icarusancalion

Auburn here wonders about the etiquette of back and forth commenting on AOOO and how it feels like chit-chat in the library.

In the process of the conversation the question of hit/comment ratios came up. Now I researched hit/comment ratios on Fiction Alley (a Harry Potter archive) back in 2003 after friends complained that terrible stories got tons of feedback, popular authors got more feedback, etc., etc. I decided to see if that were true.

The hit/ratio stats post is buried somewhere, but what I discovered was that:

- The average hit/comment ratio ranged from 6-8%, i.e., up to 8% of all people who opened a story left feedback.

- Surprise! The quality of the story did not drastically change that ratio; stories riddled with SPAG and purple prose got the same ratio. Their hit counts were just lower.

- The type of story did, however, affect the ratio: humor fics had a very high hit/comment ratio, averaging around 12%.

- On very popular stories like Cassandra Claire's Draco Trilogy, the hit/comment ratio dipped (surprisingly) lower than less popular stories.

- Stories where the author had a Yahoo Group and made a concerted effort to pimp their work and encourage a loyal following, the hit/comment ratios were the highest, at 36%.

I compared this to the hit/comment ratio at ff.net, and found that ff.net people commented less (I believe it was ... 4%?).

I then compared the ratio at character-focused "niche" archives, and found that the niche archive had much higher ratios, comparable to the humor fics at an average of 12%.

So I'm watching the hit/comment ratio for all the Big Bang stories at AOOO with interest. My experience there up till now has been that it's a good place to store fics, but few people comment. Still, that's been on stories that are old, or have been posted to LJ/DW first.

So far the AOOO comment ratios on the Big Bangs (if you discount the author responses) are running at 1%.



ETA: At someone's suggestion I checked the hit/comment ratio for the 2009 Yuletide which was hosted on AOOO.

So far, though I haven't been thorough, the hit/comment ratios for Yuletide 2009 are also at 1%.

This tells us that the low hit/comment ratios have to do with the archive itself. It is unrelated to the download feature, which didn't exist in 2009.

It could be difficulty in logging in. I've grown frustrated in commenting there in the past and was told I should just keep myself logged in. It could be a design issue, that the comment button isn't prominent enough (Fiction Alley's ratio was better than ff.net's largely because FA's comment button was centered on the page and HUGE).

But at this point in time, stories posted on AOOO first receive markedly fewer comments than those posted in LJ first --Aha, here's where I confused people: markedly fewer comments than they did at archives in 2003; authors note that it's also fewer comments than they receive on LJ.

If the archive is going to be an important portal for fandom, this problem needs to be resolved.

ETA2, aka, OH HAI, metafandom people. Due to time constraints, I'll try to answer in a condensed form here:

1) I think the "nonfandom-lurker increase" theory is interesting but would have to be borne out by an increase in hits.
2) Other people's stats are showing 1%-ish hit/comment ratios at AOOO, 3%-ish at DW/LJ.
3) In terms of "comment split," the difference between now and 2003 is that comments in 2003 were split between archives and Yahoo mailing lists (which couldn't be tracked at all since they were emailed off-list) instead of between archives and LJ/DW. There's always been a split between comment delivery systems.
4) As for why the overall decline in commenting that seems to have occurred, it occurs to me that there is a lot more fic overall. Between 2007 and 2010, Harry Potter fic on FF.net increased from 300,000 fics to 477,000 fics. (Going from memory, there were about 180,000 HP fics on FF.net in November 2002.)
5) I would love to see if fics with a lot of delicious tags/recs received a higher hit/comment ratio. It could explain the 4% AOOO ratio on certain 2009 Yuletide fics. Anyone want to tackle this?
6) Yes, lots more to be done on data gathering and stats. Thank you for all your help. :)

A question came up on my f-list about the end of canon in Stargate Atlantis.

I'm not sure whether the imminent end of the series has any significant effect on readership

In the Harry Potter fandom it certainly didn't. I can't imagine the end of the series would have a significant impact right away. Quite the opposite. There's a spike in interest as people mourn, fret over what's not neatly tied up, are annoyed at the author's/PTB's ships, or just miss it and want more, darn it. In time I think it will taper off as people find other active canons and drift to new fandoms, but no boom is going to be lowered late December, no, not at all.

How active the fandom remains depends on the fandom:

- Do the main archives, challenges, communities, still have people to run them? (Most Important Factor.)
- Is the fandom old enough to have a solid body of work, and fandom tropes, to sustain it?
- Are there lots of Swiss cheese-like holes remaining to play in?
- How dependent on canon is the fandom (are the majority of fics episode tags, or have the fic writers embraced AUs and crossovers)?
- How committed are the fans to keeping their fandom alive? Have fans declared that nothing will stop their ship? Or have they been ho-hum about the end of their series?
- Are there other factors to keep the fandom alive? Spin-offs, movies, conventions.

Apparently the Organization for Transformative Works is creating a wiki.

Cool. I didn't know that. A fandom wiki's a good idea.

( On fandom wikis and a really clueless kid. )

Laura Hale has inspired me to send a donation to the Organization for Transformative Works (otw_news). We need to have a real fanfic wiki written by mature adults who actually care about fandom. And, you know, a fandom wiki that contains a little bit about fanfiction. Just a thought.

Recently a gen fanfic writer wrote a anti-slash screed. (Doesn't she know that an anti-slash screed is what got me reading and writing slash in the first place, says Icarus, 150 slashfics later.)

The question came up as to whether or not we should read or rec this gen writer's stories in the future. You know, the usual, "Ew, if that's her attitude I don't want to read her." -- "Me neither."

destina had a really good post/article about this... somewhere... a very long time ago. But I can't find it. Guess I'll have to write my own.


Fanfic and the Magical Forget Ray

Because we post stories to personal networking sites, we know a lot more about fanfic writers than we once did. Instead of belonging to a list or Yahoo Group and reading fics in a vacuum, we enounter... people.

This can be good. We might like them. We might wonder why they haven't updated their WIP in ten million years -- and reading their Livejournal, we can find out why.

This can also be bad. We can learn that not only do they write gen, they also write slash (oh my). We might stumble across political beliefs we don't agree with, or an anti-slash screed (uh-oh). I know I liked Anne Rice a lot better before she had a blog.

The person who wrote this screed, well, 1) I didn't like her screed, 2) I didn't like the fact that she deleted comments who disagreed with her and left the ones she agreed with, I think that's dishonest, 3) I didn't like how she started banning people who wrote comments she disagreed with, no matter how mild (for example, "Huh. Really? I'm surprised. I think people should write what they like").

That doesn't matter. In my view at least, the personalities behind the stories are irrelevant. The stories stand by themselves. I may not like someone. I'll still read their fic. I'll still recommend it if I think it's good.

Why?

Because my own credibility will be done for as a reccer (okay, I don't rec as much as I used to, but anyway...) if my recs are swayed by my personal feelings about the authors. That is why the Oscars suck. Overblown Hollywood crap wins because the judges like the director and feel he's deserving.

It's hard to forget when someone's been an utter wanker, of course. And here I wanted to quote destina because her response was classy. (I still can't find that post.)

For myself, I use the "Magical Forget Ray."

It works a bit like the S.E.P. field* in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and looks exactly like an oversized hair dryer from the 1950s (curlers not required). You sit under this baby for about 50 seconds, and voila! What a fine new author you've discovered. Never heard of them before. All that's left behind is a vague sense of unease that causes you to never, ever, read their personal posts again.




* = Somebody Else's Problem, the most effective form of invisibility cloak.

( How To Keep Your Challenge Committments - or - Strategies For Challenge Success. )

( Why Does It Matter? The Cost To Your Self-Disclipline )

All is not lost. If you didn't make your challenge deadline(s), you may just need to reexamine your motives and your strategy for writing challenges.

The Writing Challenge requires certain time management skills that can be learned. It's not a coincidence that the "busy" people in fandom who have the least actual time are the ones who manage to write for four or five challenges while working full-time, running an RPG, and juggling committee responsibilities (I'm looking at you, femmequixotic).

( #1 - Should You Sign Up At All? )

( #2 - Writing Stages And Planning )

( #3 - Uh-Oh. )

( #4 - Dealing With The Guilt )

I've been following the whole debacle where two fan artists who posted Harry Potter drawings have had their journals suspended, all their unrelated journals suspended, and been issued permanent bans from LJ. It's now officially called boldthrough. The fact that LJ tried to cover its ass by unlinking deleted journals (thus no more obvious icarus) has irritated me the most. Cowards. Pick a policy, make it clear, and stick with it. Then you don't need to cover your ass when you've followed your own damned rules.

I described the whole situation to WG and he got that narrow-eyed look he gets when he's seeing through the bullshit. The guys at his work says he looks like a cop, and I agree.

He said finally, "They're being threatened at LJ."

Yep.

Based on the Rolling Stone article, Perverted Justice is just another hate group, one that's got a popular target. Like the KKK in the post-Civil War south.

The real fear is not online predators. It's a fear of technology with "online sex predators!" as a buzzword.

Regarding moving to another service:

It's hard for me to move. I'm scattered across four fandoms. The HP readers and friends might pack up and leave while the Stargate Atlantis and Supernatural people stay put. Wherever we go, we'll face the same problems from people who can't distinguish between art and reality.

I support the idea of a fan-created blog network, and I think femmequixotic's response -- "Let's think it through first" -- is the right one.

That's how I left Earthlink. I didn't get up in arms or inconvenience myself.

- First I bought my Slashcity account and moved all my fics to it from my old Earthlink page.
- Then I changed whatever links to my old site I could.
- I added new fics, got everyone up to speed and in the habit of using my new site for about six months beforehand.
- My next move should have been a redirect to the new site but I didn't know how to do that.
- I'd already moved my email to Yahoo and Gmail.

Finally, Earthlink pissed me off one more time, with a service outage for three days that they didn't even apologize for. When I canceled my service, I was transfered to a hard-sell guy in India.

Hard sell guy: "But you will lose all your contacts to your email account."
Icarus: "I use gmail."

He never brought up the web space which was the main thing keeping me there. I guess he understood I was serious.

Make it easy for yourself to move:

1) Go back through your posts and link all your art and fanfiction to a website or archive. If you have a comment feature there, so much the better. This has the plus of enabling you to track hit counts on your stories and protects you from any problems whether you leave or not (Slashcity.com is one fandom friendly option and their tiny plan is only $24 a year).

2) Back up your LJ at your leisure (how-to back-up instructions here). I found this process excruciatingly slow, by the way (archiving program LJArchive here).

3) Post elsewhere as well as in LJ from here on out. I understand if you use Semagic (download Semagic XP version here) you can post to multiple journals at once (snapetoy's how-to post to multiple journals here). That could save you many headaches as you're backing up every time you post.

4) Keep up on fanarchive and the latest fan efforts to create our own service. Do a little research. (fandom_flies is one community tracking the progress and direction of an exodus.)

Once you have a better alternative, or your flist is emptying like rats on a sinking ship ... all you have to do is turn the key in the ignition.

How does Stargate Atlantis rate in online popularity?

We can use fanfiction as a benchmark for how popular the Stargate Atlantis fandom is compared to other fandoms. My statistics are taken from fanfiction.net, the largest fanfiction online archive*, which receives 9,700,000 impressions per day according to Alexa. As of June 25th, 2007, fanfiction.net was the 193rd most popular site on the Internet, drawing more traffic than MSNBC. Actually, a lot more traffic than MSNBC.

Fanfiction is a huge online draw. Therefore it can be used as a general measure of the online popularity of a show.

( The number of stories measures the level of activity in the fandom. )

About eight years ago I stumbled across a debate about Christopher Tolkien's collection of J. R. R. Tolkien's 13 volumes of notes The History of Middle Earth. The question: is it canon?

At the time I didn't understand the debate. What? Tolkien wrote it, right? So it counts as canon. Of course it does!

Or does it?

Now with the impending Encyclopedia of Harry Potterness, I understand why it's a question.

In the case of Tolkien's notes, they were compiled by his son, not Tolkien, and many of the working notes were at odds with what ended up in the actual Lord of the Rings. Because they were notes. And nothing more.

J. K. Rowling on the other hand will be overseeing her own project. Tying up all the loose ends of canon in her own way, on her own terms.

My answer to that: Nuh-uh. No way. She's alive, she can still write more books. In this case the Encyclopedia is an end run around expanding her own canon. It's cheap, spurious, and easy to throw out answers in an interview or slap together entries for an Encyclopedia. She can write all the stories she wants in her mind -- without giving us full and complete actual stories. She doesn't have to go through the hard work of processing the complete universe that creates a canon.

I think it was Orson Scott Card who pointed out that a story starts to write itself, it begins to take off of its own accord and run with your pen. The reason why she's contradicted some of her own answers from interviews in the past is because the creation of a story, of a canon, is this process. Writing will change what you "mentate" and "think through" with your purely intellectual faculties.

I don't accept this cheap shortcut of hers. Unless she takes the time to pick up her quill pen and write us a real story, I do not accept the Quik-Quotes Quill version of a canon.



P.S.: Whether or not the Encyclopedia agrees with my fanfic doesn't affect me in the least, because the vast majority my HP fics were written pre-Half Blood Prince and aren't canon compliant in any way. This is just my little manifesto on what is and isn't canon.

Remember FanLib and their connections with Hilary Rosen and RIAA?

I was having trouble understanding who RIAA was and why those connections were problematic, though I followed that under FanLib's associate, Hilary Rosen, RIAA was all about scraping money for the suits at the expense of the artists. With a little more digging (thank you rez_lo) I learned she helped criminalize fair use even where no copyright had been violated.

Most of us know that fanfiction relies upon fair use as our legal cornerstone. Undermining fair use is bad for fanfiction writers. Really bad. I've put Rosen on my dartboard as an enemy of fanfiction.

But now I have a clear picture. RIAA is a bunch of assholes who threaten dirt-poor college students with lawsuits for illegally downloading music. Or! Those lucky kids can settle for between $3,000 - $5,000.

Apparently, RIAA has leaned on universities (I imagine by telling them if you don't help us, we'll sue you instead) to send letters on their behalf. At least one university stopped short of giving RIAA students' addresses outright at any rate, though their lawyers are running scared.

( University students get a threatening letter via the nice folks at RIAA. )


Now that I have this pretty snapshot of RIAA -- what on earth is FanLib doing mixed up with these guys?


(I've turned off comments because I have to focus on writing right now.)

What Is This Pornish Pixies of Which You Speak?

We fanfiction writers and readers wish that people who stumble on this odd thing we call "fandom" would take their time to learn what it is. Look around. Read some of our better stories (instead of selecting something at random, and really, would that even work in a book store?). Get to know us before you pass random ill-informed judgments.

Now that pornish_pixies has come into the limelight because of Strikethrough 2007 to a variety of fandoms, I'm going to ask other non-Harry Potter fandoms to do the same. I'm seeing pornish_pixies used as an example of "fanfic I wish didn't exist" in some fandoms, and I find that distressing, given pornish_pixies's history in the Harry Potter fandom.

But you don't know that history yet, do you? Give me a moment of your time.

First, Harry Potter is a megolith of a fandom that has kept the hecklers at Fandom Wank entertained for half a decade. The political infighting (a.k.a. "wank") has been in proportion to the size and variety of the HP fandom: immense. It became a by-word. Whenever a new fandom had a lot of wank, the folks at F_W gloated, "This could be the next Harry Potter."

If you wish to understand the history of Harry Potter wank, this well-written editorial (set aside an afternoon), The MsScribe Story: An Unauthorized Fandom Biography, covers 2001-2006 and will give you a Ph.D. in that darkest aspect of Harry Potter fandom history.

But it doesn't seem to mention pornish_pixies. Well, what was fun for the hecklers wasn't much fun for the participants.

Enter switchknife and pornish_pixies.

After a series of inter-related wanks that embroiled many friends, the prolific slash writer switchknife, who maintained the popular Switchknife Recs website waved a flag (red? white? pink?), calling for a halt to all the battles. "This is supposed to be fun," switchknife insisted. "Let's get back to the porn -- the good kind of wank."

Switch created pornish_pixies, "The Community You Wank Off To," kicking it off with a series of "write your favorite kink" challenges. Switch's terms (made somewhat solemnly, with a wink):

- Respect other people's squicks. Since this is a pr0n community, there will be depictions of various kinds of sexual practices. Please state warnings clearly before the fic/poem, or place your story behind a cut-tag (as advised above), if you feel that some of your subject matter could seriously upset people. (Examples: chanslash, bloodplay, rape.)

- Respect other people's kinks. Do not tease and/or abuse someone for their particular proclivities, or what they choose to write in a fic. Everyone here reserves the right to perv unchallenged.

It was intended to be short fics only, lunch hour length, but that went by the wayside very early on.

Since that time, pornish_pixies has been a sort of Japanese bathhouse of R and NC-17 Harry Potter fic. HP fans take off their fandom affiliations and politics and leave them at the door. "Fluffy Harry/Ron Christmas morning romance" appears next to "Werewolf BDSM Non-con" without a qualm. Slash, (Other?), are all welcome, so long as it's sexually explicit and you leave each other be.

So to stand outside of pornish_pixies and use it as an example of "that" kind of fic that "I would never read," misses the point of the community entirely.