Analyzing FF.net reviews of 'Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality'

There's clearly a 'dead-end' effect, yes - you can see it clearly in the first graph, with the thick black bar each chapter receives, proportional to its time as the 'latest' chapter. EDIT: you can also see this effect vividly in the Unexpected Circumstances per-chapter graphs.

But I don't see why this would distort an entire region compared to another region: every reader in the 40-70 region is going to dead-end in the 40-70 region, almost by definition, unless they start reading at the very tail end such that an update happens before they finish that region (and would leave a dead-end review, one chapter before).

HPMOR's been on the rise as a search term according to Google Trends. Though I would assume those are mostly not new readers if they're using shorthand.

It can't be that often. I just went through the Notes on HPMoR.com (which seem to be incomplete) and C-f for 'review', and nowhere since February 2012 does Eliezer ask for reviews (he remonstrates demanding reviews, mentions total review count, talks about reviewing his plans, etc.)

155 199 [199] 159 209 133 125 142

I started reading too late to catch most notes of this sort by EY (and I often skip Author's Notes anyway), but from personal real-time observation of other fanfics it seems to be a tremendous help for authors to beg for reviews, in any and all senses of "begging". Asking for stuff is good, and holding updates hostage for the price of reviews is even better (assuming there actually are any readers). Giving public thanks to reviewers also works.

PS: Also, I suspect that taking total length of reviews into account can reveal something new about distinction between "hard fans" and "populists".

Possibly, and maybe also try employing some 'sentiment analysis' to estimate review favorability, yeah.

But I probably won't bother with this because I've answered the questions I was interested in, and doing those extra analyses would be much more work - not only do I not know how to use any of those tools, I wouldn't even be able to reuse any of my existing code, eg. the download code for downloading entire reviews would be more complicated (I would have to do real HTML parsing instead of just grabbing single lines with user/chapter/date in a stereotypical format).

That's an interesting angle. I think we actually could measure conversions to some extent.

The survey asks after MoR, and also how long a user has been around, so one could filter for any survey set mentioning MoR and subtract their longevity from the date to figure out what was their 'latest' chapter before joining LW.

A second way which would probably work better is to leverage the usernames in the review data set and compare to a list of LessWrong users & account registration date, to do much the same thing: take every username which appears on both lists, and the LW account registration date, and credit them to the chapter appearing just before their LW account registration. (If their LW account precedes their first MoR review, it'd probably be best to eliminate them from consideration.)

it seems that 6838 different FF.net accounts placed reviews. That's fewer than I expected given the 9.6k favs and 8.6k follows.

Remember the 1% rule: 1% of your viewers will interact or participate in a meaningful way (and I've seen videos on YouTube with more than 100x views to total votes). So actually, given how much easier it is to favorite or follow than to write a review (however slight), a 6.8 : 9.6 ratio is pretty impressive.

The odd thing there for me is that favorites outnumber follows. I would have expected follows to be a superset of favorites: I might find a story worth following, but not so good I will publicly put it on my favorites list & endorse it.

Of course, that guy named "Guest" was pretty prolific.

And let us give due credit to anon. People mock him for a lot of stuff, but he has good taste in fanfiction.