Ways out of the Power Law Trap

[Hannes]

Yeah, I think the problem lies with the fact that, say, of 10 000 pieces of content, 100 are "strong" (what ever that may mean). So 1% have what it takes. Maybe they have even stunningly similar qualities, as to be almost unrecognizable. They elicit the same amount of laughter or tears, they have the same "view-like" ratio, the same amount of panels or whatever you choose your relevant variables to be. Only 1 of these 100 will (so 0,001% if I think correctly), through some network feature, like one more link to somewhere, gain a moderate advance relative to the others. Then the feedbackloop kicks in, making the one the dominant star. Everything else get's drowned out, while having almost the same properties (so they all "deserve it"). This is the problem I try to wrap my head around with this thread.

Maybe it's the danger of good content being buried, their creators discouraged into giving up that scares me. I'd hate to not discover a great comic. Imagine your favorite comic is out there, somewhere, and you'll never even see it. The favourite comic you never discovered ... kinda sad idea.

Like your idea of subtly nudging people into one direction. Nice hint.

[Mane]

It's an interesting theory, though I don't think it represents the internet dynamic perfectly. I would like to believe that good content will be noticed and reach it's intended popularity eventually, the only real difference being in the period it takes to get there. There are stories that are instant successes due to various factors, then there are those that take time.
But this is just a case of visibility. One would also have to expect that the content just might not resonate, also due to various factors, with the majority. Being a cult classic instead of a block buster isn't that bad either. A lot of people would rather have that.

I understand where you are getting at, but I honestly think the best way to go about it is to focus on your work, on improving your skills and try to find ways to promote it on your own.
As far as Tapastic goes, I mentioned this before, one idea that I had , based on experience with previous sites, that might help with getting new readers is that instead of an avatar of the story, you should get an icon or a snippet of the uploaded page in the fresh section.

[Hannes]

I'm not trying to make statements about specifics or individual strategies. It's about the behavior of large numbers. Like which lump of rock will attract the most mass and eventually become the sun is entirely uncertain and will always be. I am not analyzing individual merits, if you look into the top 10% of content the differences of quality become pretty marginal, imo. My own work is far from there, btw. so I would count as a "smaller asteroid", which is pretty decent for my chosen niche, so I can't complain (keeping in mind my comic really got a heavy boost by being featured in the Daily Snack ... which was a kind of "equalizer" mechanism, that doesn't exist anymore).

The problem is this: Once you have a sun, it will stay. So one large body practically excludes other bodies becoming as large, or even larger in the future. Once you're in a fully developed market, so to speak, it becomes a zero sum game. So the question in this case becomes: How to enable alternating suns? Turnover velocity you could call it.

[Mane]

Once you have a sun, it will stay

I actually have to disagree with this statement. I've seen way too many things drop in popularity over time. There are many things that can lead to this. Overexposure. Or something better comes along. The position among the best is rarely, if ever, a certainty.

[donathinfrye]

@Hannes -- this is constantly on my thoughts. It's a dynamic that exists outside of the Internet, too. Something, something about it is in human nature. It's in the randomness of evolution, the necessity for chaos and order.

I'm an actor. One time, I auditioned for a television show called Gilmore Girls. It was one of the only times in my life that I auditioned for a television show. I knew its name at the time, and I recognized it as a romcom that some of my friends watched. My audition received a call back for one of the lead's eventual boyfriends, and off I went to Philadelphia to read in front of the camera with a couple dozen other actors who were also called back. I read, much in the same way I had before, in front of the same people I had before. The other guys, who were there, rehearsing and preparing their reading, all looked very much the same as I did -- they all read similarly well, with minor shifts in the choices they made. I received another callback. I returned to Philadelphia a few weeks later and repeated the process. This time it was just me and two other guys. We looked even more like each other than the previous round of auditions. Our readings were, in terms of choice and style, even more similar to one another's than before.

Ultimately, I wasn't cast, and the strangeness of the experience made me yearn to redouble my efforts focusing on stage acting, which had a process that had just felt more ... organic? Possible? Enjoyable for me. I stopped dying my hair blonde (I'd seen enough blonde-haired guys that looked like me and sounded like me to last a lifetime). That shift, that not getting the role, cemented my direction (and the actor who won the role over me's direction). He's become a minor celebrity with a following of sorts, and I've become a stage actor/writer who claims that he does it all for the love of the story and the work, and doesn't care about becoming famous. Doesn't want that life. And maybe that's a lie that I tell myself and other people to protect my ego.

The ancient Egyptians were culturally and scientifically more advanced than any civilizations that came after them for several thousands of years. So were some of the South American natives. Now, those areas of the world are some of the most under-developed and poor in our modern times. What might have happened if the Spanish had focused on North America, and the slightly-less genocidal English had landed in South America?

For that matter, what if the North American natives had been more resistant to the random diseases that the Europeans brought over with them? Imagine a world with an America evolved through the cultural influences of the natives rather than the pilgrims.

What if you/I had started writing webcomics 10, 15 years ago? What if I had joined Tapastic when it was brand new and not filled with many thousands of different titles? What if Webcrawler's initial search algorithm back in the 90s had been just a hair better than Google's? Or maybe just almost as good as Google's? How would our world be different now?

While the Tapastic community is friendlier than other communities, the power structure plays out similarly as it does everywhere else. Most people want as much as they can get, the largest slice of pie possible, and they're doing what's in their ability to get that. Growth is exponential until a ceiling is reached, and random chaos and circumstance sets that ceiling differently for every individual.

So what can you do to change that? Small things. Helping to promote other peoples' work, circumventing algorithm and AI wherever possible by being a human being. Community projects that combine the reach of many people towards a singular shared goal.

In the end, though, maybe the power law dynamic is inevitable. It's literally coded into our DNA and the entirety of our history. Random chance determines most things. You can buck against that, I do believe that everyone controls their own destiny up to a point. It's one reason why I encourage students to never turn down an opportunity just because they believe they'll have more opportunities down the line; life only offers you a finite number of true opportunities, and you never know which of those is going to give you the best roll of the dice.

Yep. So there's a bunch of pre-coffee early morning word vomit. It's a very interesting topic, though. Thank you for bringing it up in such a thoughtful way.

[Hannes]

Hannes:
Once you have a sun, it will stay

I actually have to disagree with this statement. I've seen way too many things drop in popularity over time. There are many things that can lead to this. Overexposure. Or something better comes along. The position among the best is rarely, if ever, a certainty.

Granted. Thank you for making the point. I am not as long in the game, so I haven't had the chance to witness long term developments yet. You live to learn, the saying goes ^^°

Although it's hard to believe that the top star is going to be overtaken any time soon. I think the views of #1 is about 20 million, while the next in line is about 10 million views, #3 is like 7 million. So the drop is very steep. Where these additional 10-13 million views are gonne come from will be interesting to see. Especially if it should be something completely new. Taking the ~1 million views per month of Tapastic, we would need to see one comic getting all the views for two years in a row to make this happen.

That or Tapastic will need to grow as a plattform and release some of the zero-sum pressure out of the system. Which could very well happen, if the western cultures see the light and adopt webcomics as intensely as Korea did. I surely hope so There is a ton sleeping potential.

[Hannes]

@donathinfrye This is the most delicious morning vomit I ever laid eyes on ... that came out weird.

The story with the many "you's" is incredible. Some "Malkovic Malkovic" moment indeed. It's a very healthy mindset you promote, too.

On the other hand I believe it would be awesome to create the kind of plattform that does things a bit different. Just to see how it works out. Just to see if it's possible to direct the information flows a bit more evenly and still have satisfied customers. There are just as many "Bell Curve" distributions to be seen in nature as there are "Power Law", if not even more. But how to do it?

[Mane]

Well Tapastic is new compared to other sites so there is plenty of room to grow. My statement regarding popularity isn't related to anything I've seen happen on this site, I'm talking about examples from various media channels.
Take for example The Simpsons. This was one of the most successful shows on television, a cultural phenomenon, but has experience a decline in popularity and ratings in recent years. Sure, it will probably never eke out of existence simply due to how big it once was (it's still a popular show by todays standards) but it just shows that the momentum you once gained can only take you so far. Other shows have risen in the mean time and the viewership has shifted.

[donathinfrye]

@Hannes Haha, thanks! Here are some very low level thoughts on how one might go about doing what you're talking about:

You limit how many comics you are hosting on your site and take submissions based solely on diversity and variety and quality, rather than pure viral potential. You can then easily control inner promotion to try to build a more equal distribution of reach within your community. Still, there is a human element, and that human element would be the people who make the decisions on what content to accept in the first place. There's also the company bottom line issue, in that you might be putting yourself at a disadvantage versus other platforms/publishers if you care less about aggressive competition and safe marketing tactics.

If you keep your platform open, like Tapas(tic) is, this becomes even more challenging. Any comic can be posted to Tapas, and that alone demands more curation. The more curation is necessary, the more the human element makes it a lot harder to ensure diverse distribution of reach. When the bottom line comes into play, and your company grows and has to start turning a profit, and share-holders are demanding more sales, how do you justify fair distribution? Why take a chance on something experimental or more niche when you know that a specific style of comic statistically just sells better to your audience?

I don't really have the answer to that, and it's a truth that probably does make the growth of my own webcomic a little slower. It's not cute and largely eschews romantic storylines. It's not artistically or narratively traditional, not told vertically, not funny, not slice-of-life or particularly relatable for teens/young adults. Its process is time-intensive and means bi-weekly rather than more frequent updates. It's none of the things that make it primed to connect to the majority of the audience for webcomics. I do think that the art and the story are good, and I do believe that those things will help me continue to consistently grow my readership. But, just like when I decided to focus on stage acting over screen acting, I guess I'm just too stubborn to not try to do things the way that's most enjoyable for me.

So I'm probably relegated to being that cosmic dust hoping to gather up enough other dust that it eventually becomes a minor celestial body in your metaphor. To create a system with alternating suns, alternating planets, where every body gets its own time to be promoted at large really requires a closed system, I think. I spend a lot of time hunting down comics on this site with fewer than 100 subscribers; there are a lot of them, and a lot of them are very, very good (why does Astronaut Ninja still only have 4 subscribers?). I don't think an open platform like Tapastic and other similar sites could ever accomplish what you're talking about without folding, just because the task would be so impossibly large and ultimately subjective. At least, it'd take someone with better ideas than any that I've ever had!

A closed system, though -- yeah, that could work. I don't know a lot about Hiveworks in depth, but they might be one of the better examples of this. I believe that they do a pretty good job of sharing the marketing love.

That's not to say that open systems can't do more. Things like the daily snacks, more spotlighting of a greater variety of comics/styles, those things could all go a long way towards bringing up books with good potential to more equal footing. I am curious to see what new tools/efforts Tapas is going to make as it continues to develop its new app and system; they've mentioned adding more things to serve the purpose of the Daily Snacks, but not what yet. I guess we'll find out!

[Hannes]

Daily Snacks, Staff Picks, Discovery or "Surprise Me" and likewise functions could really go some way towards empowering the small artists. I agree. Maybe we won't really need a small or closed system to achieve a more bell shapey kind of distribution. I'll read up some more about this stuff. Maybe there are interesting examples already out there.

Sometimes I wish I had the funds to run some pilot projects myself and just test stuff out and just get the data myself.

[donathinfrye]

I bet that with a strong core collaboration of folks with good reach and talent, going from broke to funding a pilot project is something that could be achievable through Kickstarter or other crowdfunding means. At least on a small, contained level. It'd be a hell of an undertaking, though!

[SirHellsir]

@Hannes The top webcomics might look like permanent suns, if you look at the top manga, they are the oldest still running ones, but tapastic is an open platform, if you look at the history of youtube, many top tiers not just lost popularity but completely died.
And as @Mane said, even top tier shows in TV (a not so easy to acces platform) like The Simpsons can be overtaken
@donathinfrye those auditions sound so earie

[JigokuNeko]

Hmm, I'm not sure if physics is the science to look to for an answer. I'm sure psychology and economics have more of an insight into this. You mention popular stuff and the question is, why is it popular? In economic terms, it is a product in a lot of demand. Why is it a popular product? It satisfies a need the consumers have (or, it creates the need they never thought they had, lol). This need can be influenced by either internal (ex. I want to read escapist fiction with protagonists that remind me of my own experiences) or external factors (ex. I see my friends/lots of people read this, I want to read this too, I want to be "in the fandom", I want to feel like belonging).

So, from the perspective of a hypothetical owner of the whole wide internet:
If you leave things alone (as in an unregulated free market model) there will be competition but almost always the result will be monopolies dominating the field since information about the various products is never ideally, perfectly available to everyone (ex. can't pay for ads, can't spend time on networking so not many people know of your product and those who are popular know each other and often advertise each other, thus generating more interest.)
If you meddle a little (as government does in socialism) there will be a fairer distribution of the pie but some of the products will be favored in lieu of others (favoritism in curating, not enough time to shift through it all, thus losing good content )
If you meddle a lot (communism) you definitely will end up favoring what you personally like and there will be very few and poor alternative choices in the end. Like, guaranteed.

In the end, it's always about information. If you want popularity, you must let people know about your product. In every creative endeavor there is twice as much social networking drudgework.

[scythe]

Sounds like what you're talking about is the free market. And yes, that's a good thing.

Ever-increasing growth and competition do make it more difficult, even seemingly impossible for new, unknown content to rise to stardom. Yet, every year, new content continues to get made, and some do eventually rise to the top.

It's a dog eat dog world, fundamentally driven by ever increasing competing forces. And while, yes, at times it can be cruel, unfair and unjust, just like evolution, it get results.

[Hannes]

@JigokuNeko I don't think it is necessary to decide between scientific disciplins here. Sorts of statistical distribution ocurr in sociology and physics alike (though in the end everything is physics). It's just a means of adequately describing what you see. In this case we're looking at the behavior of large numbers of people and it's consquences.

Politics is an interesting thing to add here, but may lead the discussion to strange places I didn't intend (but maybe inevitable...). But if we go there: Western societies where never growing faster as when they where distributing wealth more evenly. Like the "golden" 50's and 60's. Well, it's hard to make causal arguments in this world, but at least the correlation is high in this case.

@scythe Gotta be honest here: Evolution shouldn't be an excuse to accept sub-optimal outcomes anywhere. It may be convenient for some to make you think this way though. Evolutionary theory is, like statistics, just a way of describing what you see happening and subject to constant reconsideration (as everything in science). But then again, I'm not the kind of guy who just accepts things. I want to make them better for most people possible.

Free markets ... phew. Even if such a thing as the unnecessary reductive idea of a free market would exist in this universe, it's just a "lean back and stop thinking!" kind of concept. Which is never good. Also I think you'd have to introduce a currency first to see some market happen. As long as you get stuff for free, no market in sight.

[scythe]

The currency in question is time. It costs time to read a webcomic, therefore, we're all competing for our audience's time in exchange for their reading/liking/commenting on our work. And since there is a finite amount of that time to go around, and more and more comics going up every day, the rules of the free market apply.

[zwebb90]

ok, that was the a funny read hahaha! XD OMG now someone has finally put (internet fame) into terms i can grasp XD, well yes, i am, or i would consider myself and my work to be a tiny fist sized rock in the grand abyss of the solar system. bumping into other rocks now and then and slowly twirling aimlessly into darkness.... wow that's depressing... anyways!!! my best bet "or" a rocks best bet, to become grater would be to fall into orbit with a larger hunk of mass, a planet. in that orbit, over time you can connect with more orbiting debris and start to draw even more in to your slowly growing mass......unfortunately your success will be determined by how much the planets gravitational pull is bringing in, meaning as long as you're coasting off of a bigger source, you cant expect to surpass it......the sad truth is, it doesn't really matter if the comic is better or worse, or if its unique or just another cliche, if it got there first and had an already established following....that planets not going anywhere. the mystery of determining what will be popular and what wont is endless... there's no way to determine it ahead of time....you have to be FAST and also in the right place at the right time with at LEAST enough of a fallowing to build some momentum on...

[Alli]

Whelp, I've got a BA in advertising, let's see if I can help.

Laws of nature still apply to the internet because they still apply to the humans that use said internet. Readers are human. All too often I read posts from creators in this forum who seem to see readers as numbers on a screen. If the numbers don't make them happy, they expect Tapastic to be responsible for fixing it. Readers are not numbers. They are people with different tastes, different experiences, and varying amounts of time to spend on reading comics. If you want more readers you have to find them and take them on a magic carpet ride if you want to keep them. If you truly feel that the only thing standing between you and your desired number of subscribers is visibility then invest in your comic and buy some adspace.

Are there ways to increase visibility for lesser-known comics here on Tapastic? There are methods of trying, but there will be no solutions to the problem as you have presented it. I recommend a cloud of series tags that can be more specific about common themes than the genres can describe. For instance, on many manga sites you can check a variety of boxes to choose the kind of series you want to read, as well as crossing out things you don't want to see on the list. Using this for series tags would make searches easier as people know more about what is available. Perhaps a "random series' button could help a little, as well. Does this give everyone equal visibility? No. Because that is simply impossible.

If Tapastic could magically make all comics equally visible, it would last no more than five minutes because readers are drawn to what they like and skim over what they don't. They stop reading what loses their initial interest and share their favorites with their friends. As a comic creator, you have likely decided to make a comic that appeals to you, personally. It may appeal to a great deal of people or it may not appeal to anybody but yourself. This is something every creator must accept. You have to make comics for YOU. Not for numbers on a screen. Not for what you think will appeal to lots of people. It has to be something you would be doing on your own even if there was no one to look at it because otherwise it will only ever be a numbers game to you. I can't speak for everyone, but I know that I don't want to read something designed for a numbers game.

[Hannes]

@lunox99 you're right naturally, because in the end for creators it all boils down to what you want to spend your life doing. For readers it is all about the fun of it. I assume everybody does what he can to make readers share the experience in an honest and true way. There we cross over into questions about art and craft.

This thread wasn't intended to find solutions for individual creators though, not to share wisdoms of craft either. There are already plenty out there in the forums and I would advise everyone to read them who wants to know what she can do to get the word out there. That some will just do whats necessary cynically, others just enjoying the ride and love the art is a given.

What is of interest here is thinking together about the framework of it all. The rules of the platforms out there, the rules of networks and what they can and/or should deliver to readers and creators. To say it's nature (or evolution, or the market) and there is nothing to be investigated or tested left would fall a bit short, imo (imagine for a moment a scientist, or MD would think this way. It would be the end of history). To think in extremes can be interesting too, but to just switch between extreme inequal and extreme equal distributions would be to not think about all the inbetween possibilities. Desirable or not, that stands to discussion.

So I want to encourage everyone, reader or creator, to think about this network/platform meta level stuff for a bit and share their thoughts, ideas, opinions here. I think there is already very intersting things said and easy solutions collected here. Like "random series" or "surprise me" button, etc. "daily snack" was a nice feature too or whatever else we can come up with. I've just read that bandcamp is pretty well equipped as a platfrom in this regard. Gotta investigate a bit about this tho.

[Hannes]

You're right. It's an economy of eyeballs so to speak. Curious if this changes things compared to ordinary markets, like the farmers market. I bet there are some serious differences.