Comments about comments

[praetor3d]

I'd like to start an author's thread to comment about comments, not sure if this is the correct forum spot, but I'd rather have a consistent topic for this rather than the one/two month check-in posts.

As Claire states, commenting should be the lifeblood of this site, and of course the challenge is eliciting more comments.

Since this is an "academic" site, to study this further, requires a dive into the types of commenters (in my personal observation).

For instance, I like to try to put detailed feedback in my comments, in hopes of engagement. Perhaps I could do better with asking more questions to draw out replies. I try to use a template to remind myself to cover varoius aspects of what I've read, with consistency. I'd like to believe that this is the type of commenting authors would enjoy to receive.

Then there's the other spectrum of commenting which is using one liners like "great story, good job!" or "can't wait for the next chapter!". And while it's better than nothing, it maybe moves the needle 2 out of 10 as far as motivating myself to post the next chapter. I almost feel like these are like a begrudgingly obligatory comment, when the call reminds to send comments. And I feel like these commenters don't stick around long, or just stop commenting entirely altogether over time.

I've also heard the excuse of "I'm not going to comment if I don't like the story". For that, I've styled my comment template to state "what I would change in the story to make it better (to me)." So I try to frame the negative into constructive criticism.

I also feel like there are authors who state they enjoy receiving comments but never/rarely send out comments themselves. And it's especially eye rolling if they complain about lack of comments. (and just to add, as a story commenter, I do take mental score if authors comment on other works, and if they don't then I don't comment on theirs, which just feeds into the issue to begin with). I've seen this behavior mostly at other sites and hope it doesn't happen here. However, I do feel that the sheer number of story posts is exponentially outpacing comments of late (after all, authors have commonly remarked how it is great to have a story repository site!). And it's further diluting the time and efforts of the small number of those that provide meaningful comments.

So, what to do about it, is I guess why I'm starting this post.

I've often thought of a few things:
1) for authors who never comment on others, I've often thought of the idea of a ledger, where authors can't make another story post unless they've banked 5 comments.
2) and for strictly consumers, I've often thought of banking comments in order to unlock the next chapter. For this, I think there's been the argument that it would restrict views from casual or new viewers. So then, maybe you could model it after news websites, where the first 10 articles are free, but after that, you'll need to start gaining some comment credits to see more. There's also the argument about suppressing the number of views, but for me, I'd rather have 1 engaged commenter with 10 views versus 10,000 views with crickets.
3) I'm on the side of forcing people to make an account here to unlock stories. There's the recurring argument about anonymity and again this obsession with not suppressing view numbers. For that I throw up my hands, do you want comments or not? Because guests will never comment.

And each of these banked comments can't be the one liner variety, so I'd try imposing something like a 50 word minimum threshold.

And there are those who will say, "it's just not me to comment on stories." Again I throw up my hands, and say, well you're going to have to pay to play from now on.

And yes, there's the important issue of the time and effort the admins would have to spend on any of these ideas. Certainly we'd like to refrain from putting even more on their plates.

Anyway, curious what's on other people's minds for this.

[Vela Nanashi]

I know that I always comment on stories I read here at least, I was a horrible lurker once, but here I will comment on all things I read, even if I stop because it is not for me, and I usually try to write the comment during reading as that does not slow me down more, and I mix with my feelings and thoughts about situations, and what I hope to see and other perhaps slightly random things that the story evokes in me. Also if I actually spot some grammar, wrong word or spelling that is wrong I say so, not to be mean, but for authors who want their story to be closer to perfect than my own stories ever get

As for your ideas they are interesting and I had been thinking a bit about adding some features to the forum to do some of these and related things, but as a retired pile of rust I am hardly reliable at coding.

I would also like to experiment with at least gathering the data of who comments and who does not, and such. I am not sure I would prevent posting stories, but I may trickle those out to have a steady stream of content.

I talked a bit to Claire about making it easier for authors to say post a teaser chapter of a story to guests, to draw people in from search, then a few more chapters for registered users, and then perhaps you have to comment to the authors posts to get more, or the rest of the story goes behind the pillars view wall, by author choice, not by popularity of favourites, but I still think that when the model we currently have start happening it will be great

Thanks for your ideas and food for thought, and also thank you for your comment that you give out to folks, and me, they are appreciated and I hope I have expressed that, I really need to read more, and comment, though when I have writing energy that is where my time goes, I write much faster than I read

[praetor3d]

I was a longtime lurker on all the sites as well, but now I can't believe I waited so long to join. The engagement is fun. Commenting is admittedly time consuming, but being able to discuss a work on a subject so taboo is fun.

Another idea, I've heard that the now defunct sites had some exclusive members sections, where people could share more of themselves. Somewhat inline with the 'would you share this kink with someone IRL'. So perhaps that could be an incentive to invite frequent commenters.

[Vela Nanashi]

Yeah we do have some threads like that already one very close to that suggestion

[Lucius]

I've often thought of a few things:
1) for authors who never comment on others, I've often thought of the idea of a ledger, where authors can't make another story post unless they've banked 5 comments.

I don't think I'll ever comment or post any story of my own on any board that works like this. That's a recipe for moderation going mad -- I've seen that on a piracy board where after a certain threshold one can request stuff only after fulfilling someone else's request. Ex post facto enforcement of the rule, the screams of 'LEECHERS ARE NOT WELCOME! HALL OF SHAME!' etc. Long story short, I ceased regarding it as a community, only fulfilling this or that request once in a blue moon and never requesting anything again.

No, automating it isn't a solution. I'll choose a power-mad mod over a brick wall any day.

2) and for strictly consumers, I've often thought of banking comments in order to unlock the next chapter. For this, I think there's been the argument that it would restrict views from casual or new viewers. So then, maybe you could model it after news websites, where the first 10 articles are free, but after that, you'll need to start gaining some comment credits to see more. There's also the argument about suppressing the number of views, but for me, I'd rather have 1 engaged commenter with 10 views versus 10,000 views with crickets.

I suppose we should wait for the 'Popular' and 'Favourites' thresholds to kick in.

3) I'm on the side of forcing people to make an account here to unlock stories. There's the recurring argument about anonymity and again this obsession with not suppressing view numbers. For that I throw up my hands, do you want comments or not? Because guests will never comment.

I think that at present the board simply has to show the 'window-shopping' guests what is on offer. Even snuff boards tend to go into purdah only after some time in the open -- and often for clear legal reasons, the new UK law etc.

[Vela Nanashi]

Yeah I really don't want too strict enforcement, I much prefer we structure story layouts to help that. If the system with popular and favourites don't do it blocking authors from posting is a bit counter productive if you want to increase the number of authors who post:)

[KittyUmbrass]

I don't get the obsession with comments on stories.

Yeah, it's really nice to hear from someone who got something from your creative works, but seriously, this isn't unusual anywhere. Lots of communities bemoan th lack of audience feedback, it's not unique to these places.

I'm a creator. I write because I need to write. I make music because I need to make music. Maybe if there was nowhere to share them, I'd be less inclined to do that work, but equally, there are so many works that I have just never shared anywhere, for whatever reason, and I don't regret any of them. I like that a place like this exists, where I can see that there are people who might enjoy the dark, twisted imaginings I come up with. The ratings system is nice in that there's a number that goes up to say someone liked the thing I did.

But for the most part, comments are not a motivating factor. They're nice as evidence someone really engaged with what I did, but if 1 in 100 readers comments on my stories? That's fine by me.

That said, I see that people do seem to care a lot about comments on stories. I don't need to understand that to recognise that it's a thing. So here's some of my thoughts on the matter.

* * *

This place does not feel like it's set up to encourage people to start making comments.

While there are some general discussion, and rape fetish discussion, boards - it's all a bit dry and, well, academic. I feel like, if story comments are the end goal here, then we need to look at building the sense of a community here, not just a set of boards. RapeCage was probably the most active site like this in my experience, and it worked because there was lots of other reasons to post going on, and lots of ways to engage with each other. The vibrant Chat scene on RC was one part of that. The other part was there were lots of games threads on a dedicated board, for people to post their questionnaire results, set quizzes and challenges for one another, and do "react to the previous post" type games.

The best way to train people to comment is to have fun, light-hearted conversations, games, and such. And this place doesn't (yet) have much in that vein. I try to post more in the other discussions (the dryer, more academic-feeling ones that we have here) because growing the non-story parts is what will get people to get into the habit of, you know, talking to each other and sharing thoughts.

Offering encouragement to share ideas by being positive about the posts we see on other parts of the board, is a better way to do it than trying to police the matter or exhorting people to do it or else the board will shut down.

[RapeU]

I agree with Kitty. Some of the lack of engagement can be solved by making one more category on the board. Call it the gym or whatever would work with the academy theme where we can play games. Sure, a lot of the games are repeats of games from other forums, but they work because people have fun playing them.

[Lucius]

I agree with Kitty. Some of the lack of engagement can be solved by making one more category on the board. Call it the gym or whatever would work with the academy theme where we can play games. Sure, a lot of the games are repeats of games from other forums, but they work because people have fun playing them.

Perhaps the existing Dining Hall can serve as a good place for what you have in mind -- it's not like there's any danger for game threads to be swamped there, at least not yet.

[Claire]

@praetor3d Thank you for creating this topic. I think the bookclub is the perfect place for it.

First, I share your frustration with authors posting their own stories but not responding to others. If authors on average have more posts with new stories/new chapters than replies to other people's stories then you can't have an active community. The number of comments would always be less than the number of story posts. And then users who are purely readers would have to compensate for that which they currently don't do. So I get where you are coming from.

What I am sceptical about is hiding a large share or even all of our content behind a registration wall. There is three reasons for that.

1) Registrations aren't our problem currently. We got over 200 users now and the number of daily registrations has been growing since launch. So this is currently not the issue.

2) I generally want to provide incentives for people to register. That is one of two purposes of the Popular Stories board. There are also a bunch of small things I would like to make exclusive for registered users. Currently, you can't use the forum's search function as a guest. Then I would like to add a simple GUI at some point that allows users to search for combination of tags but have that accessible only for registered users. Essentially, I am all for giving registered users convenience of life features that guests don't have.

3) There are two risks involved in hiding a large share or even all of our content from unregistered users. The first one is that guests need to know what they get when they register. If all of our content is hidden, then a lot of guests might simply immediately leave the forum again. So having a large publicly available collection of stories to get them hooked and then promise them with the Popular Stories and Community Favorites boards "Hey, you like this? Look, here is more, and not only that, that is the really good stuff!" always seemed like a good idea to me. (Note: Before anybody derails conversation: I know that "popular" does not mean "better". But this is how people will perceive it. There is a reason why people pay attention to the "Top 100 best rated movies of all time" lists even if you personally think that 80 out of those 100 hundred movies are overrated.) So it is not only important to have a strong incentive for people to register. It is also important to communicate to users what that incentive is. If users don't understand the incentive, it is irrelevant.

The second risk lies in losing visibility for search engines. If we block content from guests, we usually also block it from Google and other search engines. The stories would not get indexed and these search engines would not perceive the forum as growing anymore. Google can't show what it hasn't indexed and if it doesn't find new content every time it returns to the forum, it will see this place as irrelevant. Both mean we get shown much less to users and might end up costing us new users. Especially over the last two weeks or so did Google start to show individual story threads to users and these got people to click. To give you a few example of clicks and impressions for individual story threads over the last 7 days:

• Die Unendliche Vergewaltigung (German Version of The Infinite Rape): 6 clicks and 22 impressions
• Späte Genugtuung: 5 clicks and 12 impressions
• Mutiny in Leopold's Ville: 2 clicks and 12 impressions
• Arcane: The Enforcer's Pet: 2 clicks and 4 impressions
• Men at War: 2 clicks and 2 impressions

And then there is a bunch of stories that produced 1 click for the site over the last 7 days. Now these numbers aren't huge, but the more stories we get, the more the occasional click on a story will add up over time. We could theoretically make this content visible to bots but hide it from users. Here is the problem though: Google would show this content to users. They would then click on it, run into a "Please register!" wall upon first contact with the site and likely leave the forum immediately. Google tracks that user behavior and notes that as "This wasn't what they were looking for". Google would register a high bounce back rate for our content and start deprioritizing us in search results.

Now, I can't tell you exactly what would happen if we walled off large chunks of our content, but given that we currently have no problem with registrations, I'd be reluctant to take the risk to destroy our visibility on search engines.


What I would like to try is a form of early access for registered/active users. Here is how that would work: We would create another board for authors to publish their stories in, just like they do now. For authors, nothing would really change. In that forum, an author can only see the threads that they themselves created. A normal user would not be able to see any topics in that forum. Unless they are registered or a pillar of the community. And after something like 1 to 3 days the story gets automatically moved to the public stories board. There could be two early access tiers:

• (1) A story in the Publication Board is readable to Pillars of the community only (incentivizes participation)
• (2) A story in the Publication Board is readable to registered users only (incentivizes registration)

Currently, I am sceptical about (1). If we implemented that, authors would have to wait a day or two until their story is readable for the vast majority of registered users. That could scare off authors from publishing here. However, the more Pillars we get over time, the less this should be a concern.

(2) should not be a problem at all. I could see authors even prefer that over the current system. Why? Well, first, they would not lose any reader who can comment. Guests can't comment anyway and registered users would have the same access to the story as they do have now. So in terms of comments, nothing would be lost and views from guests would only be delayed for a few days. Second, it would isolate your story from the competition with older stories for a few days. Currently, if some comment or a new chapter on an old story is posted it pushes your story down the topic list. But if your story was in a special board for newly posted stories only, this wouldn't concern you. Your story would stay at the top of that board for a few days and would only have to compete with other new stories for the top spots but not with older stories receiving updates/comments.

The only thing @Vela Nanashi and I would have to figure out is how to automatically move topics from the Publishing Board to the Public Stories board after a given time interval. But I think we would be able to do that.

Why do I prefer this type of early access incentive over blocking off content entirely? Because it avoids all the problems I mentioned. Readers would still get hooked with freely accessible stories as before, thus knowing what they are signing up for. And second, it avoids all the pitfalls that come with potentially destroying our visibility on search engines.

So what do you guys think about these ideas? I think (2) has no downside at all for authors. (1) I would like to return to once we have more Pillars such that authors can expect feedback within 24 hours after posting their story even if not all registered users have access to it immediately.