Your example is good. Yes, I can believe that a fic might appear unpopular by some public metric because its content is controversial, while actually being quite popular in secret. So I concede the point.
As to quantifying popularity, I think I might have finally met somebody nerdier than me :) Your scale might well work in theory, but I can imagine that it would be very difficult to figure out a way to calculate it in practice. You'd have to know first of all how many views/kudos/faves/etc. constitute the various quintiles, and this would necessarily change depending on how long the fic has been available to read (and the expected number of kudos et al would be lower if the fic had fewer hits too). Devising a formula that accounts for all these variables is beyond my capabilities at present :)
This is actually the kind of thing that the powers that be at AO3 would have more ability to figure out if they wanted to, since they have buckets of actual data to base such calculations on. But I sense that they don't want to provide any more measures of popularity than they already do, probably to avoid controversy :(
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2015-03-21 12:17 am (UTC)As to quantifying popularity, I think I might have finally met somebody nerdier than me :) Your scale might well work in theory, but I can imagine that it would be very difficult to figure out a way to calculate it in practice. You'd have to know first of all how many views/kudos/faves/etc. constitute the various quintiles, and this would necessarily change depending on how long the fic has been available to read (and the expected number of kudos et al would be lower if the fic had fewer hits too). Devising a formula that accounts for all these variables is beyond my capabilities at present :)
This is actually the kind of thing that the powers that be at AO3 would have more ability to figure out if they wanted to, since they have buckets of actual data to base such calculations on. But I sense that they don't want to provide any more measures of popularity than they already do, probably to avoid controversy :(