(no subject)

[farla]

So I've given 686 reviews. I have no idea how many stories were deleted over this, because a lot of people did the delete/repost thing and some people who are brighter than them may be waiting until the month is over to repost, so even going through the links wouldn't tell me much.

Normally I stalk the Just In page for this, but this month I've been behind. The major thing I noticed from that is the lack of reviews. Aside from attention whoring submit-an-OC fics, most had few to no reviews. As a number of newbies reviewed their story while signed in, I'm suspicious about how many anonymous reviews were done by cleverer authors. This is kind of depressing. I'm not even sure if I can say that this is a problem on the reviewers' side, because god damn do most of these fics suck. Looking for even mediocre stories is an exercise in tedium, and I can't help but wonder how many people are actually reading.

Of the 686, 370 of them got the dialogue paragraph. That's not counting the number of stories bad enough for me to just tell them to get a beta reader, yell at them for writing songfic or anything else that made me ragequit early rather than list errors, and there's also a number where was no dialogue to screw up. In fairness, a number of them had what looked like errors as opposed to systematically doing it wrong, but still. I spam the dialogue bit constantly and I just did NaRe a few months ago, I'm not really sure what more I could do. I guess actually reply to everyone who PMs me about "omg long paragraph is looooong" and try to talk them through it would be the next step in futility, but fuck that.

And the thing is, until more people do it and readers can get used to seeing how it works, individual authors will still struggle with the explanation and new authors will keep making the same mistakes. It's one of those tipping point problems.

We really need some sort of reviewing/betaing movement that doesn't involve me doing all of the work.

Comments

[simon-alexander.livejournal.com]

I will stand with you in this movement!

[farla.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[negrek.livejournal.com]

It makes me think back to the days when I was first getting into the fandom. It's really hard to separate what actually happened from what's being distorted by the nostalgia goggles. Review counts were generally low back then too--most new stories didn't get more than one or two unless they were by someone popular/of a current fad-type/about a popular ship. So the blanket amount of reading and reviewing probably hasn't changed much. (It's so strange to think that I started doing this going on eight years ago.)

On the other hand, it never seemed like the "Just In"s were *that* bad. My standards were quite different then, of course, but it seemed like I could always find at least two stories on the Just In page in a given day that I would be happy to sit down and read a chapter of, even considering that I ignored the canon character stories. I mean, they were bad, but I'm pretty sure even back then I didn't put up with total incoherence or talking heads. But who knows? It also feels like there were fewer stories getting posted each day in general.

I'm always being tempted to dive back into the FFN archive and try to actually look at trends in the kinds of stories being posted, the kinds of reviews being posted, and so on. Arrgh, if only I didn't have so many other things that I'm always tempted to do.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Hm, I guess it's hard for me to have a good idea what regular numbers of reviews are. I'm going to check through the older pages tomorrow and try to get a sample.

The quality is definitely worse. I mean, what originally gave me the idea for NaRe was that I went through reviewing the whole Just In page a few times, and I considered finding only two or three decent stories out of the twenty-five to be a bit disappointing back then.

This month nineteen stories total qualified as decent enough for the C2, and large numbers were outright unreadable.

[purplekitte.livejournal.com]

I'm in different fandoms but I have found my and my friends' review numbers to have gone down over the years. Particularly, I'm not getting nearly the number of reviews right when I post something from people refreshing the Just In page. Not that I ever got many and maybe it's a matter of which fandoms are all the rage at the moment, but I'd noticed it too.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Part of it obviously varies by fandom, but I don't think that explains all of it. Looking at LJ's own terrible review culture, I wonder how much is that reviews are ending up the province of newbies, so an established fandom ends up with more and more people who read but don't comment, or only comment on the few things everyone else is? (And then there's worse and worse writing that never gets called on, and then people bitch about how hard it is to find decent fanfic and stop reading.)