Discoverability of stories is an oft talked about problem. The site has our likes and favorites, would it be possible to put together something like "people who liked this story also liked these other stories"? or even generate recommendations based on your own likes? Sometimes I go through the likes/comments of people who like/comment stories I vibe with and I've found it's one of the better ways to find stories, would be nice if it were a little more automatic and I bet there are a lot of gems it could reveal. It could also encourage people to like stories they vibe with to improve their recommendations which is something I know all authors enjoy.
I feel like the extra search options and tagging system we already have are more than enough. You can search tags, filter through stories OR chapter if you really need to, and you have so many parameters you can set. 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, genre, chapter length, story release date, and even gender POV. Plus, there's a 'Recently Updated' section first thing on the home page if you really wanna dig for gold.
"Recently Updated" only lasts about two hours on the front page. The feature I'd most like to see is to showcase other Top Ten lists besides "all time likes." All time likes is cool -- but it's been essentially ten stories for as long as I've been on this site (with an occasional shift at the 8-9-10 positions) -- and that's a lot of years long. I think a Top Ten most views/likes/bookmarks/etc. within the past such-and-such time would be huge. Sure, it's great to see stories that have 40k upvotes, but what stories have gotten the most traction in the past six months? I think I'd also be curious to know more about "Story of the Week" -- what are the criteria for that? Who chooses? Is it based on some algorithm, or just a hot vibe for something fresh? I love it when a SOTW is something really new and creative ("El Presidente" is my favorite from recent memory). I also like a SOTW that gets a lot of user/viewer/reader engagement. Obviously, those kinds of things are great for the site and the community. What about multiple Stories of the Week? As it reads now, the front page spotlights the same ten stories as always, plus whatever has been updated in the past two hours. I wonder/worry whether some of the better work on the site is being lost to the algorithms.
Story of the week goes to the story with the most user interaction over the last seven days provided that story: is at least 25 chapters deep, Has had new chapters posted in that time, Has not previously been story of the week in the last 6 months I think there used to be a members poll on patreon aswell.
The tagging idea is nice, but it hasn't worked well with how the authors implemented it. Since the tags are done at the chapter level, but only surfaced at the story level, it only works to give readers an idea of what they could encounter in that story. However, when someone comes in with a loose idea and then has thousands of chapters spanning hundereds of tags, readers become rightfully frustrated that the story they're reading has nothing to do with the tag they searched because that tag was releavent in chapter 132 of the 57th fork. You can search by tag and then by chapter, but you're only going to get the most 'relevant' or 'rescent' chapter and in a totally different category than what you're interested in. And if you do happen to find a chapter that is somewhat to your liking, you now have to back up through the previous chapters and remember any choices that would have gotten you there. Also, you can't cross reference and look for a chapter that has this tag and that tag. Or exclude certain tags. Its a nice idea, but the only relevance I've found is to tag all my stories in a particular serious and keep tags of general ideas to remain consistent so I don't pollute the word cloud further than it is. The data is there but either the interface or API's are not there to utilize the data. And unless they open up at least the Metadata, we're stuck with what they have until they have time. If it had a graph storage system, it could be easy to crossreference all this and similar readers as well, but I suspect the storage is a heavily structured system.
