Inkbunny's "Popular" selection increased by 50% by Inkbunny < Journal

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Lyserdigi

3 years, 9 months ago

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great....
that's what we need..
more popufurs..
-_-
.
.
X3

Lyserdigi

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Lyserdigi

Seriously though..
neat !
i've found plethora of great artists through popular / latest / and top100 users ...
at some point.. if inkbunny userbase keeps on growing and more artists post here...
you could maybe change top 100 artists to top 150 ? ..

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Lyserdigi

That's a great idea! I think we might actually go to 250, but we'll test it out and see. Thanks!

arkaid

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

Maybe you should improve the selection algorithm. It feels like only having a huge amount of watchers immediately guarantees you a spot in the popular section. Maybe you want to average that by the number of watchers? The more watchers an artists has, the more views it requires to get into the popufur section.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ arkaid

We have considered tweaking the "Popular" section to consider, say, +favs/views. The thing is, the most-watched users are the most popular - and that's usually for a good reason. As such, their work typically meets our goals for selection. Besides, we don't want to penalize members for being popular!

There is a significant difference in view count between members' individual works (see your own stats), and for most popular artists this will mean that only their best work is guaranteed to make it.

ProjectDarkFox

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

Most *appealing, sir. I and probably 95% of artists have to figure out what actually appeals to the audience here at InkBunny and cater to that, because I guarantee you it's not their "best" that gets the most notice.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ ProjectDarkFox

Well, I guess that depends on your personal definition of "best". :-)

Part of our consideration was that this will slightly increase the number of G-rated works in the selection, which are arguably under-appreciated by fans.

FibS

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ ProjectDarkFox

Which is probably why the section says POPULAR and not BEST...

graymuzzle

3 years, 9 months ago

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Great! Good for all concerned.

Ketsa

3 years, 9 months ago

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Similar to what Arkaid said, it'd be nice to have a cap on the number of pictures one can have in the "popular" section, for those instances where a highly regarded artist posts a collection of work at the same time.

BunnyFoxglove

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Ketsa

Honestly, this is probably the best suggestion I've heard. Limit the popular section to 1 submission per artist for the top X.

That ensures the most variance of artists getting exposure.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ BunnyFoxglove

Having a wide selection of artists is one of our goals, and it has been increased by about 40% with this change. However, we don't want to punish our most popular artists for posting a lot of good work to Inkbunny at once. In fact, having people miss out on good work because they weren't watching "Latest" at the right time is just the kind of situation we want to avoid.

Think of "Popular" as a cake which just grew a few inches. The strawberry area got about 10% bigger today - people like it a lot! - but now that the whole cake is 50% bigger, there's room for a slice of coconut sprinkles; and a random slice is less likely to be strawberry.

If we said "you can only have one slice of strawberry", it wouldn't be fair to the people who really like it. Strawberry might also only come around once every week, and in that case there will be different flavours taking its place at other times of the week.

BunnyFoxglove

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

This is all fine and dandy until an artist with 5,000 watchers posts 50 sketches at individually, and eats up a huge chunk of the pie. I think we all know there's at least one artist on IB who's fully capable of doing that. I don't think it's exactly right that 50 sketches should be mashed into the popular section just because of who drew them, taking up tons of room for fully completed pieces from lesser known artists.

So I guess it's just a matter of what you prefer. The only thing I look at in the popular section, is stuff done by artists I don't watch. If it's an artist I already watch, then it's in my new submissions anyways. Maybe we can have an option to hide artists that we are currently watching.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ BunnyFoxglove

We're talking about Aogami of course - who provides a great example of what to do in this situation: use multi-page submissions to batch related works into one submission.

This slightly increases the chance that a submission will become popular - watchers know that even if they don't like all the work, they'll probably like a few if they enjoy the topic. But it greatly decreases the number of submissions, so his work takes up less "room". And if it was popular already, adding more by other people spaces it out.

Because of the way selection probability works, our change has a big impact on whether Aogami's work shows up on the front page as well. Say he posted eight works a few days ago, all of which easily made it to "Popular" section. His work would previously have had roughly a ((1 - 8/120) * (1 - 8/119) * … * (1 - 8/109)) = 23.68% chance of showing up on the front page at least once for any given page load. Now, it's more like ((1 - 8/180) * … (1 - 8/169)) = 13.48% - a 47% decrease. (This happens because picking someone else's work for the first slot now has less of an impact on whether his work is selected for other slots, because there's more to choose from.)

Of course, because these sketches are good work by a popular artist, they still make the full "Popular" listing - and he's not being disadvantaged compared to other artists.

BunnyFoxglove

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ GreenReaper

You completely side-stepped that one, since I specifically said posted individually. So I'll reiterate, what happens if he doesn't use multi-page?

EDIT: I'm not saying the current system is bad. I'm just pointing out the obvious.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ BunnyFoxglove

If we find that the system is not achieving our goals, we'll consider what action to take at that time. Right now, it works pretty well; and better now there's a wider selection of work to choose from. Even the most prolific artist has limits.

I do not expect what you propose to be a serious issue, in part because it takes an awfully long time to post fifty separate submissions, all with proper ratings and keywords. It would also make it harder to navigate a series of sketches, unless pools were added - which takes even more time.

Popular artists' time is limited, and they know that the best way to spend it is to provide people with what they want in an efficient manner. Multi-page uploads often satisfy those goals, while decreasing "submission spam".

eXcito

3 years, 9 months ago

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I think you should add some RNG to the required views. Like one day it could require 200 views, other days 400 etc. :)

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ eXcito

The limit is on the number of submissions, not the number of views; so the precise number of views varies naturally. Blocking popular keywords can also have a major impact; we'll show you more of what you want to see, even if it has fewer views (and that, in turn, may lead to it getting more views).

AvaBun

3 years, 9 months ago

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Ah, this is wonderful news~

A lot of my friends used to complain about how they'd never make the popular section ever. I hope that this lifts their morale enough to start drawing again.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 2 years, 3 months ago by Owner

@ AvaBun

I hope they do, too! It's a tricky bar to set; we want to give people a chance to make it in, while maintaining a level of quality which gives those dropping by a clear reason to stick around. We'll probably be able to move up to four pages in the next year or so. Edit: We did!

InannaWDraco

3 years, 9 months ago

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Cool. More artists will get more exposure that way. :)

Maxximo

3 years, 9 months ago

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This sound awesome, it could be teorically possible keep the popular picures quantity in proportion to the number of member and the total of pictures in Inkbunny, something like the 1% of (pictures/(members*.5)) considering .5 the % of memeber who upload pictures and the result equivalent to the number of pics who can be on 'Popular', in that way its possible to keep the popular section with an opportunity to all the memebers always.

JackMcslay

3 years, 9 months ago

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Maybe work a new argorithm? For instance, if you favor artwork which the ammount of views/favorites is a greater percentage of the user's watcher base, that will at the same time favor artwork that's exceptional by the artist's own standards as well as lesser known artists, since popular artists are more likely to have watchers that haven't been active for a long time than newer, lesser known artists

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ JackMcslay

If watchers are not active, they won't be viewing the work, and so will have no impact! :-)

(Similarly, if you forget about Inkbunny for a few months, you'll no longer be listed as a top member, even if you have lots of watches.)

Views/favs can be a useful metric. I used it when voting in the Inkbunny T-shirt competition. However, on a global scale, I've seen it make odd choices - and it requires a large sample size to avoid gaming. It's worth considering, but possibly for a separate selection, and over a longer period of time.

Alfador

3 years, 9 months ago

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Hmm... If it's "good work from newer members" you're looking for, why not have a second section for artwork that specifically has low views but high favorites-to-views ratio? Maybe also give a bonus in the algorithm if the user has few total posts, all or most of which are within the past X days. (Specific thresholds to be determined experimentally.)

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ Alfador

What we're most looking for is "good work", period. Our concern was that we were being unduly restrictive, resulting in too high a proportion of good work from the most popular artists, when equally good work from less well-established members was missing out. Hence, increasing the count.

There may well be a value in considering "underrated" work, but as you say it'd have to be a separate section as it would not be a fair measure of what is "popular". (For a similar reason, we're not inclined to impose a cap on, say, works featuring Sonic the Hedgehog, or with a particular rating. If people don't like a particular topic or rating, that is what blocks are for.)

iedasb

3 years, 9 months ago

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i wish i was popular, please see my drawings people TnT

CLCoon

3 years, 8 months ago

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@ iedasb

"	i wish i was popular, please see my drawings people TnT ...

From one artist who used to feel that they should only make art to be noticed to the next, let me give you an honest opinion.

Never force or beg for popularity. It makes you lose focus on whats important in your work, which is progression. If you focus on pandering and scrimping to become popular;
1) You wont become popular.
2) You wouldn't have focused on becoming better in your trade by doing what you want to do instead of what makes you popular.

So never worry about popularity, as you blossom into a better artist, your work will surely show! ^^

iedasb

3 years, 8 months ago

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@ CLCoon

this is why I'm tired of inkbunny lol

CLCoon

3 years, 7 months ago

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@ iedasb

what do you mean? :/

iedasb

3 years, 7 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 7 months ago by Owner

@ CLCoon

1) I'm focusing in my work not in becoming popular.
2) This comment is old.
3) People here don't care about looking at non popfur artwork.
4) People here only still care about popfurs.

CLCoon

3 years, 7 months ago

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@ iedasb

not true, they care if you cater to what kinks are popular before even caring who make them.

tkongingi

3 years, 6 months ago

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@ iedasb

Of course people care more about the popular artists. That's what being popular IS.

iedasb

3 years, 6 months ago

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@ tkongingi

well, you answered what i dont wanted to answer.

Vladimir

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

What? Threehundred?! Awesome! ^^
You really seem to have the right ideas to make the little artists get popular, as well!

Oedipus

3 years, 9 months ago

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Meowe.

Meow. (that is all)

Lamia

3 years, 9 months ago

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I've always thought this feature on inkbunny was a great one, and I never would have gotten the boost I needed to get to where I am, viewers-wise, without it

I'm glad you folks are giving it some extra thought and all that, my only thought is to increase the number of submissions that show up on the frontpage (although the interface itself is only so wide, and more rows may look clunky)

Immelmann

3 years, 9 months ago

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I'll give them popufur. I'll give them the most spectacular furry art they've ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll change the algorithm so everyone can be on the front page! Everyone can be popufur! And when everyone's popufur...
[laughs maniacally]
...no one will be.

Tuke

3 years, 9 months ago

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Great news! Looking forward to hopefully seeing a little more variety up there ;P

MaDrow

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

Any elaboration about how popular submissions could be high-quality?

Let me spoil the answer for you:

Popular != High Quality

Last thing I noticed from that section is am Patreon Ad small thumbnail with a big Patreon logo in it and a sketch dump thumbnail which implies the content linked to is just a bunch of sketches. BURP

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ MaDrow

Artistic quality and popularity are not equivalent, no; you'll always be able to find "good" work which is not popular, or "popular" work which is not good, depending on your criteria. I think you underestimated the work with the Patreon logo, though - it's is a preview image for two finished, coloured works included within the submission. (It also has 260 +favs.) Sonic isn't to everyone's tastes, of course.

As for the sketches - yep, they're sketches, though the work at the top left might well qualify as a standalone piece with a bit of cleanup. Enough people felt it worth looking at to just tip it over the edge, probably because of a relatively high watcher count. It might be filtered out if we set a minimum +fav count - although it's still in the top 1/4 of recent submissions there as well.

MaDrow

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

I hope you'll understand that I wasn't going to click on those thumbnails, because that would make them popular (hèhè).

Also defending those thumbnails wasn't needed. I want to point out that the increase of the popular section doesn't help the intended result of the average use that section.

EricAdler

3 years, 9 months ago

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To help counteract the 'flood' phenomenon when a hot artist posts a ton at once and gets a bunch of faves on each, perhaps a limit on the number of submissions per artist. It the limit were set at 3, for instance, all the 'popular' artwork would be shown, until one artist has a fourth that would qualify. That one (and the fifth, sixth, twelfth, etc) would be skipped over.

With that tweak, 3 images max per artist and 180 slots would guarantee that, if everyone was flooding, there would still be a minimum of 60 artists shown on the popular page. If the limit were 2 per artist, flooding would still mean that you would have a minimum of 90 featured artists. The 'flooding artists' will still generate traffic to their pages, since people will be intrigued by the sample and go looking for more.

ZekLullaby

3 years, 9 months ago

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That's actually a nice thing... I have many friends who get into popular all the time, I don't usually care, but it's a bit frustrating to never been that close (I don't think I'm popular popular, but at least have enough watchers to been feature once, I think) ... but now that there's a bigger chance... well, is kind of cool... Thank you, I guess.

TayFerret

3 years, 9 months ago

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Damn kids. Back in my day, it only took 100 views to get into the popular section on Inkbunny!

Jacinth

3 years, 9 months ago

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InkBunny Staff: Thank you so much for taking a serious look at this and giving a thoughtful and meaningful response to my request as a writer and member of InkBunny's thriving writing community. You guys continue to be the best staff any site has to offer, and it's the reason InkBunny is prospering.

GrandAngel

3 years, 9 months ago

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""Popular" was never intended to be an exclusive club for those with thousands of watchers, or for work featuring specific subjects."

That never went through your mind when making it? :/

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GrandAngel

At the time we didn't have a thousand users, let alone hundreds of users with thousands of watchers.

GrandAngel

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

I suppose so. Still, the *idea* of a popular section never sat well with me, especially on sites like this.
Like ... I look at that page, and *all* I see is NSFW, with probably 3 whole clean pieces.
So basically, this almost completely kills the chance for a purely clean artist to get their work featured.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ GrandAngel

Promoting "clean" furry artists is not one of our specific goals - though we don't have anything against them, either. If anything, we're about helping furry artists make money. One of the best ways to do that appears to be being open to drawing mature or adult work - so, in theory, we should encourage them to do so!

In practice, we're not trying to do that, either. We're just trying to show people art which we think will encourage those who'll like Inkbunny to stick around. If good General-rated art were more popular - or even equally popular, since we boost it by showing it to guests by default - it'd fill the front page.

But it isn't. Just 2/15th of Popular is G-rated - and the result is the same if +favs are used, so it's not that people like general art better when they see it. These submissions come from artists who also create mature and adult work.

There'd probably be room for a counterpart to Inkbunny dedicated to G-rated artwork (as ArtSpots was). It might even be possible to share databases with separate profiles. However, if ArtSpots has taught us anything, it is that it'd probably not be competitive (popularity-wise) with sites accepting adult artwork. And honestly, DeviantArt does pretty well there already, and a large number of professional furry artists are on it.

GrandAngel

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

I'll give you your deserved credit that you are actually honest with how furry art goes and how mature/adult works sell when general doesn't.

It's like how an artist will make a comic, remove all the smut, then sell the comic that has the smut in it.  Everyone will go, "Oh, definitely buying to help support you, not for the smut." My eyes roll like a speeding bowling bowl when I see people try to claim such dumb crap.  Even some artists who do that will claim that the sales have nothing to do with keeping the smut a pay-only feature ...

Sure, I bet some people actually do wanna support the artist, but said artist wouldn't make the smut a pay-only feature if they were confident that their art/story alone is what sells their comic, rather than the smut.

But ya, credit to you man.  It's rare to see a furry keeping it real when it comes to such things.

Still ... I wish my clean artist friends would have a real chance.  Saddens me that a stick figure with a dick gets more views than their work they spend an hour or more on. :(

SeruleBlue

3 years, 9 months ago

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Glad to hear you guys are tweaking the popular section!

That list always intrigued me. Getting on it just seems so difficult to me if you're not someone with a billion watchers already (at which point I feel like anything you upload would get plopped on the list).

I've actually been keeping a lot of data about my submissions over time. (I like data, alright?)
The view spike after getting on the list is pretty interesting to see! I thought I'd briefly share two of my graphs to show the effects of making the popular list.

An (NSFW!) animation I did last year managed to get onto the list sometime on the last of the three days it could have qualified on. There's a decent spike on the pink line (representing the change in total views on all of my submissions on Inkbunny per day) that isn't seen on the blue line (representing FA).

This other (NSFW!) other animation I did recently made the popular list within about a day, and you can see a pink mega-spike shortly afterwards.

Along with those spikes, I've seen that the average submission views you get per day after having something make the popular list is boosted by a lot for a week or two. And of course, views, comments, faves, watches, and all that nice stuff increases by quite a bit for a while~

So it's nice that you guys are trying to get more people on the list! I hope the new changes work well! ovo

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ SeruleBlue

Very interesting data! Thanks for sharing it with us, SeruleBlue. :-)

Enkiko

3 years, 9 months ago

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I don't get why popular is based on views instead of faves. An image gets a lot of views because it's about a subject that interest people and cause them to click the link. But that doesnt say the person liked the image. The person might have been disappointed to see that it was a lazily drawn. And the difference between images that draw a click and that draw a fave is often gonna be whether the viewer liked the image.

ObZen

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Enkiko

If they don't care if "good" art is in the popular section why would they want stuff people actively show they like to end up there?

Enkiko

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ ObZen

Because popular means what people like. People are more likely to fave things relating to popular subjects, but at least you'll know the picture wasn't something crap that happened to draw views. 'Good' on the other hand is usually considered independant of the subject, so a picture isn't any better because a popular character is featured in it

ObZen

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Enkiko

Oh if only that were true. I've seen a lot of sub par stuff get faves just for its content. It's not a good picture by any means, but the content is what people like, so it gets the faves. Most of the artists who end up on the popular section put out good quality stuff, but some don't, but they cater to popular fetishes. A fave is no more a guarantee of quality than views, but it is at least a little more reliable.

Enkiko

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ ObZen

Depends who's faving, I'm not gonna fave an ugly scribble and I'm sure there are others who think the same

ObZen

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Enkiko

That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I see it happen all the time. Some people fave things cos it's stupid, or funny or awful regardless of the quality of the art.

ObZen

3 years, 9 months ago

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So what I'm getting is that you claim to want more general audience art, and other lesser known artists the chance to hit the popular page, but aren't actually taking steps to ensure this, but rather are just making more slots easier to fill by the same already popular artists because you're unwilling to limit the number of slots they can fill. You don't want to "penalize" the popular artists for being popular, but you're fully willing to penalize other artists for not being so popular while also making it difficult for them to gain popularity.

Want to make it more fair, here are a few suggestions:

1. Limit the number of submissions from the same artist in the popular section to 5.
2. Make the Recent section on the front page larger. I think when it comes to some users, if you're not on the front page, you're stuff isn't going to be seen, and with the large number of submissions a day, you can get sweeped from the front page in a matter of minutes depending on the time you upload.
3. Make it based on faves, not views. It'll open it up to maaaaaaany more artists, feature more "good" art (even though that's obviously not a priority), while still keeping stuff in that people dig.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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Edited 3 years, 9 months ago by Owner

@ ObZen

The recent change increased the number of artists featured in "Popular" by 45%, and the number of General-rated works by 115%. The chance of the most-popular artist getting a particular front-page slot fell by almost 50%. I don't think this is "making more slots easier to fill by the same artists".

Our goal with the front page is to show people work which they are likely to want to see, and so encourage them to stick around, for the benefit of all members. If we can diversify the selection without compromising that goal, that's great, and it's the goal of the change mentioned here - but it's not our intention to be "fair" in the sense of "presenting everyone's work with equal prominence" or (say) "giving clean artists more of a chance because porn gets a lot of views". If it had been, we'd never have implemented "Popular" in the first place; we'd just have "Recent", like FA. Conversely, we don't think having the front page be all-Popular - like deviantART - is the right way to go; so, as well as giving each member a gallery of their own, we provide a space for their work next to the most popular art.

Basing "Popular" on +favs might seem better if you look at the very first items in a search by views, but the three day search ordered by +favs results in essentially the same number of artists in each of the first three pages compared to the same search ordered by views (42 vs. 40, 71 vs. 72, 101 vs. 102). Popular artists have a lot of watchers and views because, on the whole, they have good art - which tends to get a lot of +favs.

Requiring a minimum proportion of +favs may be useful for filtering out the occasional sketch, and we'll consider adding +fav/view to future algorithms; but it's no magic wand for identifying the best work. What might work better is to have skilled art critics who can pick out worthy artists and promote them before they have gathered a body of followers; but there'd probably be even more arguments about that, and I'm not sure it'd be significantly better than what we have today.

ObZen

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

All I care about is lesser known artists getting a little more exposure. The artists that are already popular are going to stay so no matter how many of their images appear in the popular section. They will always continue to dominate a large section of it. They're popular for a reason, and rightly so. Limiting that number so that a few more good, lesser known artists could get in there seems like a no brainer though, if you care /at all/ about letting other people get some exposure.

I'll give you a perfect example of potentially why just using views doesn't give you any sort of accurate way to measure any sort of quality or popularity and how it can be (and already is being) abused. Custom thumbnails that require you to view the full image just to see what it is. It could be a beautifully done digital painting, or an awful scribble on a napkin. The same 1,000 users click on both of the thumbnails to see what they are. By the current logic, it's perfectly acceptable to assume that the users want to see stuff like the scribble just as much as the beautiful painting, just because they were duped by a misleading thumbnail that they had to click on to see what the image actually was. That is a broken way to measure things. That is exactly why I dislike the algorithm /only/ using views. Faving an image actually takes a concerted effort that just clicking on a potentially misleading thumbnail does. To think that it's not all that important when it comes to how popular an image is, quite frankly, is completely asinine. The mere concept that you put less emphasis on a users effort to show an artist that they liked their image by clicking on something to tell them so as opposed to just blindly assuming a user liked an image because they viewed it, boggles my mind.

Look, it ultimately doesn't matter to me one way or the other if things ever change. I finally found a way to block the popular section so I don't have to look at it anymore cos I was tired of seeing the same stuff there. However, maybe you should rethink things and actually start caring about fairness to all artists in regard to the popular section. Caring about the entire userbase surely can't be a bad thing can it?

Candyscream

3 years, 9 months ago

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How about a little "insider tip" section, that only features works of people with lets say... less than 100-200 Watchers? Or something along those lines. Doesn't even have to be big, because eventually no one that manages to end up in there might stay there for a long time. But then again it might be really hard to find enough pieces that meet the quality standards or the algorithm might choose pieces that are somewhat crappy but still have a lot of favs because they manage to cater well to a certain fetish niche.

GreenReaper

3 years, 9 months ago

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@ Candyscream

A section based on favs / watchers is under consideration, to highlight good work by less-followed (perhaps newer) members. We're not opposed to highlighting niche art if people like it, because our members can filter it out if they don't, but we'd probably present it in a way that highlighted the status of the artists it was trying to select from (e.g. "rising stars").

Vinylshadow

3 years, 8 months ago

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One picture per artist on a 48-hour cycle per x amount of views

Perfect

softcream

3 years, 8 months ago

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I'm ganna try to make it on the frontpaggge >l3

CLCoon

3 years, 8 months ago

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as a guy who made it into the popular section quite a few time I can honestly say this; whats the big deal with being in that section anyway? Its a 15 minutes of fame kinda thing for the little guy methinks.

Taleir

3 years, 7 months ago

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Still using views rather than favorites, huh?

Kind of disapprove because views can be generated more than once from a single user while a favorite is unique. Going by views leads to feedback effects, such as in the Most Popular of All Time (By Views) search, where things that already have immense views will only continue to gain views because they'll always be listed first. Everything on the first page appears to be more than one and a half years old. Very stagnate.

Meanwhile, the equivalent search using favorites instead of views is broken and seems to only include fairly recent submissions, with a few exceptions. I have submissions that beat most of the images on the first page in favorite count, but they do not appear. This is clearly not searching back as far as 'forever'.

GreenReaper

3 years, 7 months ago

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@ Taleir

Yes, there's a known issue there when you have more than 10,000 results - it seems like it orders by time, applies the limit, then orders by +favs. Need to look into it at some point, but it's not the highest priority right now (that's getting our content distribution system in service).

GreenReaper

2 years, 3 months ago

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@ Taleir

Oh, I forgot to reply to the rest - well, since we just increased it to four pages, I'll do so now.

Inkbunny keeps track of work you've viewed in the last day. If you go back and view it lots of times, it doesn't count that unless you do it over a long period of time. In fact, you now have to have looked at it, not just opened it in a background tab. In addition, the Popular section is based only on works published in the last three days. The most any individual member could contribute to a count which mattered for putting it on the front page would be three. As mentioned above, the number of +favs tends to correlate closely to views within that time.

It's true that listing popular work for too long can cause it to remain popular - one reason we don't use "all time" views more prominently - but in practice, the top work is vastly popular in general and views derive in large part from this popularity. The WikiFur page for Babysitting Cream has for several months received significantly more hits than WikiFur's front page, because people search for it so much; and Sonic- and MLP-related work generally has a huge appeal.

Taleir

2 years, 3 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

Oh, I know how all that works.  It's a good thing to put a limit on how often someone can increment the view count.

And going by view count makes sense for the popular section, since it is constrained so tightly by the three-day time-span.  The maximum number of views someone can give a submission in that time period is 3, and then it no longer qualifies for the popular section.  Given that the sample size is constrained so tightly with such a narrow time-span, knowing that someone is obsessing over a submission so much as to repeatedly visit it over those few days is a useful indicator of popularity.

But when it comes to unconstrained (or very large) time-spans, it's best to prefer searches that will not feedback upon themselves.  Searching for "the most viewed submissions of all time" will result in the most viewed submissions of all time being viewed even more, and ensure that the first several hundred results will barely change over the entire lifetime of InkBunny.  Potentially, there are submissions that have had their view count incremented by a single user a hundred times or more thanks to this feedback effect.  It's just not a very useful result and probably isn't in the spirit of what the searcher had intended.

Using the favorites count instead will still create a bias, but it's much less vulnerable to feedback because a favorite can only occur once.  It's also better for larger time-spans because it is an explicit sign of popularity, rather than an implicit one.  Who knows why a submission got viewed so much!  It might've just been a picture with a ton of drama attached to it.  Or maybe the artist themself is the popular one and the submission only got a lot of views because of that (think of something like poor-quality sketch dumps of artists with 8000 watchers).  Things like these are not exactly what people intend by the term "popular".

So, I guess the take away to all this: I suggest a preference to sort "by favorites" when the search span is greater than a month and "by views" when it is less than a month, if a more specific measure of popularity is not explicitly set by the user.

Also, would be nice if you fixed the "most popular (by favorites) of all time" search even if this idea doesn't interest you.  I've been very curious what that list looked like for a long time!

GreenReaper

2 years, 3 months ago

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Edited 2 years, 3 months ago by Owner

@ Taleir

The list's like this, at least right now. Fixing it properly might unfortunately take a bit of work because of how searching works. I think it was in part to avoid a massive join which might have soaked up a significant amount of time and memory. Views is relatively cheap to obtain. Of course, searching was designed six years ago, so maybe things have improved - certainly the multi-CPU queries in an upcoming version of PostgreSQL are exciting… but I digress.

I do think "views over time" can actually be a good indication of long-term popularity at the top end, perhaps even better than +favs. People still like Babysitting Cream. They still like Sonic in general, and there are a lot of searches for it, which means it gets a lot of views. (We actually have a 'Sonic the Hedgehog' search as a performance test in our monitoring.)

Anyway, I think we all agree that +favs could be more useful in various ways, it's just doing it. :-)

Taleir

2 years, 3 months ago

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@ GreenReaper

Definitely not saying, "take searching by view count out entirely," but adding some sensitivity to context might help it to more live up to the intentions behind the search; be more likely to get a satisfying answer to the question of, "what is the most popular stuff on InkBunny?"

Case in point, I am not surprised to see Babysitting Cream at the top of that PasteBin list; it definitely belongs there...! But I'm also not surprised that AvalonX only appears three times in the first 60 all-time most favorited list, versus his over 30 hits in the most viewed list. And so many of those 30 are just messy pencil sketches... A pretty clear example of the bias I was talking about, right there.

Also, darn... None of my works made the top 60. xD

FousenWorks

3 years, 7 months ago

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High quality work...
>artist post just a sketch
>ends up in the popular area cause tons of folks saw it and fave it

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