(no subject)

[melannen]

The Les Mis fanwork exchange I signed up for is going live in about an hour and a half. I wrote 7000 words in forty-eight hours for it. I may or may not link it here depending on if I decide it's terrible. :P

any, relevant to that, have poll:

Poll #14439 v. important question

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 58

View Respondents

which is harder?

View Answers

making good fanwork
13 (22.4%)

leaving good feedback for good fanwork
10 (17.2%)

trick question both are impossible
35 (60.3%)

Comments

[lannamichaels]

There is a deeper metaquestion to be had about the nature of "good". Who defines "good"? For a good fanwork, is it the author (one person or multiple coauthors) who defines good, or is it the reaction of the audience (multiple people, inability to get accurate data from all of them, is the difference between the hit count and the kudos+comment count the number of people who didn't like the fic?)? Do things get evened out? If I say it's good and someone else says it's bad, does it equal neutral? What makes a fic good? It's a complicated question.

But the person who defines good feedback is the person who receives it. Therefore, it's easier to please one person than to please the nebulous idea of the audience of people who might potentially read the fic.

Also, 42.

[melannen]

See, I tend to interrogate this question from an inverse perspective: it is impossible to please a the complete, unbounded set of the audience of all people who might potentially read a fic, so a fic that pleases a) its author and b) some significant number of the theoretically possible audience is sufficient to define as 'good'; as theoretical audience approaches infinity, the probability of pleasing a non-insignificant number of its members approaches one.

However, to be 'good', feedback must by its very nature please one specific person, that is, the creator being feedbacked; and the tragic, entropy-burdened nature of humanity is such that the writer of the feedback can never understand any single other being so perfectly as to be assured of pleasing them entirely; thus the probability of pleasing creator is always significantly less than one. q.e.d. good fic is much easier than good feedback.

:P

[lannamichaels]

Ah, but how are you getting the data from the " some significant number of the theoretically possible audience" to the extent that you know it is significant? If your population approaches infinity, how will you know what a signficant N is?

Whereas you can survey the satisfaction of feedback where N = 1 (or slightly more than that with coauthored works, but it's rare that N > 5), so you can only ever know if feedback is good. You can never know if a fic is.

Also, I submit that authors are very easily pleased and if you point out a couple things you liked, you will make that author's day, thereby contributing more Goodness to the world. (Also, you are adding positive reinforcement to continue to get more fics, which you have defined as Good by giving positive feedback on it, thus contributing to your unbounded set's population)

[melannen]

Ah, but, you see, the number of pleased audience members required for "good" fanwork is absolute, not proportional, and therefore knowable! And while it is possible to survey the satisfaction given by feedback, the survey conditions will be such that response bias is inevitable and impossible to correct for.

Also I wish to point out that statements such as "authors are very easily pleased", while they contain semantic meaning and may even be empirically provable, have very little evidentiary value, as nobody who finds feedback impossible to write is physiologically capable of integrating that statement in a functional manner. :P

As for your final parenthetical: it is absolutely correct, but is unrelated to your argument, as utility and difficulty are independent variables: meanwhile, creating bad fanwork has the primary negative effect of only reducing potential audience size for one's own work (already demonstrated to be bad and therefore of negligible value) while leaving bad feedback has a nonzero chance of reducing the amount of good work created by the other fan going forward, which gives it a much more substantial risk factor associated with the increased difficulty.

[carmarthen]

Also I wish to point out that statements such as "authors are very easily pleased", while they contain semantic meaning and may even be empirically provable, have very little evidentiary value, as nobody who finds feedback impossible to write is physiologically capable of integrating that statement in a functional manner. :P

I have noticed this effect!

(I find writing extensive feedback to take energy and time but usually not be difficult unless a story has really turned my brain inside out and I have to think about it for a while to formulate my thoughts, and I'm pleased by almost all feedback because most people seem to view typing "I enjoyed this story!" as an insurmountable task so if someone takes the time and effort to comment, hooray. [redacted cranky rant about how I don't like the current trend for making feedback a big fucking impossible deal so people get no feedback instead of 'I liked this' feedback, which no author in the history of ever prefers]. Feedback is the #1 way we can encourage people to write more of what we like. Feedback is power.)

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I don't find either difficult.

[jain]

I'm in something of a writing slump at the moment, which is why both. But usually leaving feedback is the harder one.

[melannen]

Yeah, writing is easier or harder depending on ... stuff, but feedback is *always* hard.

[kate]

Hm. I find both mildly difficult, but also I find that the more I practice, the better I get at both. I've been feedbacking a lot more recently, and I've gotten rid of a lot of the prevarication I used to include (particularly about art). I feel a lot more confident (and willing) to feedback than I used to.

Also, just wanna say, that first comment thread gives me glee.