correct the error"?

3972129 I wrote really a lot in this thread describing it. You can read what I wrote before if you want to understand it. I don't recommend it. It isn't a practical idea.

I don't believe you want to understand it anyway, or you do understand and don't care. From your first post in the All-In thread, it seems all you want to do is misrepresent other peoples' statements so you can get off on your own righteous indignation. You didn't review anybody's stories. You haven't done anything in this group except make indignant accusations.