Kudos sort on AO3

[petronia]

Good idea in the short run, bad idea in the long run -- not for social reasons, but because it'll probably make incumbent advantage more advantageous to the point of reducing the value of the peer review itself. I mean, there are forces that work against that too, and everyone has their compensation heuristics, but it's not necessary.

EDIT -- working it through... before this you had to sort by hits, then scan down the page for kudos/hits ratio, which is more indicative than either metric by itself (baseline also differs by fandom size, fandom maturity, and fandom who-the-heck-knows, but all this is heuristic). Geez I have to get off the computer though

Comments

[petronia]

Yeah, as far as I'm concerned sort by comments is useless, except as an extremely fuzzy measure of "controversialness." Like, ppl are more likely to leave a comment if there's a trick ending, or memorably kinky rarepair sex**, something like that. XD Not to mention, the comment count could just be conversation threads between the author and her readers. And your point about why multi-chapter fics attract more comments is exactly right (also, the longer the fic is, the more complex the plot/characterization -- hopefully -- to the point where you can have a conversation about what's going on in the fic, rather than in the canon. Cf. something like Captive Prince where you have 400 ppl leaving walls of text on each chapter).

** OTOH if the story is pr0ny, especially if it's trashily pr0ny, ppl will kudo but they won't bookmark publically (private bookmarks don't show up even to the author, I guess?), because that makes a statement on your own profile. XD Case in point, those two Avengers stories I wrote. Two chapters each, similar wordcounts. The pr0ny one has twice as many hits and more than twice as many kudos, but it has about the same number of public bookmarks.

[ayalesca]

I generally feel bookmarks are only useful as a measure of how well the fic serves as comfort reading XD There's lots of fantastic works that people read/watch once and never again because why get punched in the feels twice? OTOH stuff that indulges one's kinks, narrative or otherwise, is the kind of thing people pull out at 3 AM when they're drunk or whatever. Not that, um, I would know. Because I privatize my embarrassing bookmarks, too. XD

[lacewood]

Actually the existence of private bookmarks WILL show to the author but you can only tell by comparing the numbers between your statistics and the public record, so to speak, so this is probably more trouble than it's worth. XD (I only realised this because of the discrepancy on one of my recent stories)