Toasty with all your ao3 wizardry, do you know a way to sort fics by kudos but with proportion to "time since posting" factored in? I often sort by kudos, but im worried this data is biased towards older established fic.
Sorry it took me a while to answer -- I ended up rummaging around in the data a bit. :)
There isn't any way to sort fic by "kudos per day since posted" or anything similar. But I can see why it might be useful to help counteract the "rich get richer" tendency of fics with lots of kudos to keep getting more kudos.
I started out by verifying that older fics do tend to get more kudos -- I didn't verify this for AO3 overall, but instead looked at two ships I'm familiar with (BBC Sherlock's Sherlock/John, shown in blue, and Ted Lasso's Keeley/Roy/Jamie, shown in red):
We can see that the very early works get the most kudos. There may be some more subtle effects of new canon to dig into, but for now I'll leave it at that.
Okay, so what if we look at kudos/day since posted? Does that fix the issue?
...Nope, this has the opposite problem! It's much higher for very recent works which have relatively few days in the denominator. (Note that there are undoubtedly other functions we could come up with that wouldn't have this degree of recency bias; this is just one possible metric.)
I tried throwing out the most recent works and only looking at older ones (pre-2022 for Sherlock; pre-Oct 2022 for Ted Lasso). What I found was that when you do that, kudos/day is very highly correlated with kudos:
(Edit: R^2=0.84 for S/J; R^2 = 0.81 for K/J/R)
So it turns out sorting by kudos gets you roughly the same results for most works in the archive. I verified this for my own fanworks -- when I sort my works by kudos/day, the first few are my most recent works, and then after that it's pretty close to the same as what I get when I sort by kudos.
Thanks for the interesting question!
Methods notes: I only looked at one-shots (to avoid confusion over whether I should look at date posted or date last updated, mainly). I looked at the entire set of 167 Keeley/Roy/Jamie one-shots, but I used a hacky pseudo-random sample of 440 Sherlock/John one-shots (I sorted all the one-shots by title, then downloaded every 100th page of 20 works).
