SealJohnson
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- Joined
- Jan 4, 2019
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Currently, the trending lists, tag rankings and series finder—indeed, pretty much everything on this site—are by default sorted by total views.
Total views is a pretty meaningless stat, and using it as the primary means to sort series is, to be frank, screwing over a lot of series posted here.
Why is it meaningless, you may ask? Because the total number of views depends on the number of chapters posted. And a chapter can be any length.
A series with lots of tiny chapters is going to have many times more total views than one with fewer, larger chapters, even if they have the exact same number of readers and the same number of words written. This puts authors in a difficult position. Either they have to game the system by dividing their chapters into tiny snippets posted separately, or their series are less likely to get discovered, and don't get read.
A somewhat related problem: the current trending list creates a massive snowball effect, where the only series being viewed are those that already have the most views. This kind of thing is a problem everywhere, but the trending lists on other sites such as Royal Road are much more successful at getting readers to view new stories. Here, it's mostly the same titles, week after week.
Many of the stats shown next to series in the various lists are equally unhelpful.
Total views is a pretty meaningless stat, and using it as the primary means to sort series is, to be frank, screwing over a lot of series posted here.
Why is it meaningless, you may ask? Because the total number of views depends on the number of chapters posted. And a chapter can be any length.
A series with lots of tiny chapters is going to have many times more total views than one with fewer, larger chapters, even if they have the exact same number of readers and the same number of words written. This puts authors in a difficult position. Either they have to game the system by dividing their chapters into tiny snippets posted separately, or their series are less likely to get discovered, and don't get read.
A somewhat related problem: the current trending list creates a massive snowball effect, where the only series being viewed are those that already have the most views. This kind of thing is a problem everywhere, but the trending lists on other sites such as Royal Road are much more successful at getting readers to view new stories. Here, it's mostly the same titles, week after week.
Many of the stats shown next to series in the various lists are equally unhelpful.
- Number of chapters: Not a valid unit of measurement. A chapter can be any length.
- Chapters per week: Same problem.
- Favourites: Depends on the number of chapters.
- Total views: See above.
- Average views: Total views / number of chapters.
- Number of words: Unlike number of chapters, this accurately represents how much has been written.
- Words per week: Much more meaningful than chapters per week.
- Number of pages: Many readers don't know how long a 'page' is, but it's certainly more meaningful than number of chapters.
- Rating: A bit iffy sorting by ratings, because they're so easily abused. Only useful if you take into account the total number of ratings as well as the overall score (e.g. something with a single 5-star rating should not beat something with a 4.9 average and 50 total ratings).
- Number of readers: This would probably be my pick for default sorting stat.
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