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flashexchangesHi, all! We've all had a while to recover and think about the exchange—and also crunch some numbers—and now we're coming to you with statistics about the exchange as well as a call for opinions and thoughts on how it went and how we might use what we've learned in further challenges! "We" here meaning both "the WDLF3 mods" and also, maybe, you! The non-mods!
(Also, someone who doesn't know anything about WDLF might wander past this post, so here's a link to the collection, not that that will really tell you much about what nonsense we got up to.)
Statistics
On the statistics end of things, here's a Google sheet with all the stats scraped from the collection a few days ago — we regret to inform you that we missed a total wordcount ending in "666" by three words, and thus no final certificate will be awarded. But still, we wrote 405,663 words! Go us!
Here's a screenshot of the spreadsheet showing some of our word count totals:
Also, we made more than just fic!
On the audio front, we also made:
- Three fanmixes. Specifically, kimaracretak made them:
On the visual front, we made ten works with art!
There's loads more data on the sheet, although it's all from Wednesday (4/29/2020) and is thus a little bit more out of date. If you want to sort or edit the sheet, you'll have to make a copy.
Discussion/Brainstorming
And now the discussion part! We've gotten interest from a good number of people about running this event or one like it (with auctions, you know!) in some form or another in the future and we've even brainstormed a little on Discord, but overall that's a really hard format to have an orderly conversation about all the possibilities, so we're hoping Dreamwidth will help us sort some things out about how you felt the event could be improved.
Here are some discussion questions to get you started:
- What would an improved version of this event look like to you? What parts are most important and what parts could you do without?
- What did you like? What part of this experience are you most interested in seeing recreated?
- Do you have any cool event ideas related to this nonsense that you're kicking around?
- What limits would you have imposed on yourself/the exchange if you had to do it again? Think word count, assignment number, time for auctions, etc.
- Did you have fun???
Anonymous comments are on and you don't have to sign anything you say, but please be constructive. We'll never run this event in this format again and the event is already over, so just telling us it sucked is useless barring the invention of time travel. Similarly, if your only feedback is that you'd never be interested in anything like this ever again because it's not for you and you know it, you're probably wasting our time and yours! In other words, this is a post for improving future versions of this event, not a post for airing of grievances.
Please feel free to answer all or just one of the questions above, and please feel free also to pose your own questions!
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Best parts for me:
- The real-time excitement of the auctions. People cheering one another one, shilling for their friends, teaming up to bid, even getting outbid at the last minute, all fantastic. I liked this experience better than the fire sale format where a lot of little bids come in to collectively hit a target.
- WRITING SO MUCH HOLY SHIT. I can't believe I wrote so much. And it was all things I committed to writing... even my one treat crime was intended to be a bid, someone else just bid first. As completely insane as it was to commit to so much, I never felt like I bit off more than I could chew, and clearly I really thrive on that kind of accountability, which is cool to know about myself.
- The auction format put each person's sign-up in front of me in turn, so I could take some time to consider each one and whether I'd want to write for it. I never remember to look through sign-ups for treating opportunities, and having them come to us this way was really cool. Even without auctions, I'd love any exchange that took the time to say "Here is this person's sign-up, look how awesome their prompts are, don't you want to treat them?" for each participant. And I so appreciated that in WDLF positive things were said about every sign-up, whether it was long or short or detailed or "write what you want" or whatever.
- In general everyone was just really nice and it felt good to be doing a thing with such nice people. The social parts were so great! I know not every exchange will have its own entire Discord server but it was incredible to just be able to spraaaawl out and heck the place up and not be confined to one channel on EAD. So handy to have individual channels for group bids and team efforts like epochenonsense and all that.
- Non-anonymity! I loooooved not being anon, being able to ask my recipients what they wanted, all of that. I know some people care a lot about anon periods but it was amazing not to have one. I also think the mix of open auctions and anon initial assignments was nice for people who prefer one or the other.
- This is a small thing maybe, but for all that there was talk of ShAmE for defaulters, I loved that like half the people initially defaulted, and then we ALL got defaulted on our second assignments, because the thought of needing to default on an exchange fills me with dread and I felt so much better seeing defaulting be normalized that way. Even though I didn't default, I knew I'd be in good company if I did.
Things that could be improved, but would make it less WDLFily chaotic:
- It would be great to have a real timeline, with auctions scheduled in advance.
- Being auctioned off turned out to be way more fun (at least for some of us) than being kept by your original writer, so I think every sign-up should have been auctioned, not just pinch hits. We didn't know ahead of time how awesome the auctions were going to be, but once we knew, I think there was an argument to be made that everyone should have gotten auctioned for their original sign-up, not just for Flamingos.
- We all make a lot of jokes about cliques and popularity contests but there did end up being a really wide range of how much fic/how many fics people received. Obviously that can happen in any exchange, you never know who's going to write 25k for a 300-word minimum, but with the auctions it was a little more in people's faces and I think that wasn't always entirely comfortable. 10k is a lot. If the snipe point had been 5k I think that would have been less... dramatic.
All these come down to ways of making participants more comfortable, I guess, and for a chaotic exchange like WDLF we're obvs signing on for a degree of discomfort as a trade-off for more amazing whimsical random-ass fun, so I won't be surprised if your reponse to any and all is "That sounds like a you problem" or at least "That sounds like useful info for an exchange that isn't WDLF."
Suggestion for a future event:
- Have no assignments. Hold a fire sale for each sign-up, requesting pledges of 200–500 words up to a total of 1k. Then auction one additional treat per sign-up, with bids up to 5k and no group bidding. Of course writers can write more than they bid/buy and anyone can commit treat crimes. I think this would be a decent balance of guaranteed quantity (you get at least two fics and at least 1000 words of fic), relatively even distribution of gifts (or no less even than in a standard exchange), and auction uncertainty/excitement.
I've had this tab open for two hours so I'm going to give up and submit the comment before I think of even more things to say! Thank you again!
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In general, the more that's known in advance about how things are going to go, the more/better mods can communicate to participants.