The AFF system was presumably designed to make it easier for people to find fics they will like, but really, it's turned the whole fanfic experience into a ridiculously competitive popularity contest. You would think the competition would encourage people to write better and result in a net increase in the quality of writing on the site, but I don't believe that has happened.

Competition does very little to increase the quality of writing on AFF because, for the most part, quality of writing isn't the driving force behind the competition. The AFF system does not favor quality writing. If it did, then only people who write well would get exposure and get featured, and in order to compete, other writers would be forced to improve on their writing. The feedback loop would be quite different. Instead, the competition is based off of other factors. As I already established in my previous blog post, regardless of what the story is even about or the quality of the writing, in general, fics that are newer, longer, more frequently updated, more recently updated, by established authors with multiple fics, and by "high-ranking" authors will get more views, subscribers, and comments and consequently are far more likely to get exposure and be featured. Authors who write multiple lengthy stories with frequent updates will accumulate popularity and get the spotlight, and then, as a result of the self-reinforcing feedback loop, monopolize the spotlight.

Rather than fight a losing battle against the system, people give in and start going along with it. It's a classic case of "if you can't beat them, join them." Unfortunately, this only aggravates the system's problems. People are pushed to write longer fics and update more frequently and therefore rush their writing or risk getting buried in the incoming avalanches of more recently updated fics. Oneshots become irrelevant, and chaptered fics dominate, even though more often than not the authors have no idea where they're really going with the story and haven't taken the time to properly think their stories through. They write ninety chapters, but perhaps fifty or more of those chapters were completely unnecessary and were written due to poor planning or to fill space or both. People will spend their time spamming people's walls in self-promotion to gain more views and subs rather than tinkering with their stories in the editing and revising process. Writers will simply emulate and sometimes even plagiarize whoever is successful, but the successful people aren't always the best writers. In short, fics become inevitably discriminated against by type, and quality of fics remains about the same or even declines.

It's obvious the system is flawed, but then you run into another problem: designing a different system for determining who gets more exposure and who gets featured. The current system is basically too objective because it disregards anything outside of pure numbers and doesn't account for a lot of unfair biases, but if we want to create a system that favors good fics, who's to judge what constitutes a "good" fic and what doesn't? How do we judge that? There is more than one factor contributing to the definition of "good" writing, there is controversy over what is "good," and in the end, different people have different tastes. Also, “quality" writing doesn't necessarily mean "appealing" writing; moreover, you can further argue whether quality is more or less important than appeal depending on your values. Some people will say success is success, no matter how it was achieved. Others will say only quality writing should be successful and that success gained from superficial appeal rather than quality writing is not worth anything. From a business perspective, you could say that those people who milk the system are doing things the right way, and the people who don't do it just need to buck up and get over themselves.

Perhaps this problem with quality control wouldn't be as rampant if more people were actually willing to improve in the first place, AFF bias or not. I'm not encouraging people to cater to the system, but there's no reason why people can't cater to the system while writing well. Long fics don't have to be terrible by default. You can update once or more times a day and still make those updates meaningful and well-written. It's as simple as spending an extra hour reading over and making adjustments to a chapter before you post it. While your overall writing ability doesn't just magically increase overnight, you can at least improve upon what you already have in front of you. In fact, by editing and revising--making small-scale improvements--you're taking a step toward large-scale improvement.