Meta: Recs
Mar. 7th, 2010 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darklyndseaLately I've been thinking about recs. I don't actually read a lot of actual lists of recs (mostly because the way people describe recs to convince people to read them is completely useless to me), but Delicious, where I find a large chunk of the fic I read, functions in much the same way. There are a few people who tag everything they read, but for the most part people only tag fic that they enjoy for whatever reason. And since you can see the number of people who have tagged a particular URL, it works pretty well if you want to see what a lot of people like- an aggregated rec list, if you will.
Obviously this isn't a completely accurate system of comparison- if nothing else, you get people using slightly different URLs when they tag (with or without #cutid1, for example, are different URLs even though they lead to the same page), the same fic on different sites, URLs that have changed since they were first added, etc. But it's good enough to get some sort of an idea: if there are only one or two people tagging a fic vs. if there are hundreds.
I bookmark (almost) everything I read on Delicious (here), but I don't always tag well. I've only rated 10.9% of the fics I've tagged, on a 5-point scale. 1 is so horrible I can't imagine anybody ever enjoying it, 2 has flaws but is kind of enjoyable, 3 is average and contains the vast majority, 4 is good, and 5 is so awesome that I squee whenever I reread it. I tag according to writing quality, with a small amount of bias for personal preference- there are some writers who I love but don't actually write all that well, and I don't rate their fic 5's.
So, when I look at the fics I've tagged with 4's and 5's, one thing stands out: most of them are lightly tagged, and some of them I'm the only tagger of. I think most of the heavily-tagged fic I've rated is untagged, but won't be tagged higher than 4 at the most when I get around to rating it. So what gives? Do I just stumble across obscure fic, or is the way I rate fic wildly different than the way other people rate fic? Something else?
Obviously this isn't a completely accurate system of comparison- if nothing else, you get people using slightly different URLs when they tag (with or without #cutid1, for example, are different URLs even though they lead to the same page), the same fic on different sites, URLs that have changed since they were first added, etc. But it's good enough to get some sort of an idea: if there are only one or two people tagging a fic vs. if there are hundreds.
I bookmark (almost) everything I read on Delicious (here), but I don't always tag well. I've only rated 10.9% of the fics I've tagged, on a 5-point scale. 1 is so horrible I can't imagine anybody ever enjoying it, 2 has flaws but is kind of enjoyable, 3 is average and contains the vast majority, 4 is good, and 5 is so awesome that I squee whenever I reread it. I tag according to writing quality, with a small amount of bias for personal preference- there are some writers who I love but don't actually write all that well, and I don't rate their fic 5's.
So, when I look at the fics I've tagged with 4's and 5's, one thing stands out: most of them are lightly tagged, and some of them I'm the only tagger of. I think most of the heavily-tagged fic I've rated is untagged, but won't be tagged higher than 4 at the most when I get around to rating it. So what gives? Do I just stumble across obscure fic, or is the way I rate fic wildly different than the way other people rate fic? Something else?
