eve11 | Teaspoon data

I has it.

I am still navigating it. At the outset, I was curious about reviews. 87% of the stories on Teaspoon have at least one review (29732 out of 34145 stories). In comparison, 90% of the DW stories on FF.net have at least one review (40590 out of 44917).

There are 235262 reviews on Teaspoon (likely more now, as the scraping is a few hours old), and 550124 reviews on DW FF.net.

The 5-number summary of the number of reviews per story:

DW FF.net:
summary(story$reviews)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
   0.00    2.00    4.00   12.25   10.00 1710.00 

Teaspoon:
summary(story$reviews)
    Min.  1st Qu.   Median     Mean  3rd Qu.     Max. 
   0.000    1.000    3.000    6.888    6.000 4360.000*

On the whole it looks like Teaspooners may be stingier, but I think also that FF.net may have a higher probability of readers leaving negative reviews than Teaspoon. I'd have to take a sample and read them to find out.

One thing that I have for Teaspoon and not for FF.net is the dates of the reviews. So I can look at trends in when reviews are given vs. publish dates. The 5-number summary of the number of days between the initial publish date and the date of a given review is:

summary(reviews$afterpub)
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
    0.0     1.0    14.0   136.4   116.0  3451.0

So this is saying that 50% of the reviews that are in the database were given within two weeks of the initial publish date of the story. There is a big tail, but this also accounts for multi-chapter stories that are being updated in progress. I don't have the update times of the individual chapters.

But I also looked at the number of reviews vs last update time. Now, last update time can be misleading because authors tweak their stories without necessarily adding content (ETA: actually, I'm not sure now what an update means for a 1-chapter story. I've edited my stories quite a bit but the update dates seem to be static even if the edits happened months or years later. Mods? How does update vs. edit work?**). For example, 5085 stories have update dates not equal to publish dates, and only one chapter. On the other hand, at least for 1-chapter stories, 96% of the tweaks happen within 3 days of publication. So anyway, I'm looking at the 5-number summary of reviews after the last update time, for all reviews that are larger than the last update time:

summary(reviews$afterupdate[reviews$afterupdate >= 0])
   Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
    0.0     0.0     1.0   160.2   134.0  3451.0

This is a weird distribution. 54% of these post-update reviews are given either 0, 1, or 2 days post update.

The true distribution I'm searching for--the distribution of reviews following addition of a new chapter, is likely somewhere between those extremes.

No pictures yet; it's past my bedtime and I am meticulous about graphs.

*Yes, you saw that maximum correctly. There is a story (unslinky's 3-million word tome "Terminal Decay") that has more reviews than the number of words in most of the stories that most people write (!). Literally, 80% of the stories on Teaspoon are 4500 words or less.

**"Updated" is the last time updated, eg, sent through the modding queue. The update date does not change with story edits. The outliers for the 1-chapter stories seem to have at one point had other chapters or notes as chapters to "bump" them up in the archive, that got either consolidated into one chapter or deleted. Thanks

ghost2 and

abates for the clarification.

Current Mood: high

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

nonelvis

I suspect that Teaspoon "edits" aren't logged publicly, while the "update" timestamp is changed whenever a new chapter is validated.

From:

eve11

Right, this is my thought too after looking at the examples from my own stories. But then how is it explained that the "update" timestamp for a 1-chapter story isn't the same as the "publish" timestamp? Does it depend on when it enters/exits the queue? Does it have to do with whether a story is rejected by the mods at first?

For example, here are some stories that have a difference in publish vs. update date greater than 60 days, but only one chapter.

         id                         title words  updated published complete
        217 The End of All Things to Come  5392 12/27/03  08/21/03        0
        674                Apollo Mission   100 08/28/06  11/05/03        1
        916   The Calm Before the Massage   102 08/27/04  01/14/04        1
       2663                Echoes in Time  3828 08/09/05  06/01/05        1
       3345  Mate, Have you got the Time?   255 06/03/06  07/19/05        1
       3947                Specks of Blue   135 11/11/05  08/28/05        1
       3950 A Small Christmas Celebration   776 12/10/05  08/29/05        0
       4347  Just What The Doctor Ordered   950 08/29/07  10/05/05        1
       6082            Simulation of Life   503 07/19/06  04/06/06        1
      10046                   In CUM-pany   253 04/20/07  02/01/07        0
      22577    Light Through a Glass Lens  1037 08/12/08  06/10/08        1
      29564              Morals That Kill  3378 09/14/09  03/02/09        1
      31128                 You're Fired!   183 09/05/09  05/30/09        0
      43468                Wedding Shower  3037 01/26/12  09/08/11        1
      44619           Blast from the Past  3374 08/29/12  12/12/11        0
      45204          A Mind Like No Other  7674 03/31/12  01/20/12        0

Edited Date: 2013-03-01 02:26 pm (UTC)

From:

nonelvis

This is an interesting question, especially considering that most of the fics on your list pre-date validation through the queue, which began in January 2008. I'll point the other mods to this post and see if they have an idea.

From:

eve11

There are 89 reviews associated with those stories, and 68 of them are timestamped after the publication date but before the last update date, so it looks like the stories were definitely active at the publication date and then updated.

As I noted, the discrepancy between publish and update (if there is a discrepancy) for 1-chapter stories is generally small. 5085 out of 26670 1-chapter stories have a discrepancy (19%), and only 48 have a discrepancy bigger than a week. But the top 5 have big discrepancies: from 9 months to two years.

A couple things that might be going on:

1) There was a server crash at some point, so there might have been some story text lost that was re-added. I've run across a few stories with word count = 1, and in the description is added "The text of this story was lost in the server crash."

2) It could depend on how the author might make edits. That is, if they want to make a change and instead upload a whole new chapter, and then delete the older one.

From:

nonelvis

The server crash long pre-dates my involvement with Teaspoon -- in fact, I had no idea until now that this had happened!

Your theory about the publish date being affected by how someone makes edits sounds likely. If I have time this weekend, maybe I'll look at the database to see if something obvious pops out to explain the date discrepancy.

From:

abates.livejournal.com

I think the server crash predates me being involved with it too, and I'd actually forgotten about it until now. I don't know much about it, other than that the text for a bunch (all?) of the stories was lost.

From:

abates.livejournal.com

So far as I can tell from looking at the code, "published" is when the story was first submitted by the writer (in the case of a multipart story, it will be when they submitted the first chapter)

"updated" is changed whenever a new chapter is added (in the case of Teaspoon, it's when the chapter is validated). If an author submits a one-chapter story and it's initially rejected, it may take some time to be revised and go back through the queue.

"updated" isn't updated when a story is edited, but bear in mind that at some point we upgraded from efiction 1.1 to efiction 2, and 1.1 may have handled it differently.

From:

a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com

I've always gotten more reviews at FF.Net than at Teaspoon and AO3 combined. I think it is the variety of fandoms, shift of fandom interests, higher traffic volumes, etc. There is also the fact that Teaspoon seems to hold authors to a certain standard - and let's face it - unslinky and saywheeee (for examples) more than deliver.

These are interesting statistics though...NEEDS A GRAPH *cackles*

From:

eve11

Hee, I will work on pretty pictures this weekend. I am not very good at joins of tables and the like so setting up the data in the format that I want is taking a bit of time. But yes I do want to make a big searchable graph. As with writing, I wish the finished product could just spring fully formed from my head, but sadly I'm going to have to write some code at some point ;)

I got an account over at FF.net but the posting interface was pretty awful so I never used it. I guess since I've been hanging around Teaspoon since 2006, I am more familiar with it. I don't mind AO3 but I never just go there and check the new stories queue, for example; I'm usually clicking a link someone has posted on LJ.

From:

a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com

LOL!! I will wait happily. Mandy like pictures. Make Mandy feel smaht. *Cackles*

I love that you can load to AO3 with very little fuss and cleanup, Teaspoon is a copy and paste thing. FF.Net is a little harder (pasting warnings to Word Doc and uploading and tweaking - editing is a bitch, but doable), but I guess I'm so used to posting at all three places, I never really think on it. It takes a longer time to post, at FF.Net, I'll say that - but the reviews, favs and follows are worth the hassle. It has gotten to where Teaspoon is the last place I post, some of that due to it being moderated and I dread mod queues, lol!!

From:

eve11

I never use Word to write stories. I always use a plain text editor and put HTML tags in directly for the occasional italics. But for some reason at FF.net, it would inject random lines between my sections. I just remember having a tough time with it and getting frustrated and figuring that any extra reviews I might get for my stories weren't worth the time.

For me, I post to LJ, any relevant LJ comms, Teaspoon and then AO3. But a lot of the stuff I put up on AO3 was a big data dump of older stories. I've not written very much new since mid 2011 (that I've posted on any archive anyway). I think Teaspoon might have an advantage over FF.net and AO3 for classic Who stories. My Sixth Doctor stories haven't gotten very much attention at all on AO3, but they were well received on Teaspoon. There is a "first posted archive" effect and an "overall activity" effect in there, though, I bet.

From:

a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com

Oi. What a pain!! I can see where you'd get frustrated with it! Not worth it.

I think when everyone gets AO3 they do a data dump, lol!! I have a bad habit of leaving the 'original posting date' on my stuffs, so not a lot of hits there. Then again, it seems on FF.Net is is MOSTLY my older fic that gets hits.

Oh yeah - Teaspoon is THE place for Classic. Readers AND writers. FF.Net and AO3 are mostly 'Nu Who'.

Interesting idea...wonder if there is data to support that.

From:

dqbunny.livejournal.com

I have gotten so few reviews/feedback on Teaspoon that I really don't update my stuff there. I mainly stick to LJ and Ao3 these days.

From:

eve11

Of late, the overlap between lj and Teaspoon is pretty strong. The authors I read on lj; I tend to read their stuff on lj before it goes up on Teaspoon b/c that's where I find it. But I stick with Teaspoon for the easy ability to favorite stories, and to search for characters and the like. I like recc-ing for

calufrax too. But the volumes there are smaller than they once were.

From:

thisbluespirit

Interesting... :-)

From:

ghost2.livejournal.com

"Published" is when a story is submitted to the Teaspoon queue; "updated" is when it's validated. For a single-chapter story, typically those dates are the same. They most often tend to be a day different if, for example, an author submits a story at night, and a mod doesn't look at it until the following day. Rejections have no impact on these dates. Rejected stories are deleted from the queue and must be resubmitted. When that happens, the "published" date is whenever the resubmission is made, and the date of the rejected submission plays no factor.

Of course, this doesn't explain why some stories have long gaps between the published and updated dates, especially in the days prior to moderation. I have a couple of theories, though. One is that some authors used to post notes as new chapters in order to "bump" their stories onto the "most recent" page. If these notes were eventually deleted when moderation started, the irrelevant content would disappear, but a gap between the "published" and "updated" dates would remain. Or some authors may have chosen to condense multiple chapters of older stories into a single chapter, creating the same effect.

Also, possibly the system was run differently prior to a certain date so that the published/updated dates don't work in the same manner as they do now.

Replacing a chapter's entire content doesn't change the "updated" date. I've experimented with doing this myself (including just a few minutes ago), and the date stays the same.

As for review counts between ff.net and Teaspoon, Teaspoon is at a disadvantage because we don't allow anonymous reviews. I'm sure authors would get a lot more feedback if unsigned comments were allowed, but then a larger amount of abusive feedback could also result.

From:

eve11

Aha, yes, I think this solves the mystery :)

Actually for some of the older stories I do see some unsigned reviews still hanging around (they show up at "NA" in the author field). And for some of them also, the chapter is an "NA"--even though the story is one chapter, more reviews show up when you hit the "All" category instead of a particular chapter. Which makes me think that yes, there was a chapter that got deleted but the reviews for it are still there, somehow. See, eg: story id 217 from the list. There is only one chapter listed but if you go to the "All" tab a second review shows up.

That is good to know about edits vs. updates and published vs. last updated. Thanks!

From:

nonelvis

Ah, that's the published/updated distinction! Thank you. eFiction is full of little mysteries.

From:

aralias.livejournal.com

once again, i appear to say 'this is some fascinating stuff', but this time - as well as your most excellent anaylsis of the situation i am staggered to learn of a story with four THOUSAND reviews. and none of her other stories are short either. i literally don't know how so many words could be produced.

would it be possible (and you may have already mentioned this) to split new and classic up? because i'd assume that we were (slightly) dragging down the averages on teaspoon - i.e. i think a lot more classic people do post to teaspoon rather than ff.net and classic fics have fewer fans so thus fewer comments), but we may be such a small percentage of the total stories anyway that it isn't relevant.

hmm, anyway - it's all interesting!

From:

nonelvis

i literally don't know how so many words could be produced.

Speaking as someone who helped validate millions of those words: neither do I. I don't think my entire fiction output from now all the way back to when I first started writing short stories many years ago hits a million words, much less three million of them.

From:

eve11

Ha, I actually made a table of the reviews of just that story; it has 1002 chapters, and 63 different unique reviewers across its history. One might think that the story would have some drop-off as it got longer, but she seems to have some good staying power with loyal reviewers. 50% of the reviewers reviewed at least one chapter from the 900th-1002nd chapters, including some where their only review is the last chapter. 8 reviewers appear to have reviewed at least 10% or more of the story, and even the ephemeral reviewers (10 reviews or less) seem sprinkled evenly throughout the story in terms of the latest chapter they reviewed. (ETA: here's a screenshot of the reviewers with 10+ reviews on that story with the count, reviewer id, name, earliest and latest chapters reviewed)

I have the eras listed for the stories. Some of them have more than one so I have to decide how to classify those ones, but I should be able to create "Classic" vs. "New Who" labels and look at reviews in each. Or "Classic", "New Who", "Both" and "Other" (for things like SJA and Torchwood).

Edited Date: 2013-03-01 10:35 pm (UTC)

From:

aralias.livejournal.com

WHY DIDN'T BOBSYERUNCLE REVIEW THE FINAL CHAPTER? was it just such an incredible let down? they were there at the beginning and at the almost end!

and the compellingly named dontgiveahoot... you leave hundreds of reviews but then don't bother with the final 200 chapters?

From:

eve11

I like the name "Ten in Pain" :D

I put up a graph for you in my latest post of the number of unique reviewers broken down by category (First Doctor, Second Doctor, etc...). It shows that at least on Teaspoon, the bulk of the Classics are reviewed in similar numbers as the New Who, but New Who has higher outliers. And the Nine era has the highest trends of unique reviewers per story, although I mention I haven't yet controlled for time.