YMMV / Fimfiction.net

• Hilarious in Hindsight: One story written in 2011 was titled “Crusaders Of The Lost Mark”. Later in 2015, one episode of Season 5 was given a very familiar title…
• Incest Yay Shipping: Applecest (Applejack X Big Mac), Sparklecest (Shining Armor x Twilight Sparkle), and Princest (Celestia X Luna) tend to be popular, albeit appearing in clop rather than legitimate romance. Sparklecest in particular tends to be popular enough to the point where more than half the fics involve either Cadance being okay with it, or Shining cheating on Cadance with Twilight (the other half either taking place when Cadance wasn't babysitting Twilight yet, or omitting Cadance altogether).
• Pandering to the Base: Want to know the quickest ways to get your fic to the front page, even discounting perfect grammar and engaging writing? This, and Sex Sells. As long as the writing isn't bad and the story appeals to enough people, upvotes and hits will fly in really quickly.
  • Bad enough that up to half the featured page can be smut on a given day. Also, the prevalence of Second-Person Narration practically does away with pretenses that most of these fics are anything other than purposeful Self-Insert Wish-Fulfillment.
• Quality by Popular Vote: Several users think that the quality of a story is directly correlated to its like:dislike ratio.
• The Scrappy: Flash Sentry^note the pony Twilight is implied to have a crush on in Equestria girls garnered a lot of hate from writers on the site after his first appearance. After all, his nickname ever since has been "The Waifu Stealer," and he is still on the receiving end of a lot of Take That! fics or moments within them. However, that is not to say he is universally despised. His portrayal heavily depends on the writer and the amount of hate he gets appears to be directly proportional to how much the author in question likes Twilight Sparkle.
• Shipping: Lots and lots of lots of it, up to and including the kitchen sink. Some authors are devoted to their OTP and will only write that pairing. Others are more flexible and can hop between ships, even for the same character. And still other authors will try for the most bizarre shippings they can think of, just to see if they can pull it off. The third largest group on the site is dedicated to shipping, and you can find groups for every common pairing and most of the uncommon ones too.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat: There is some, though it's mostly low intensity bickering and snarking rather than an all out shipping war, and remains limited to large and medium-sized ships with small ships getting a pass. For example, there is constant, low-level bickering between the supporters very popular Fluttershy/Rainbow Dash ship and the moderately popular Fluttershy/Big Mac ships, while ships such as Luna/Fluttershy tend to get either little comment or even some encouragement from supporters of these camps.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: When a series has a huge cast, with even characters that appeared in one scene having a fandom and a character tag, this is inevitable.
  • Maud Pie x Big Macintosh is a good example of this. Both of their stoic personalities had them shipped like crazy. A few months later, under similar circumstances, it was Maud's sister Marble Pie.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Changes to the layout of the site often creates this reaction, though like most instances of the trope it fades away eventually.