Nevill
Arcane
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2009
- Messages
- 11,211
Amusingly enough, SV has the exact same problem, though for different reasons. They have a flourishing community of fanfics with a few Original quests that rarely survive. Their problems come from overabundance of content stiffling some new and unique works that are struggling to build a readership.
Their discussion thread is somewhat fascinating. Warning, WALLS UPON WALLS of text.
I think Rihaku has managed to identify the problem:
Their discussion thread is somewhat fascinating. Warning, WALLS UPON WALLS of text.
I think Rihaku has managed to identify the problem:
Obviously, not all of the points apply to us, but looking at how much discussion his quests generate, I tend to agree.Rihaku said:Okay, on the matter at hand, encouraging original content. This is an extremely difficult task because quest authors, like anyone else, have access to all the entertainment media available on the internet. It's very easy for an author to get bored or discouraged (or both) and just give up. Combine that with writer's block, which can affect even the highest-paid professional authors, and you have a massive productivity hump to overcome.
Cetash's general-analysis coverage is much more on-point, and the context gorge is a huge problem for original quest authors. If we consider what a quest author is asking a player to do - to check in, and post, consistently, about a story - we get an understanding of how great the difficulty is. Any consistent action that requires some level of effort is basically a habit, and we all know how hard it is to make habits stick.
There are a lot of things that have to go right for any quest to be successful.
1. The thread itself needs to be appealing enough for people to click on it.
2. The OP has to be engaging enough for people to get invested, at least a little.
3. And then the actual hard part begins: sustaining momentum. If you want a consistent readerbase, you have to consistent yourself. Just like Wildbow can't take a vacation, you have to acknowledge that any lapse from a consistent and speedy (once every day is ideal, every two days is workable, every four days very difficult) update schedule will result in a substantial loss of reader activity. You can make a slow-and-consistent update schedule work, but you will see much less participation per update than for an equal number of words released quickly.
4. Even quests with a strong start can gasp and stutter at 3. And releasing a large number of words quickly is very, very hard, even with maximum motivation. Typically in order to build a substantial readerbase you will need consistent, fast, quality updates every 1-2 days for at least 3-4 weeks. Many quests won't see a true foundation until 6-8 weeks. If you're not fast and good, your readership will go find other things to do. If you are fast and good but take even a week's break, your readership will fall off 20-50%, and the compounding nature of activity means your quest activity will fall off 40-70%.
5. This makes author motivation the central bottleneck. Readership statistics impact content productivity inasmuch as they affect author motivation; as Ralson notes, even one voter would be enough for a true Mind of Steel to keep writing. But anyone with a Mind of Steel would be off busy running a Fortune 500 company. Writers are just people.
Even authors that attract a large audience with fast, competent updates that are long enough to overcome the context gorge can lose half of their quest activity with even a 4-day break. Plus, it's seen as passe for content producers to acknowledge that there is a link between readership and productivity (just look at what people are saying about me!), even though for many writers and artists this link is very strong. These combined factors (1-5) are the source of your stark statistics, Cetash. Even factors 1-2 are extremely strong filters behind which 90% of original content does not survive. A great OP with a less-than-gripping thread title will be running uphill during its critical early stages, and human psychology means that there is no reliably "gripping" title (Besides 14 Weird Ways for This Old Trick to Lose Weight, of course).