Implemented Fairer sorting of lists

[SealJohnson]

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.

• 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.

Here are some stats that are actually useful for sorting / showing in summaries:

• 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.

 

[DaoFox]

That isn't really a problem. You have 3 identifiers, IP, session id and account id. You can add digital fingerprint in as well but with the way the net is moving to trying to limit digital fingerprinting, that may not be worth wasting time on. So when a user views a chapter, it will record their ip, session id and account and check for uniqueness.

Your session id and account would track you across ip changes unless you use incognito/private mode. Device changes, nothing you can do about. But it isn't big enough of a deal. Again, I said as fair as "humanly" possible.

Im confused, is this statement addressing towards me?

Overall, I agree that a higher quality work may fail to find a fanbase while a lower quality one can get a large fanbase. Though I'm not understanding what you mean by ones posting more chapters will be disadvantaged, are you talking about if we switch to uniques?

There are claims that posting more per day equals to more views on a 1to1 basis. You can tell from looking at the table I posted that this isn't true as a standard. Just because 4 chapters are posted and someone clicks the first, they don't automatically continue to the 4th. the more chapters posted, the quicker you see a decrease in subsequent views. If I release 4 chapters in a day, I NEED to get 1 view for each to be on even footing with the 1 view the single chapter release got, on the basis that my story will conclude sooner should I include the same amount of content or my views will be diluted should I release only the same number of chapters. because once I stop posting, my views will stagnate and I will no longer receive as many views. while the slower release continue to benefit from their 1-to-1 ratio, rapid releases see a less than 1 view per release on average by the end. Once you reach the top 8 trending you get the same treatment no matter whether you post greater or fewer number of chapters, also shown in the table, where 3 of yesterdays top 4 have a much lower release rate and varied from having a bit less or quite a bit more words per chapter. because all possess the same amount of space in the most eye-grabbing section of the homepage.

the 3rd placed trending title is of a much shorter length and had the least number of people going from description to reading chapters, and reading chapters on the whole, however it had the highest continuity rate where almost 1 in 3 people read from beginning to end. IMO this title should have had a better chance to rank 1st for the day, because more views were reaching the newest chapters. it didn't because in that day it simply didn't get the same total of views as the other stories, whether because fewer people followed the story or because there was less content for new readers to enjoy. this doesn't mean its trend was any weaker, just that is was proportional to its size and appeal.

2 titles are in the top 8 of today's trends despite their weekly chapter averaging only a single new chapter every 7 days. neither of those stories have more than 2k words per chapter. so clearly the release rate and word count isn't having as big of an effect as some are assuming and they both have a very different amount of chapters. a good portion of new views can be attributed to being on the front page for so long despite the low rate of release, yet the readers are the ones deciding to read the story which keeps it there. this naturally means it has an "unfair advantage" over series that don't ever appear on the home page despite being of similar nature, because it has a means of gathering views the others don't, yet people wouldn't keep reading if the stories lacked the necessary appeal in the first place. so do stories fail to make the trending list due to lack of visibility or lack of appeal? when all these stories had the same initial accessibility in the "new stories" section (that none of my stories will ever get because I make the story page long before releasing the 1st chapter, and so don't even get this free publicity, despite being just as new).

In the end, "trending" titles are stories that are already getting a bunch of views for 1 reason or another. a "trending" feature is never going to be fair because it rewards already popular titles with further opportunity to gain more views. the fairest solution is to remove any system that recommends specific stories over another beyond the relevance of a genre/tag search. replacing it with a "word cloud" feature would go further towards showing what genre's and tags are currently being search for/viewed in a greater rate than the previous day/week/month.

If I don't post a new update to my story and the next day I suddenly see its total chapter views doubled, I would expect a good chance at appearing on the trending list, regardless of the "update frequency or content", as it suddenly gained popularity it did not previously have, because clearly that would have had nothing more than a negative impact to my chances of getting seen. but no matter whether its the current system or a new "fixed" system, this simply wont happen because it is not a system designed to include such a story in its considerations, because the number of those views will be dwarfed by those who release more than me, more frequently than me. perhaps then we should say that "stories must be published in full in a single upload so trends can determine where people are choosing to read at any particular time, without any influence from release rate or average word count." as it would then be fairer to those who post one shots.

there is an unfortunate truth in the world that goes along the lines of: "the fairer a system you try to devise, the less fair it becomes". the more specific a method becomes to determine which series are "deserving" the less fair it is to the series that don't meet the criteria. computer random isn't even truly random as the server will compile a specific list of numbers that will then be used to make the selection 'appear' random. no matter how often the list is regenerated, ultimately, certain titles will still be favoured over others as those picked "randomly" will gain greater coverage the more the system ends up picking them, and other titles will find they never appear in the random selection. trying to make the searches 'fairer', you would have to restrict all writers to posting stories of the same length, to the same schedule, with the same amount of content. the examples given so far are that the slower releases and larger word count titles are being treated unfairly, because there are people who chose to release less content at a greater rate. but what about those who post even less frequently with even higher word counts than that, can't they just argue the same thing? should my once-a-year release of a 160k word story, become the standard that all shorter and faster releases be compared to? I think not because that is obviously not fair to anyone and is not even close to being a valid comparison.

perhaps remove ranks of any kind even from search results? so stories load as thumbnails with random placement in a grid with just their cover and title, but then there is an unfair comparison between stories with and without their own covers, so I guess remove that too. to a grid of relevant results that contains only the series name and its tag/genre's, which would mean more people reading the description, yet never reading the chapters which isn't what we want to occur either.

---
I personally dislike never-ending epics of indeterminable conclusion, because I know how few of them ever reach "completion". so as a result I become LESS inclined to go to stories with lots of chapters and there's plenty of people like me. I also dislike reading stories that have too large of a word count per chapter, because the task of reading from start to finish becomes more daunting and there's plenty of people that are the same as me in this regard too. I may have to load the screen multiple times over different days just to slowly bring myself to finish reading the whole chapter to the end, so exactly who can decide whether the metrics being argued in regards to trending are even valid? my IP address will change, my session id will also change, and only because I am a user will that remain the same... should I have chosen to log in before reading a chapter. never mind people who use public devices to read their favourite stories, thus negatively influencing the "unique views" counter.

we know pure view count means nothing, we also know the length of a story, the word count or the number of chapters has little to do with it's popularity as well. ratings and reviews are all subjective and can't be used as a measurement either, but these are what are being nitpicked over for a feature that is inherently unfair. there is no fair system that cant be "gamed" and yet you cant just claim someone is "gaming the system" because they are getting better placements. some stories gain views from external sources, while many only have an internal audience within SH.

even if the system was fair, as long as people perceive an inherent unfairness to be present, its all pointless. yet people will be fine with an unfair system as long as they perceive it to be fair. the same system will always be viewed differently, and the only person who can ultimately decide which is right is the person responsible for managing it.

the best we can hope for is Tony deciding on how the system will be adjusted to give a more accurate result, and even then people will be able to choose to write and release in a way that is more favourable for their series to get a better placement, just like a few do already. Only a different group of writers will now coincidentally fall into the bracket of having a story that best meets the new criteria, through no intent of their own.

it's a wall of text, because there is basically nothing more worth being said by me on the topic until Tony makes a decision. trending has too many issues that make it a poor system and yet only a select few of those issues are being focused on.

 

[Jemini]

There are claims that posting more per day equals to more views on a 1to1 basis. You can tell from looking at the table I posted that this isn't true as a standard. Just because 4 chapters are posted and someone clicks the first, they don't automatically continue to the 4th.

1 this is a fundamentally flawed argument that misses the point. It is not that it increases viewership on a 1 to 1 basis, but that it does indeed give an unfair edge in terms of views for the day by getting duplicate views from the same readers.

Also, 2nd, we're not talking the 1st 4 chapters of the series. We are talking about 4 consecutive chapters deep into the series. There is a far stronger reader retention after chapter 10 compared to before. So, your argument really is fundamentally flawed on every level.

Also, in terms of creating a fair system, that's what all this discussion is about. Some early suggestions were, as you said, favoring unfair arbitrary factors. This is why we have been discussing on and on and talking about the issues, and this is how we came up with the 1 view count per unique viewer per day. This is the most fair way to close exploits while still keeping a level playing field that minimizes the favoring of arbitrary factors. Your argument ultimately drips of defeatism trying to argue against even trying to improve the current system which many people have expressed discontent with.

 

[lnv]

There are claims that posting more per day equals to more views on a 1to1 basis. You can tell from looking at the table I posted that this isn't true as a standard. Just because 4 chapters are posted and someone clicks the first, they don't automatically continue to the 4th. the more chapters posted, the quicker you see a decrease in subsequent views. If I release 4 chapters in a day, I NEED to get 1 view for each to be on even footing with the 1 view the single chapter release got, on the basis that my story will conclude sooner should I include the same amount of content or my views will be diluted should I release only the same number of chapters. because once I stop posting, my views will stagnate and I will no longer receive as many views. while the slower release continue to benefit from their 1-to-1 ratio, rapid releases see a less than 1 view per release on average by the end. Once you reach the top 8 trending you get the same treatment no matter whether you post greater or fewer number of chapters, also shown in the table, where 3 of yesterdays top 4 have a much lower release rate and varied from having a bit less or quite a bit more words per chapter. because all possess the same amount of space in the most eye-grabbing section of the homepage.

You don't have a 1 to 1 return regardless of how many chapters someone releases. That is because everyone reads differently, some people read as they come out, others quit midway while some stack chapters, it also depends on WHEN in the day the chapter is published. Releasing multiple chapters per day gives you more views outside of just trending, as I explained, featuring on NU is worth more than trending for now. But end of the day, you still get more views for having multiple chapters, the ratio of so would depend on the story and how many chapters. But it's hard to argue it is anything more than an advantage.

the 3rd placed trending title is of a much shorter length and had the least number of people going from description to reading chapters, and reading chapters on the whole, however it had the highest continuity rate where almost 1 in 3 people read from beginning to end. IMO this title should have had a better chance to rank 1st for the day, because more views were reaching the newest chapters. it didn't because in that day it simply didn't get the same total of views as the other stories, whether because fewer people followed the story or because there was less content for new readers to enjoy. this doesn't mean its trend was any weaker, just that is was proportional to its size and appeal.

2 titles are in the top 8 of today's trends despite their weekly chapter averaging only a single new chapter every 7 days. neither of those stories have more than 2k words per chapter. so clearly the release rate and word count isn't having as big of an effect as some are assuming and they both have a very different amount of chapters. a good portion of new views can be attributed to being on the front page for so long despite the low rate of release, yet the readers are the ones deciding to read the story which keeps it there. this naturally means it has an "unfair advantage" over series that don't ever appear on the home page despite being of similar nature, because it has a means of gathering views the others don't, yet people wouldn't keep reading if the stories lacked the necessary appeal in the first place. so do stories fail to make the trending list due to lack of visibility or lack of appeal? when all these stories had the same initial accessibility in the "new stories" section (that none of my stories will ever get because I make the story page long before releasing the 1st chapter, and so don't even get this free publicity, despite being just as new).

In the end, "trending" titles are stories that are already getting a bunch of views for 1 reason or another. a "trending" feature is never going to be fair because it rewards already popular titles with further opportunity to gain more views. the fairest solution is to remove any system that recommends specific stories over another beyond the relevance of a genre/tag search. replacing it with a "word cloud" feature would go further towards showing what genre's and tags are currently being search for/viewed in a greater rate than the previous day/week/month.

I don't think I've ever argued about the quality of the novels on the trending... if anything, I've defended that aspect and I agree something wouldn't be on trending if it didn't have at least some quality. That said, I think it is hard to argue that those that release multiple times per day have quite an unfair advantage, the 3 advantages I've outlined.

If I don't post a new update to my story and the next day I suddenly see its total chapter views doubled, I would expect a good chance at appearing on the trending list, regardless of the "update frequency or content", as it suddenly gained popularity it did not previously have, because clearly that would have had nothing more than a negative impact to my chances of getting seen. but no matter whether its the current system or a new "fixed" system, this simply wont happen because it is not a system designed to include such a story in its considerations, because the number of those views will be dwarfed by those who release more than me, more frequently than me. perhaps then we should say that "stories must be published in full in a single upload so trends can determine where people are choosing to read at any particular time, without any influence from release rate or average word count." as it would then be fairer to those who post one shots.

RRL does a system I heard where it depends on 30 days of trending, so it is more about growth over 30 days, thus no one can stay in trending for long. That might also be a good solution for constantly shuffling in fresh titles.

there is an unfortunate truth in the world that goes along the lines of: "the fairer a system you try to devise, the less fair it becomes". the more specific a method becomes to determine which series are "deserving" the less fair it is to the series that don't meet the criteria. computer random isn't even truly random as the server will compile a specific list of numbers that will then be used to make the selection 'appear' random. no matter how often the list is regenerated, ultimately, certain titles will still be favoured over others as those picked "randomly" will gain greater coverage the more the system ends up picking them, and other titles will find they never appear in the random selection. trying to make the searches 'fairer', you would have to restrict all writers to posting stories of the same length, to the same schedule, with the same amount of content. the examples given so far are that the slower releases and larger word count titles are being treated unfairly, because there are people who chose to release less content at a greater rate. but what about those who post even less frequently with even higher word counts than that, can't they just argue the same thing? should my once-a-year release of a 160k word story, become the standard that all shorter and faster releases be compared to? I think not because that is obviously not fair to anyone and is not even close to being a valid comparison.

I can't agree here. That sounds like a strawman argument... you are effectively saying it isn't worth wasting time being more fair because 100% fair is never possible, thus we shouldn't bother with 95% fair.

That is why I keep emphasizing the importance of being fair as humanly possible. Not to mention we aren't talking about edge cases which fall through the crack, we are talking about 1% having an unfair advantage over 99%. And it is something that can easily be fixed.

Also, I will note I find it hard to believe a single chapter is 160k words. An author can easily break it up into multiple parts and release it daily at something like 20k words per day. Now to be clear, I don't want authors to change their ways of doing things be it small chapters or long chapters. So I understand someone might want to do 1k chapters while others do 13k chapters, it doesn't matter because sometimes how chapters are divided is part of the author's style. There is a reason why often times authors place the most important punchlines at the end of the chapter, because in doing so it becomes more memorable over something that happens midchapter or beginning of chapter when reader's attention is lower. But I find it hard to believe something that 160k chapters can't be split. To be honest, something that is 160k words SHOULD be split.

perhaps remove ranks of any kind even from search results? so stories load as thumbnails with random placement in a grid with just their cover and title, but then there is an unfair comparison between stories with and without their own covers, so I guess remove that too. to a grid of relevant results that contains only the series name and its tag/genre's, which would mean more people reading the description, yet never reading the chapters which isn't what we want to occur either.

As I explained, trending has a purpose. Generally, trending stories have a minimum amount of quality otherwise they wouldn't be there. By promoting trending, those who visit the site can pick a story that fits a minimum quality requirement. When I posted on RRL, a lot of people gave me compliments for how great my grammar was. And I was totally shocked because while I think my grammar is above average, it shouldn't be that great compared to actual books which have editors. Hell, even I could spot my own grammar mistakes after reading (it also didn't help that my grammar check was accidentally off when I wrote my first volume). To that, the response was that there is so much terrible grammar on RRL that compared to them the grammar seems worlds apart. (I didn't know this because I only read novels on the top 3 pages of RRL but I guess that is the case if you go deeper in)

And that is the risk with sites like these. You have a wide range of quality, and many writers don't even have English as their primary language and are just doing it for experience with a foreign language or the like.

This is why trending is important, to push readers towards titles that have at least a minimum quality aspect before they dig deeper into the site. Of course ratings help that as well but it is hard to judge ratings on things that don't have much readers.

I personally dislike never-ending epics of indeterminable conclusion, because I know how few of them ever reach "completion". so as a result I become LESS inclined to go to stories with lots of chapters and there's plenty of people like me. I also dislike reading stories that have too large of a word count per chapter, because the task of reading from start to finish becomes more daunting and there's plenty of people that are the same as me in this regard too. I may have to load the screen multiple times over different days just to slowly bring myself to finish reading the whole chapter to the end, so exactly who can decide whether the metrics being argued in regards to trending are even valid?

Everyone has different preferences, I also don't like things that have too many chapters, and I also don't like too long chapters if nothing happens most of the chapter. Though I don't like too short chapters either. But end of the day, what I like to see from chapters regardless of length is "completion". I want to feel like I got something out of a chapter.

But everyone has preferences, there is nothing wrong with that. Trending though simply looks at popularity, and I don't think you can claim something getting multiple votes is fair.

Imagine during next presidential election, they say "okay, now you can vote up to 5x for your candidate". Sure, not everyone will go vote 5X, so the fall off will be higher as you go along, but it is hard to argue that someone voting 5x has an unfair advantage. You would feel your vote is worth less and it being unfair right? So why is voting multiple times for what is trending any different?

my IP address will change, my session id will also change, and only because I am a user will that remain the same... should I have chosen to log in before reading a chapter. never mind people who use public devices to read their favourite stories, thus negatively influencing the "unique views" counter.

Your session id would stay the same as long as you use same browser and don't clear cookies. And unless you are on dialup or mobile, your IP won't change for months.

we know pure view count means nothing, we also know the length of a story, the word count or the number of chapters has little to do with it's popularity as well. ratings and reviews are all subjective and can't be used as a measurement either, but these are what are being nitpicked over for a feature that is inherently unfair. there is no fair system that cant be "gamed" and yet you cant just claim someone is "gaming the system" because they are getting better placements. some stories gain views from external sources, while many only have an internal audience within SH.

I don't think anyone can argue non-unique views are somehow a sign of popularity. By nature, popularity is how many unique people you have. If grandma, grandpa and the rest of your family vote 1,000,000 times for you, that doesn't make you a celebrity.

Now of course there will always be ways to game the system, there is no way around that. BUT, that doesn't mean that SH should facilitate that within itself at the very least.

Even worse, I don't like the aspect of platforms forcibly changing author's styles of writing just to get popularity.

even if the system was fair, as long as people perceive an inherent unfairness to be present, its all pointless. yet people will be fine with an unfair system as long as they perceive it to be fair. the same system will always be viewed differently, and the only person who can ultimately decide which is right is the person responsible for managing it.

The fairer the system, the less likely it'll be seen as unfair. There will of course be people who say this or that. But again let me ask you this, what do YOU consider fairer, unique views or total views? Can you come up with an argument on how unique views is less fair than the current system?

the best we can hope for is Tony deciding on how the system will be adjusted to give a more accurate result, and even then people will be able to choose to write and release in a way that is more favourable for their series to get a better placement, just like a few do already. Only a different group of writers will now coincidentally fall into the bracket of having a story that best meets the new criteria, through no intent of their own.

it's a wall of text, because there is basically nothing more worth being said by me on the topic until Tony makes a decision. trending has too many issues that make it a poor system and yet only a select few of those issues are being focused on.

At end of the day it is up to Tony, but as he said, he will come back to this discussion. And what we discuss here will most likely influence his decision. Which is why we should keep this discussion as productive as possible and discuss the points of pros and cons. I would like to hear your and @XianPiete or anyone else on the negatives of my proposal for unique views. (I hope we can set aside pointing fingers at each other and simply discuss the topic at hand on how to make the system better, but we have to accept nothing will ever be perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try)


The other option we can go with is similar to RRL where a novel depends on the last 30 days of trending, so often times new novels will end up on trending due to their growth and old ones will always fall out unless they can maintain crazy growth which is impossible. This way, no novel will spend more than a month or 2 on trending and new novels will always show up.

 

[XianPiete]

I would like to hear your and @XianPiete or anyone else on the negatives of my proposal for unique views. (I hope we can set aside pointing fingers at each other and simply discuss the topic at hand on how to make the system better, but we have to accept nothing will ever be perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try)

As I have said from the beginning, I wouldn't mind doing away with all popularity metrics and making the novels that appear on the front page truly random. It shouldn't be hard to implement and it would allow Novels that have been buried to have a chance for this attention everyone is fighting over. I truly DO NOT care about number one. To prove this point, I didn't post any new chapters here since yesterday. People still read my story though and the average views per chapter are still steadily climbing. I can't help it if people choose to read my story. I spoke with another author recently who is in the top five that has been dealing with similar abuse to what I have received here. Change your metrics to whatever you want, just let me write the way I want to write and release chapters the way I wish to release them. Don't blame me for people choosing not to read your novel. It's not my fault.

 

[lnv]

As I have said from the beginning, I wouldn't mind doing away with all popularity metrics and making the novels that appear on the front page truly random. It shouldn't be hard to implement and it would allow Novels that have been buried to have a chance for this attention everyone is fighting over. I truly DO NOT care about number one. To prove this point, I didn't post any new chapters here since yesterday. People still read my story though and the average views per chapter are still steadily climbing. I can't help it if people choose to read my story. I spoke with another author recently who is in the top five that has been dealing with similar abuse to what I have received here. Change your metrics to whatever you want, just let me write the way I want to write and release chapters the way I wish to release them. Don't blame me for people choosing not to read your novel. It's not my fault.

Sigh... why does this have to turn towards your novel, my novel, whoever's novel. And I don't want you to stop posting chapters or changing your posting style, the OPPOSITE. I want everyone to be able to post however they wish without having to worry about this or that. I don't know why you are taking things personally when I've never made it such...

I would really like if everyone puts pointing fingers aside and comment on each other's suggestions. Nothing else. There is no reason to make this personal.

On the topic of random, I already stated that having a single random novel show up on top that meets a minimum requirement might be something to consider. But that doesn't replace the concept of trending.

If the metrics are going to be changed, everyone should have a say in what they think about it. And more opinions can help show the pros and cons and make a system that is as fair as humanly possible for everyone.

 

[DaoFox]

You don't have a 1 to 1 return regardless of how many chapters someone releases. That is because everyone reads differently, some people read as they come out, others quit midway while some stack chapters, it also depends on WHEN in the day the chapter is published. Releasing multiple chapters per day gives you more views outside of just trending, as I explained, featuring on NU is worth more than trending for now. But end of the day, you still get more views for having multiple chapters, the ratio of so would depend on the story and how many chapters. But it's hard to argue it is anything more than an advantage.





I don't think I've ever argued about the quality of the novels on the trending... if anything, I've defended that aspect and I agree something wouldn't be on trending if it didn't have at least some quality. That said, I think it is hard to argue that those that release multiple times per day have quite an unfair advantage, the 3 advantages I've outlined.




RRL does a system I heard where it depends on 30 days of trending, so it is more about growth over 30 days, thus no one can stay in trending for long. That might also be a good solution for constantly shuffling in fresh titles.




I can't agree here. That sounds like a strawman argument... you are effectively saying it isn't worth wasting time being more fair because 100% fair is never possible, thus we shouldn't bother with 95% fair.

That is why I keep emphasizing the importance of being fair as humanly possible. Not to mention we aren't talking about edge cases which fall through the crack, we are talking about 1% having an unfair advantage over 99%. And it is something that can easily be fixed.

Also, I will note I find it hard to believe a single chapter is 160k words. An author can easily break it up into multiple parts and release it daily at something like 20k words per day. Now to be clear, I don't want authors to change their ways of doing things be it small chapters or long chapters. So I understand someone might want to do 1k chapters while others do 13k chapters, it doesn't matter because sometimes how chapters are divided is part of the author's style. There is a reason why often times authors place the most important punchlines at the end of the chapter, because in doing so it becomes more memorable over something that happens midchapter or beginning of chapter when reader's attention is lower. But I find it hard to believe something that 160k chapters can't be split. To be honest, something that is 160k words SHOULD be split.



As I explained, trending has a purpose. Generally, trending stories have a minimum amount of quality otherwise they wouldn't be there. By promoting trending, those who visit the site can pick a story that fits a minimum quality requirement. When I posted on RRL, a lot of people gave me compliments for how great my grammar was. And I was totally shocked because while I think my grammar is above average, it shouldn't be that great compared to actual books which have editors. Hell, even I could spot my own grammar mistakes after reading (it also didn't help that my grammar check was accidentally off when I wrote my first volume). To that, the response was that there is so much terrible grammar on RRL that compared to them the grammar seems worlds apart. (I didn't know this because I only read novels on the top 3 pages of RRL but I guess that is the case if you go deeper in)

And that is the risk with sites like these. You have a wide range of quality, and many writers don't even have English as their primary language and are just doing it for experience with a foreign language or the like.

This is why trending is important, to push readers towards titles that have at least a minimum quality aspect before they dig deeper into the site. Of course ratings help that as well but it is hard to judge ratings on things that don't have much readers.



Everyone has different preferences, I also don't like things that have too many chapters, and I also don't like too long chapters if nothing happens most of the chapter. Though I don't like too short chapters either. But end of the day, what I like to see from chapters regardless of length is "completion". I want to feel like I got something out of a chapter.

But everyone has preferences, there is nothing wrong with that. Trending though simply looks at popularity, and I don't think you can claim something getting multiple votes is fair.

Imagine during next presidential election, they say "okay, now you can vote up to 5x for your candidate". Sure, not everyone will go vote 5X, so the fall off will be higher as you go along, but it is hard to argue that someone voting 5x has an unfair advantage. You would feel your vote is worth less and it being unfair right? So why is voting multiple times for what is trending any different?



Your session id would stay the same as long as you use same browser and don't clear cookies. And unless you are on dialup or mobile, your IP won't change for months.



I don't think anyone can argue non-unique views are somehow a sign of popularity. By nature, popularity is how many unique people you have. If grandma, grandpa and the rest of your family vote 1,000,000 times for you, that doesn't make you a celebrity.

Now of course there will always be ways to game the system, there is no way around that. BUT, that doesn't mean that SH should facilitate that within itself at the very least.

Even worse, I don't like the aspect of platforms forcibly changing author's styles of writing just to get popularity.



The fairer the system, the less likely it'll be seen as unfair. There will of course be people who say this or that. But again let me ask you this, what do YOU consider fairer, unique views or total views? Can you come up with an argument on how unique views is less fair than the current system?





At end of the day it is up to Tony, but as he said, he will come back to this discussion. And what we discuss here will most likely influence his decision. Which is why we should keep this discussion as productive as possible and discuss the points of pros and cons. I would like to hear your and @XianPiete or anyone else on the negatives of my proposal for unique views. (I hope we can set aside pointing fingers at each other and simply discuss the topic at hand on how to make the system better, but we have to accept nothing will ever be perfect, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try)


The other option we can go with is similar to RRL where a novel depends on the last 30 days of trending, so often times new novels will end up on trending due to their growth and old ones will always fall out unless they can maintain crazy growth which is impossible. This way, no novel will spend more than a month or 2 on trending and new novels will always show up.

most of what I had to say are hypothetical based on my view regarding 1 person trying to decide whether or not something will actually make something fairer, or whether what another says has merit, last times claim was sophism, but apparently now it's defeatism. As long as my view is different to Jemini, I will be attacked with a label that makes me 'the bad guy'. just as he had attacked others for gaming the system.

Please re-read the bit you quoted Jemini, you are changing the meaning of that line to suit your argument, again, I was always talking about the new chapters posted there, and so that line has nothing to do with merely the first 4 chapters of a story, and so have no relation to the drop off that occurs as of "chapter 10". I do bring it up later in the post but that is after moving onto the topic and leaving the previous one. I don't quote you because I am not interested in you, but the discussion.
---

Inv -
Unique views are definitely better than counting replica, I never claimed they are worse than the current non-unique on principle. they are also more useful to the writers for things besides trending such as checking true coverage and reader engagement. But you have to ensure that the implementation does what it is intended to. I do most of my reading on mobile because I am rarely home. the IP will change when you move between regions, the browser and tabs have a habit of forcefully refreshing themselves on top of this, I open a browser clean of cookies for a purpose and close it once done, which will add to the unique view count despite not being a new view at all, and when you combine 3 checks of unique-ness you have to make sure the system knows which to take precedence to determine if its the same view or a new one. get the precedent wrong and you get a bunch of false positives. its part of the solution, but not the solution in itself, the handling is important to make it work.

the crux comes down to the fact that a view does not necessarily mean the chapter was read or that the story is popular. unique views still possess a rather non-specific nature that means we have to associate a page load being equal to someone reading the chapter. if I were to make a comparison, look at YouTube video's, granted the medium is different and so viewership is of a different nature, but they track not only the view, but how long people will watch the video, these are the stats that are valuable as the uploaders know where they are losing people and which parts are getting the most replays. for writers, a page load alone shouldn't be enough to determine a "view" no matter how unique, you should check the person at the very least also reached the bottom of the chapter.

trending is there to check popularity, and unique views will reduce the same persons "vote" showing up more than once. to what extent is this effective? 1 unique view per chapter to keep the counts accurate or 1 unique view to the story as a whole, which will ignore the additional chapters, so less views are measured to 2 series of the same length just because 1 updated faster than the other? and would you say that a series getting 29 unique views on the first chapter alone of a series (having only just seen it for the first time for example) is equal to getting 1 unique view on 29 chapters of the same story. because trending will count the views that pile up on the first chapter equally, despite them not reading any further. can this really be considered popularity? but you can't exclude them because this is a valid metric regarding how many 'people' are reading a story. the same count applied/checked differently affects the result. making a system to benefit the author doesn't mean the system is also benefiting the reader.

for an author the best numbers to know aren't how many views they got, but how many people read their story through. You can "fix" the Trending system to unique views and to ignore release rate as a positive influence. but come the time that the same authors and the same titles remain at the top of the screen for extended periods of time, how many people that are claiming the current system is unfair, will suddenly stop making those claims? regardless of the validity. I'm not saying making the system fairer is a waste of time or that its pointless, but rather that doing so to please people will not produce the anticipated results. people will find flaws in anything to argue its unfairness unless it benefits them.

On ratings -
As much as I dislike Qidian's method of handling things regarding licenses etc, I see merit in having people rate chapters rather than just the story as a whole. I know I tend to remember just the most interesting, busy or high tension scenes of the story, especially so towards the final chapters and a potential rating can suddenly plummet for many stories just because of a poor finish. so come time to "judge" I will have likely forgotten the chapters I didn't quite like, or in my great dislike for the majority of what i read later, may inversely forget that which I enjoyed about the series. I'm sure authors would see more value in rated chapters that forms an overall story rating rather than a stand alone one (when it comes without a paired review) so they know which parts of the story was better received, beyond just being favourited (should this even be cumulative or get averaged too?) or not and whether they have a good read or expectation towards how their reader will react to certain plot developments. though we could just do what Mangadex and others do for series, which is provide both the average rating alongside the Bayesian rating on the title page, though admittedly the results rarely differ by all that much.

as for the political reference, I am not interested in the topic (its a multitude of mess squeezed into one place) as a whole thus prefer to avoid making such comparisons, though I do think using votes as the metric is wrong, perhaps campaign ad count or finance limit would be more appropriate. the 1 candidate can get more out of the their money or spend more trying to get peoples vote. in the end they have only a single chance to win that persons vote come election time and their efforts can still amount to nothing in the end. since spending more doesn't mean higher returns, and ad placements (times of posting chapters) will have varying degrees of success or effectiveness.

 

[Jemini]

As I have said from the beginning, I wouldn't mind doing away with all popularity metrics and making the novels that appear on the front page truly random. It shouldn't be hard to implement and it would allow Novels that have been buried to have a chance for this attention everyone is fighting over. I truly DO NOT care about number one. To prove this point, I didn't post any new chapters here since yesterday. People still read my story though and the average views per chapter are still steadily climbing. I can't help it if people choose to read my story. I spoke with another author recently who is in the top five that has been dealing with similar abuse to what I have received here. Change your metrics to whatever you want, just let me write the way I want to write and release chapters the way I wish to release them. Don't blame me for people choosing not to read your novel. It's not my fault.

Like Inv said, this was never about you personally. This is entirely about the system. At the risk of sounding harsh here, if you truly do not care about your view count then you would not feel threatened enough at having it decrease by a change to the system to start becoming hostile.

We're just trying to have a discussion about what is the best way to accomplish a more fair system. Since you would be the one who's novel currently benefits most from the current system and thus would stand to lose the most from any change to it, your input is particularly valuable on this subject. So, if you can please stop taking it personally and join in on the conversation without becoming sensitive then we would gladly welcome your input.

 

[Jemini]

most of what I had to say are hypothetical based on my view regarding 1 person trying to decide whether or not something will actually make something fairer, or whether what another says has merit, last times claim was sophism, but apparently now it's defeatism. As long as my view is different to Jemini, I will be attacked with a label that makes me 'the bad guy'. just as he had attacked others for gaming the system.

Please re-read the bit you quoted Jemini, you are changing the meaning of that line to suit your argument, again, I was always talking about the new chapters posted there, and so that line has nothing to do with merely the first 4 chapters of a story, and so have no relation to the drop off that occurs as of "chapter 10". I do bring it up later in the post but that is after moving onto the topic and leaving the previous one. I don't quote you because I am not interested in you, but the discussion.

Dude, you posted a wall of text, I skimmed it, that's the natural response people take to things like that.

So, 1st off, the "defetism" label came because, from what I could tell, you seemed to be arguing that because we can never get to a 100% fair system we should just give up on fixing it and stick with the system we have now. If that was not your point, please clarify without a massive meandering wall of text that tries to cover a large number of all conceivable points in a diatribe.

And, again, you seem to be the one trying to make me out to be the bad guy here, please stop. You are also conflating 2 points I made that were very clearly stated as separate points into a single point. Unlike your wall of text, I made my message in bullet points, so that makes it a lot harder to do unless you are doing it intentionally.

I had 2 separate points. 1. Nobody argued it was a 1 to 1 relationship. 2. There is a difference between the drop-off on the first 4 chapters and the drop-off between any randomly selected 4 consecutive chapters after chapter 10. You specifically argued chapters 1-4 in your point you stated, so what do you expect me to say? If you are talking about your table a while back, I believe that was after you specifically tried to insult me again. If you want your arguments taken seriously, you are going to have to stop acting like a rude child and cut the personal victimization and insults all over the place. It doesn't get your arguments listened to.

I will stop shaming you like a child when you stop acting like one. So, please grow up and debate with some tact like an adult.

(Please note, if you were to look back through the logs of this thread, you were the one who brought me up by name in an insulting way first, and all my responses since then have been me calling you out for being rude. You are the bad guy here when you are doing that.)

 

[lnv]

Unique views are definitely better than counting replica, I never claimed they are worse than the current non-unique on principle. they are also more useful to the writers for things besides trending such as checking true coverage and reader engagement.

1. Well it is good to see that we at least agree here.

But you have to ensure that the implementation does what it is intended to. I do most of my reading on mobile because I am rarely home. the IP will change when you move between regions, the browser and tabs have a habit of forcefully refreshing themselves on top of this, I open a browser clean of cookies for a purpose and close it once done, which will add to the unique view count despite not being a new view at all, and when you combine 3 checks of unique-ness you have to make sure the system knows which to take precedence to determine if its the same view or a new one. get the precedent wrong and you get a bunch of false positives. its part of the solution, but not the solution in itself, the handling is important to make it work.

2. Of course it has to count properly, but I wouldn't worry too much about false positives, this isn't a bank.

There are 2 types of storage, session storage and persistent storage. Your session storage is wiped with every close of browser (and might be refreshed on mobile since reason mobile does refresh of tabs is it is closing them to save ram), but persistent storage remains unless you use incognito mode or manually clean them.

As for order of importance: Account > IP > session

the crux comes down to the fact that a view does not necessarily mean the chapter was read or that the story is popular. unique views still possess a rather non-specific nature that means we have to associate a page load being equal to someone reading the chapter. if I were to make a comparison, look at YouTube video's, granted the medium is different and so viewership is of a different nature, but they track not only the view, but how long people will watch the video, these are the stats that are valuable as the uploaders know where they are losing people and which parts are getting the most replays. for writers, a page load alone shouldn't be enough to determine a "view" no matter how unique, you should check the person at the very least also reached the bottom of the chapter.

3. Seeing how long people take to reach the bottom of a chapter is definitely an interesting thing that should be added. Though I would set a minimum of 1 minute cause there will always be someone going "first" by scrolling to the comments.

That said, this feature is useful not just for authors but for readers too. It would be interesting if each reader can get an average read time calculation so that they know how long it'll take them to read a chapter. I know my browser has reader mode that gives me an average time, but that time is based on overall average, it'll be nice to have a personal average.

Though I don't think it is necessary to include it for the sake of tracking for trending. That may complicate things more than necessary. For one, if a person visits once and doesn't return or multiple times, the uniqueness addresses that in itself.

trending is there to check popularity, and unique views will reduce the same persons "vote" showing up more than once. to what extent is this effective? 1 unique view per chapter to keep the counts accurate or 1 unique view to the story as a whole, which will ignore the additional chapters, so less views are measured to 2 series of the same length just because 1 updated faster than the other? and would you say that a series getting 29 unique views on the first chapter alone of a series (having only just seen it for the first time for example) is equal to getting 1 unique view on 29 chapters of the same story. because trending will count the views that pile up on the first chapter equally, despite them not reading any further. can this really be considered popularity? but you can't exclude them because this is a valid metric regarding how many 'people' are reading a story. the same count applied/checked differently affects the result. making a system to benefit the author doesn't mean the system is also benefiting the reader.

4. 1 unique view per story, just to be clear that is for trending only. Each chapter will still have their own unique views for author's purposes.

If someone doesn't read further, that is fine, because it'll work itself out over time. If you really want, you can set it that it'll only start counting story views once someone went past the 1st chapter, but I don't think it is necessary...

for an author the best numbers to know aren't how many views they got, but how many people read their story through. You can "fix" the Trending system to unique views and to ignore release rate as a positive influence. but come the time that the same authors and the same titles remain at the top of the screen for extended periods of time, how many people that are claiming the current system is unfair, will suddenly stop making those claims? regardless of the validity. I'm not saying making the system fairer is a waste of time or that its pointless, but rather that doing so to please people will not produce the anticipated results. people will find flaws in anything to argue its unfairness unless it benefits them.

5. You can only really address the obvious shortfalls, not every edge scenario as much as we want to. That said, for titles remaining a long period of time, that is also a consideration and the alternative to the unique trending is the RRL solution where it checks your growth rate over 30 days. This way, no novel will stay on trending for longer than a month or 2.

On ratings -
As much as I dislike Qidian's method of handling things regarding licenses etc, I see merit in having people rate chapters rather than just the story as a whole. I know I tend to remember just the most interesting, busy or high tension scenes of the story, especially so towards the final chapters and a potential rating can suddenly plummet for many stories just because of a poor finish. so come time to "judge" I will have likely forgotten the chapters I didn't quite like, or in my great dislike for the majority of what i read later, may inversely forget that which I enjoyed about the series. I'm sure authors would see more value in rated chapters that forms an overall story rating rather than a stand alone one (when it comes without a paired review) so they know which parts of the story was better received, beyond just being favourited (should this even be cumulative or get averaged too?) or not and whether they have a good read or expectation towards how their reader will react to certain plot developments.

6. I am all for rated chapters, BUT the ratings for those should be private for both the authors and reader. I'm worried that an author might lose motivation. To be honest, maybe keeping it simple of like, love and dislike might be more simpler. And this should be independent from favorites. Though I would require a short comment for dislikes so that the author can grasp more criticism and understand where they are going wrong in particularly, a lot can happen in a chapter.

though we could just do what Mangadex and others do for series, which is provide both the average rating alongside the Bayesian rating on the title page, though admittedly the results rarely differ by all that much.

7. Anidb's bayesian rating was at first not too far off the normal rating, these days you often see quite a difference. I think mangadex is simply too new to have accurate data yet or their weights aren't properly tuned yet.

as for the political reference, I am not interested in the topic (its a multitude of mess squeezed into one place) as a whole thus prefer to avoid making such comparisons, though I do think using votes as the metric is wrong, perhaps campaign ad count or finance limit would be more appropriate. the 1 candidate can get more out of the their money or spend more trying to get peoples vote. in the end they have only a single chance to win that persons vote come election time and their efforts can still amount to nothing in the end. since spending more doesn't mean higher returns, and ad placements (times of posting chapters) will have varying degrees of success or effectiveness.

I know my reference was somewhat off, I just wanted to look at it from a different perspective cause sometimes when talking about an issue we get lost in the debate itself and lose objective. I wanted to look outside a different but similar issue to see this debate more objectively. I didn't mean to bring in many blood sucking creatures into this debate intentionally...

 

[Itisn1tmyname]

Soo, after after @XianPiete made an announcement in his newest chapter that they were being "accused of posting too frequently here on Scribble Hub in order to cheat their way to the top of the trending novels list" I found my way here and after reading through this clusterfuck of a thread I'd like to add my opinion as a reader.



First things first, for the sake of the argument it's quite important to clarify what we are talking about. Why do I think that is important? Well, when reading this thread my mental image was of this:

- in other words, "Trending", on the front page - the first nine (8 of them displayed, one additional after clicking ">") entries of the Series Ranking page, sorted by popularity, ordered daily.
Why is this a problem? Well in the discussion it was repeatedly mentioned that XianPiete's work took number one in the rankings. Villainous Daughter is number five on the front page (as in daily rankings). Where it is number one, is the Series Ranking ordered weekly.

That is to say, my mental image while reading this thread and what actually was talked about while I read it, are two different things. Sure, both of these rankings would quite probably change if we implemented a different system to determine what exactly is "popular", but it is important that both sides of an argument are actually aware what the other side is talking about or otherwise they will just repeatedly misunderstand each other.
Which, to be direct, has happened far too often over the course of this discussion. Maybe not only for this particular reason but also because some people here seem to only selectively take what is being said and morph it so that it automatically opposes them as they seem emotionally laden and bent on getting offended.



Which brings me to my second point: If you are emotionally charged - if you are hot-headed, being hasty in your response, if the argument left you angry at the stupidity of your opponent; take your time and cool the fuck down. Take a hot bath, relax, get some tea, throw some Valium - doesn't matter how you do it but please get a clear head before continuing the argument. This whole thread could be so much shorter if people actually took their time to understand what the opposition is saying.

No, XianPiete, this discussion was not about you - you made it about you by repeatedly misinterpreting what was being said. I assume you were already emotionally charged when you went into this argument, probably because you kept getting harassed for being high up the rankings, saw a post about the rankings being unfair, and automatically assumed it was about you. Originally, it was not.
Your input here, as someone high on the list who probably deserves a spot high on the list, is quite valuable. Because, and Tony admitted that much, the current system is a stop-gap measure and will be changed. It is in your best interest to actually join the discussion and discuss how that change may be implemented without affecting stories like yours too much. Though, considering your story probably does deserve a high place the new system probably wouldn't affect you all that much either - you did say number one is of no interest to you. So if you feel you have nothing to add to the actual discussion, feel free to just lurk ^-^

This point is just as important to some other people here, but I actually wanted to avoid naming names, so please be responsible and ask yourself whether or not you are calm enough to continue the discussion. XianPiete, I am sorry that I called you out and ranted - maybe I should have taken my own advice - but as the one that actually lead me here because you felt wronged, let me tell you: you may have been wronged, but you are taking it out on the wrong people. This thread originally was no attack on you. Its subject does affect you, but you will be able to do much more if you take your time to calm down.



So, after establishing that a) we should make sure to be on the same page of what exactly we are talking about and b) all participants of the discussion should take their time to make sure they are calm, collected and as objective as possible before continuing to argue (reading previous comments a second time after getting offended to make sure you actually understood your opponent's points does help as well) - after establishing these two points now would be the time to actually introduce my own opinion but I think this post is getting long enough so I will split it.

Don't want people to miss my point because they just skimmed it :3

 

[DaoFox]

Soo, after after @XianPiete made an announcement in his newest chapter that they were being "accused of posting too frequently here on Scribble Hub in order to cheat their way to the top of the trending novels list" I found my way here and after reading through this clusterfuck of a thread I'd like to add my opinion as a reader.



First things first, for the sake of the argument it's quite important to clarify what we are talking about. Why do I think that is important? Well, when reading this thread my mental image was of this:

View attachment 956

- in other words, "Trending", on the front page - the first nine (8 of them displayed, one additional after clicking ">") entries of the Series Ranking page, sorted by popularity, ordered daily.
Why is this a problem? Well in the discussion it was repeatedly mentioned that XianPiete's work took number one in the rankings. Villainous Daughter is number five on the front page (as in daily rankings). Where it is number one, is the Series Ranking ordered weekly.

View attachment 958 View attachment 957

That is to say, my mental image while reading this thread and what actually was talked about while I read it, are two different things. Sure, both of these rankings would quite probably change if we implemented a different system to determine what exactly is "popular", but it is important that both sides of an argument are actually aware what the other side is talking about or otherwise they will just repeatedly misunderstand each other.
Which, to be direct, has happened far too often over the course of this discussion. Maybe not only for this particular reason but also because some people here seem to only selectively take what is being said and morph it so that it automatically opposes them as they seem emotionally laden and bent on getting offended.



Which brings me to my second point: If you are emotionally charged - if you are hot-headed, being hasty in your response, if the argument left you angry at the stupidity of your opponent; take your time and cool the fuck down. Take a hot bath, relax, get some tea, throw some Valium - doesn't matter how you do it but please get a clear head before continuing the argument. This whole thread could be so much shorter if people actually took their time to understand what the opposition is saying.

No, XianPiete, this discussion was not about you - you made it about you by repeatedly misinterpreting what was being said. I assume you were already emotionally charged when you went into this argument, probably because you kept getting harassed for being high up the rankings, saw a post about the rankings being unfair, and automatically assumed it was about you. Originally, it was not.
Your input here, as someone high on the list who probably deserves a spot high on the list, is quite valuable. Because, and Tony admitted that much, the current system is a stop-gap measure and will be changed. It is in your best interest to actually join the discussion and discuss how that change may be implemented without affecting stories like yours too much. Though, considering your story probably does deserve a high place the new system probably wouldn't affect you all that much either - you did say number one is of no interest to you. So if you feel you have nothing to add to the actual discussion, feel free to just lurk ^-^

This point is just as important to some other people here, but I actually wanted to avoid naming names, so please be responsible and ask yourself whether or not you are calm enough to continue the discussion. XianPiete, I am sorry that I called you out and ranted - maybe I should have taken my own advice - but as the one that actually lead me here because you felt wronged, let me tell you: you may have been wronged, but you are taking it out on the wrong people. This thread originally was no attack on you. Its subject does affect you, but you will be able to do much more if you take your time to calm down.



So, after establishing that a) we should make sure to be on the same page of what exactly we are talking about and b) all participants of the discussion should take their time to make sure they are calm, collected and as objective as possible before continuing to argue (reading previous comments a second time after getting offended to make sure you actually understood your opponent's points does help as well) - after establishing these two points now would be the time to actually introduce my own opinion but I think this post is getting long enough so I will split it.

Don't want people to miss my point because they just skimmed it :3

Regarding the mention of xians story, this was mostly occurring yesterday during which his story had held the position, which had obviously changed once midnight/the day passed. So the issue is less about who was topping the ranks, but whether or not a suggestion towards fixing the system was being taken into consideration. The table I posted was the same, based on the previous days positions and even the numbers will be invalid now they have updated. Do make sure to post your opinions, especially if you disagree, even if someone tries to shut you down for it.

 

[Itisn1tmyname]

Getting to the actual argument. I have visited both the front page "Trending" rider (picture 1 above) and the actual Series Ranking site quite frequently - whenever I was looking for a new series to read, in fact. Since the Series Ranking page lists all published series and sorts them according to a limited amount of options available at the top of the page, I won't be talking about it.
The "Trending" rider only has 9 spots, the page is endless and while I may never actually get to the last page of the site while looking for a new series, I don't often stay on the first page either. In fact, when looking for a new series I first visit front page (because 9 choices are quickly discarded), then I make a custom search, and only if I found that I am not sure what I am looking for next (i.e if I am feeling lucky) I will actually visit the Series Ranking. If it's come to that, I'll take my time and browse. Open multiple new tabs, going through multiple pages of the site, bookmarking some stories, finally finding "the one" to read for now while getting some others to read later.

I am not at all that good with stats and quite honestly, how we get to a better system of ordering trending series is a question I will not be able to answer. I can, however, highlight what I am looking for in a good "Trending" system and what I think is wrong with the current one.



As a reader - as opposed to an author, who wants the trending for new readers (and a sense of accomplishment?) - I mainly look at the "Trending" rider to look for new series. In other words, while an author would want their story to remain trending as long as possible to get the utmost coverage, I only need a story in trending until I know it - until I know whether it is new reading material or not.
What I am looking for, in other words, is good stories that I do not know yet. Since it's "Trending", the genre should not be taken into consideration, unless you have a general Trending and multiple other ones for the most popular genres or tags (since you wouldn't be able to fit all genres and/or tags on the front page, you could use a rotating system - have one general Trending and then below 2 others - a genre, a tag - that rotate daily. Just an idea)

In other words, two criteria: 1) I do not know the story yet and 2) it's a good one. Now, how to solve problem one is probably actually harder than I can imagine, but I do have a few ideas.
Let readers "hide" stories they already know manually, and runners-up automatically fill the next slots? That requires manual action from the reader, and while I wouldn't mind it there should be better solutions.
Automatically hide stories that are on the reading list of a reader? That does not account for stories the reader already knows but doesn't follow (either because they judged they didn't want to read it or because they read it on another site). I would need a second list (rather, fifth by now but second for most other readers) for stories that I have "seen but don't want to show up on Trending". SH has the option to add and edit reading lists already, but the solution is quite inelegant.
Get stories that most readers do not know yet? Well yes, but actually no. Without readers, how do you judge that the story is good? So it needs at least some readers to land on Trending. I am all for less known stories to land on Trending, but as soon as they land on Trending and I learn of them, they do not fulfill criteria 1) anymore. In other words, the List should still adapt to the viewer, as it does with the first two ideas.
As for how to judge a story as "good" for the second criteria, that's a problem for the stats guys I guess. But since we were on the topic of the Trending rider adjusting to the viewer, an option would be to "hide" stories the reader rated lowly, for a start.

Right now, the "Trending" rider is a carbon copy of the first nine entries of the daily Series ranking champs. What I am suggesting, in short, is that stories to be shown in Trending, while being ranked like on the Ranking page, do not show entries that you know will not be of interest to the reader viewing the "Trending" rider. In other words, if I am already reading entries 1-7 of the ranking, show entries 8-16 instead, something of that measure. Or, make a new criterion that judges a story as "not well-known but good" and display the best ones of these - possibly still with the option to hide entries the viewer already knows.



Now that I've talked about what I am looking for in a working Trending system, let's get to what I think is wrong with the current one. This part of my opinion does affect the Series Ranking as well, since right now Trending is directly taken from Series Ranking. However, I am currently only talking about Trending - while the Series Ranking should be adjusted as well, it is not current focus of my point. While the topic of the discussion is much broader (see quote), I chose to focus on this point in particular. Topic is that the current default sorting by total views is faulty, and I think this is especially so for Trending.

Currently, the trending lists, tag rankings and series finder—indeed, pretty much everything on this site—are by default sorted by total views.

For ease of navigation, let me once again include this image:

- which is missing its last entry, World of Women, but anyway. What is wrong with this ranking? Well, besides showing us that Ace is a great author, it shows us Ace is a great author. 3 out of 9 entries are from the same author. While that may fly in the unlimited space of the Series Ranking page, Trending currently only has 9 spaces. Let's be honest, if I know one story from an author and like it there is a good chance that I will come to know their other stories too, so there is no need for more than the objectively best story of an author to show up here. Well, or that would be the case if not for: "two criteria: 1) I do not know the story yet and 2) it's a good one". In other words, what should show up is the best story of an author that the viewer does not know yet. Assuming I read EDE and TTE, CORE is the sole story that should show up.

Which brings me to the next point. I did read EDE and TTE - long before Scribble Hub went online. I also knew of World Keeper and World of Women before I saw them here. They are longer works with pre-existing fanbase that are transferring prior chapters over to Scribble Hub. I am not saying they do not deserve their Ranking, but they should have a penalty to getting Trending. Why not completely ban them from Trending? Well, I actually think WoW (kek) is doing great where it currently is - ninth spot, I don't see it but it still gets new readers. People are critical with WoW. It does deserve some love. Additionally, if we implement that Trending adjusts to the viewer then I wouldn't see it anyways so it could be even higher and I would not see it since I know it, but other people would, getting it new readers.
True, if there was a penalty for older stories transferring over, Wow might not even make it ninth spot - currently. But as was said previously by someone else, a good ranking system regulates itself. Good stories will get better spots, and I do believe WoW is good, therefore it should make the shot.
So, stories transferring over should have it harder to land on Trending - especially if many people already know about them (WK, EDE, TTE). Which does lead back to the point: "Get stories that most readers do not know yet".



Which, for now, concludes my opinion. I do think that sorting the Series Ranking by total views is flawed and should be changed as well, but solving that problem is another shoe entirely ^-^

(And if Ace ever reads this: I am sooo fricking sorry for even suggesting that your stories do not belong on the front page of Scribble Hub, but me loving your stories is one thing and the Trending problem is another :3)

 

[Itisn1tmyname]

Regarding the mention of xians story, this was mostly occurring yesterday during which his story had held the position, which had obviously changed once midnight/the day passed.

Oh well, then what was being talked about and my mental image probably actually aligned and I just didn't know because when I checked it was already different. Thanks for the clarification!
Still, being clear about what exactly one is talking about is important :3

 

[XianPiete]

Soo, after after @XianPiete made an announcement in his newest chapter that they were being "accused of posting too frequently here on Scribble Hub in order to cheat their way to the top of the trending novels list" I found my way here and after reading through this clusterfuck of a thread I'd like to add my opinion as a reader.

If you go back and read my posts here in this "CF thread" you won't find me in opposition to the idea of changing the trending system. I am in no way emotional about that.

What my problem is and what I have had to repeatedly defend was the idea that I am manipulating scores, or somehow "gaming the system" by writing my story. In the original post and in other places in the thread people brought up the star system. To which I had to point out that the longer you are at the top of the rankings, the lower your score gets as jealous authors and people who are angry that your story is on the front page while their "better" story is not, will punitively throw out lower scores.

Just to be clear, I have no emotional attachment to having my story on the front page, I just like to write. I don't want to have to waste my time coming into a thread on the forum to defend myself from unfair criticisms. I don't write my chapters to manipulate systems. I don't break up my chapters to game a system. I don't post a lot to "get ahead". I just enjoy writing and get inspired from time to time during the day when I have time to write. Yet, in this thread, myself, and the other authors on the trending list are being accused of exactly that. My novel was number one here on the site not by my choice, but by the people that chose to look at my story. I shouldn't be accused of cheating and I shouldn't have to defend myself as an author for my word counts per chapter. I don't believe that I am being unreasonable to ask that people refrain from these types of generalized character assassinations.

Be proud of your work, don't tear down someone else's unfairly.

 

[lnv]

@Itisn1tmyname - so what you are saying is that you would prefer similar to the RRL system where it would look at the growth of a novel over 30 days. In that way, the trending list will always remain fresh and new novels would have an advantage over old as old novels will not grow as quickly as new ones, so no novel will remain for over a month or 2 realistically. Am I interpreting correctly?

Also, the idea of removing those novels from the trending list that are 1) On the reading list, 2) Marked as not interested or 3) Already rated/reviewed is definitely an interesting idea to implement.

 

[Eukro]

It is not a matter of short chapters being lower quality, it is a matter that a 4 star story that posts 1300 word chapters beasts a 4.8 star story that posts 4000 word chapters. I think the 4.8 star story should beat the 4 star story, chapter length has nothing to do with it, but unfortunately in the current system the chapter length actually does have a big influence in favor of shorter chapters.

Hi, I'm more of a reader than a writer, but I want to throw in my two cents.

X.P. is an incredible writer and I personally enjoy his writing. I mean, do you see how much he writes each day for free? On top of that, he's very kind to anyone who needs help writing on Discord. He is incredibly positive and always does his best to encourage people to write. I love his stories, I love his style and the shorter chapters make it easier to read at work. When he posted the link to this thread. I assumed I would find a silly cat fight, but instead, it was just what he said: People are accusing him of cheating.

When I clicked through the trending stories I only see X.P. having a high chapters per week. Ace does 5-10 chapter dumps for his stories one day a week when his patreon needs to be restocked and then there are a few other stories migrating over once in a while. Only X.P. is consistent with his active posting. If you aren't insinuating it's him that you all mean, I find that really hard to believe.

I don't see him defending the current system in this thread at all. I only see him having to defend himself from accusations of cheating. It's wrong and you should reread what he has written in this thread. The guy isn't cheating, he just has a passion for writing.

 

[FriendlyDragon]

I feel like this discussion has veered off topic. It’s about changing the system. Xian didn’t “game the system” so to speak; rather it would better to say that Xian’s publishing schedule greatly benefits from how the system works now. He isn’t doing this intentionally but it just happens and this is why the system needs a change. I’ve always had problems with the system because of this. People who upload chapters constantly, sometimes multiple chapters a day, are more likely to gain views. This isn’t an opinion. This is a fact. If a person uploads more frequently, regardless of how long the chapter is, it will show up more often on the front page of Scribble Hub in the new updates section. It will also show up more constantly on the front page of Novel Updates. This isn’t to say that the people are writing lesser quality or that the people that are publishing less have better stories. It’s just that people aren’t given an equal chance at exposure with the current way things are set up. And less exposure means a lower chance at being on the front page of trending.

 

[NiQuinn]

@Tony @Aster I'll leave it for both of you to decide if this thread suggestion/rec has the potential to devolve further off topic.

 

[DaoFox]

Getting to the actual argument. I have visited both the front page "Trending" rider (picture 1 above) and the actual Series Ranking site quite frequently - whenever I was looking for a new series to read, in fact. Since the Series Ranking page lists all published series and sorts them according to a limited amount of options available at the top of the page, I won't be talking about it.
The "Trending" rider only has 9 spots, the page is endless and while I may never actually get to the last page of the site while looking for a new series, I don't often stay on the first page either. In fact, when looking for a new series I first visit front page (because 9 choices are quickly discarded), then I make a custom search, and only if I found that I am not sure what I am looking for next (i.e if I am feeling lucky) I will actually visit the Series Ranking. If it's come to that, I'll take my time and browse. Open multiple new tabs, going through multiple pages of the site, bookmarking some stories, finally finding "the one" to read for now while getting some others to read later.

I am not at all that good with stats and quite honestly, how we get to a better system of ordering trending series is a question I will not be able to answer. I can, however, highlight what I am looking for in a good "Trending" system and what I think is wrong with the current one.



As a reader - as opposed to an author, who wants the trending for new readers (and a sense of accomplishment?) - I mainly look at the "Trending" rider to look for new series. In other words, while an author would want their story to remain trending as long as possible to get the utmost coverage, I only need a story in trending until I know it - until I know whether it is new reading material or not.
What I am looking for, in other words, is good stories that I do not know yet. Since it's "Trending", the genre should not be taken into consideration, unless you have a general Trending and multiple other ones for the most popular genres or tags (since you wouldn't be able to fit all genres and/or tags on the front page, you could use a rotating system - have one general Trending and then below 2 others - a genre, a tag - that rotate daily. Just an idea)

In other words, two criteria: 1) I do not know the story yet and 2) it's a good one. Now, how to solve problem one is probably actually harder than I can imagine, but I do have a few ideas.
Let readers "hide" stories they already know manually, and runners-up automatically fill the next slots? That requires manual action from the reader, and while I wouldn't mind it there should be better solutions.
Automatically hide stories that are on the reading list of a reader? That does not account for stories the reader already knows but doesn't follow (either because they judged they didn't want to read it or because they read it on another site). I would need a second list (rather, fifth by now but second for most other readers) for stories that I have "seen but don't want to show up on Trending". SH has the option to add and edit reading lists already, but the solution is quite inelegant.
Get stories that most readers do not know yet? Well yes, but actually no. Without readers, how do you judge that the story is good? So it needs at least some readers to land on Trending. I am all for less known stories to land on Trending, but as soon as they land on Trending and I learn of them, they do not fulfill criteria 1) anymore. In other words, the List should still adapt to the viewer, as it does with the first two ideas.
As for how to judge a story as "good" for the second criteria, that's a problem for the stats guys I guess. But since we were on the topic of the Trending rider adjusting to the viewer, an option would be to "hide" stories the reader rated lowly, for a start.

Right now, the "Trending" rider is a carbon copy of the first nine entries of the daily Series ranking champs. What I am suggesting, in short, is that stories to be shown in Trending, while being ranked like on the Ranking page, do not show entries that you know will not be of interest to the reader viewing the "Trending" rider. In other words, if I am already reading entries 1-7 of the ranking, show entries 8-16 instead, something of that measure. Or, make a new criterion that judges a story as "not well-known but good" and display the best ones of these - possibly still with the option to hide entries the viewer already knows.



Now that I've talked about what I am looking for in a working Trending system, let's get to what I think is wrong with the current one. This part of my opinion does affect the Series Ranking as well, since right now Trending is directly taken from Series Ranking. However, I am currently only talking about Trending - while the Series Ranking should be adjusted as well, it is not current focus of my point. While the topic of the discussion is much broader (see quote), I chose to focus on this point in particular. Topic is that the current default sorting by total views is faulty, and I think this is especially so for Trending.


For ease of navigation, let me once again include this image:

View attachment 959

- which is missing its last entry, World of Women, but anyway. What is wrong with this ranking? Well, besides showing us that Ace is a great author, it shows us Ace is a great author. 3 out of 9 entries are from the same author. While that may fly in the unlimited space of the Series Ranking page, Trending currently only has 9 spaces. Let's be honest, if I know one story from an author and like it there is a good chance that I will come to know their other stories too, so there is no need for more than the objectively best story of an author to show up here. Well, or that would be the case if not for: "two criteria: 1) I do not know the story yet and 2) it's a good one". In other words, what should show up is the best story of an author that the viewer does not know yet. Assuming I read EDE and TTE, CORE is the sole story that should show up.

Which brings me to the next point. I did read EDE and TTE - long before Scribble Hub went online. I also knew of World Keeper and World of Women before I saw them here. They are longer works with pre-existing fanbase that are transferring prior chapters over to Scribble Hub. I am not saying they do not deserve their Ranking, but they should have a penalty to getting Trending. Why not completely ban them from Trending? Well, I actually think WoW (kek) is doing great where it currently is - ninth spot, I don't see it but it still gets new readers. People are critical with WoW. It does deserve some love. Additionally, if we implement that Trending adjusts to the viewer then I wouldn't see it anyways so it could be even higher and I would not see it since I know it, but other people would, getting it new readers.
True, if there was a penalty for older stories transferring over, Wow might not even make it ninth spot - currently. But as was said previously by someone else, a good ranking system regulates itself. Good stories will get better spots, and I do believe WoW is good, therefore it should make the shot.
So, stories transferring over should have it harder to land on Trending - especially if many people already know about them (WK, EDE, TTE). Which does lead back to the point: "Get stories that most readers do not know yet".



Which, for now, concludes my opinion. I do think that sorting the Series Ranking by total views is flawed and should be changed as well, but solving that problem is another shoe entirely ^-^

(And if Ace ever reads this: I am sooo fricking sorry for even suggesting that your stories do not belong on the front page of Scribble Hub, but me loving your stories is one thing and the Trending problem is another :3)

It's a good idea, but sorta feels like trending got crossed with recommendations somewhere. As for the stats, these would ultimately make it so only signed in users, or people who never clear their session would benefit from the filtering. Since unsigned guests would receive the default list anyways, regardless of if the individual has already read the top listed series.

Your system would demand of course that unique views are recorded so that the filtering can be applied, but there are plenty of cases where knowing of a series doesn't mean that you have kept up with it or haven't actually forgotten about it despite it being in your reading library etc.

Right now, @lnv's unique view system would require a separate handling of views from a daily view, when one counts and the other acts as a checkbox per person that is ticked once they view a specific story during that day, week and month. With it only un-ticking once that day, week or month passes to allow a new valid count. Otherwise the Same persons daily views would accrue more than a single view count during a trending week/month.

 

[Scribbler]