I think this would be relatively easy to implement (I think). Basically a more advanced form of liking a story; you could choose to actively promote other authors' stories in your own profile. It would appear as something as '(username) recommends you check these out!:' The number of stories that could be actively recommended at the same time would be low (around 5, maybe 10 at the very most) so that people don't use it for just anything they fap with, but actually stories that they consider special or underappreciated. You could not recommend your own stories, obviously. People that follow you would receive a notification like '(username) has recommended this story'. UPDATED: stories on the top ten (the one that appears on the main CHYOA page) are excluded from this recommendation system. More advanced, optional or debatable features: Stories recommended by people you follow would be highlighted and/or appear first when browsing or searching for new stories. Maybe you could recommend an author directly instead of a single story? Maybe limiting this feature to only writers or people who has achieved certain awards, so that it remains as a 'writers recommending other writers' feature. Implementing a top of most recommended stories or a search for most recomended?
I like this very much. I can see that being very annoying, especially for those readers who follow a lot of authors. Perhaps a little indicator in the corner of a story would be more appropriate: "Conan The Librarian and 3 others recommend this story." This seems more prone to exploitation than merely recommending stories, i.e. "You recommend me and I'll recommend you." There aren't a lot of authors on this site that are well-known for their work on several stories in equal measure; I imagine most people would just recommend whoever writes their favourite stories, thus making it redundant. If you appreciate an author, you can display this simply by following them. This is a good idea, but I'm not sure awards are the way to go. An unknown who spams three-chapter stories every week will have more awards than a somewhat well-known writer who makes quality contributions to a wide variety of public stories. Strongly agreed. This could help weed out stories that are popular by virtue of being old, or including popular fetishes, or getting frequent, small updates. To know that 5 people chose to give up one of their limited recommendations for a story is more enlightening to most readers than to know that a story has gotten 500 favourites. It's the difference between a movie grossing $1b and it getting 95% on Metacritic - still not objective, but far more telling of whether it is worth checking out.
Yeah, I was thinking something subtle like that more than big shinning letters Totally true, it would be more exploitable and redundant with the actual following feature. Yeah, I know awards are not very popular, and I think they are remaking them, but is what we have. I don't particularly dislike them, just think that there should be a lot more of them and not be so generic. I think the requirement should be around having a certain number of chapters published, let's say ten (whether they are part of one and multiple stories and not taking into consideration whether you are the actual main writer or publishing in a public story) Anyway, whatever the requirement is I don't think it should be something too difficult to achieve for any aspiring writer, that's not the point, just require having shown a little commitment and have something published that isn't randomly generated or copied. Thanks for your input, I appreciate it.
I like this idea a lot. I'd been recently thinking that I wish I had a way to see what people have favorited so I could jump to new stories when someone has similar tastes to me. This would be like a more curated way of doing that, if you could pick which recommendations you want to display. Personally, I think it should be that simple, just having the ability to select stories and arrange them into a list of recommendations, maybe with miniature reviews. Anything beyond that would just be gravy.
I'm not entirely sure what the intended purpose of awards is, but if community involvement is considered to be important, then perhaps merging the main site awards and the forum awards could help. Of course, forum awards would need to be scaled down relatively, otherwise non-authors who spam the forum would reach the same recognition as well-known authors who don't use the forum at all. If recommendations became a thing, I imagine there'd be awards for getting X recommendations, in the same vein as likes etc. Come to think of it, maybe something like Steam's Curators (?) could work. "Best Futanari Stories," "Sissy Recommendations," "Fantasy Stories with Game Mode," etc. - specific interests that allow for tailored recommendations. Though it could be overkill for a site like CHYOA, since large collaborative works are such a prominent aspect.
I like the idea behind this but I think it won't work out the way intended. The number of users who recommend a story will simply measure popularity. And thus the most popular stories would even get a higher amount of exposure. And as you lower the possible numbers, it is quite exploitable.
Honestly I'm less interested in the total recommendations ranking/awards part of it and more just want to be able to see recommended stories by user / recommend stories myself, personally.
Yes, I believe this is the more important benefit. I am of the understanding that recommending something comes with it the implication that the person to whom you're recommending isn't already likely to be aware of it. I'm never going to "recommend" Star Wars to anyone, because they've doubtlessly already heard of it. Similarly, I can't see anyone reasonably recommending The Gamer, for instance, because the overwhelming majority of CHYOA users already know of it. On the other hand, I can see a lot of people ignoring this and simply recommending their top 5 stories anyway. I'm sure limiting who can recommend stories, and how many each person can recommend, is the way to prevent this. Experienced authors are far less likely to just go for the most popular stories, and by giving them only a certain number of recommends, they won't want to waste them. In other words, the ability to recommend stories should only be granted to those with responsible intentions. I have no idea how to measure this, however.
What about 'stories that are in the top ten (the one that appears in the main page) are excluded from the recommendation system?'
Maybe the second Patreon goal might help with that This might actually make it less exploitable. Though I would rather like some kind of a committee/jury of readers and writers that reviews stories and then vote for them. (in more rounds to reduce the number of stories by preselection) (There could be categories like "writing", "storytelling", "new", or "random". (For "random", you could use a list of randomly selected stories.))
Hmm, I'm not sure about this. If it comes down to voting, then the winner will end up being the most popular of the pool of selected stories anyway. Even worse, you could get something like a case of most committee members, I don't know, prefering inflation to all other fetishes. Any members whose interests deviate from whatever the norm might be are effectively unable to vote. That is, unless you mean that each individual vote would be displayed, and the total sum of votes is unimportant - in which case, the term 'vote' is somewhat misleading.
Yes, though I think it would still be better than having all stories you can vote for. But the popularity issue could be similar. Well, the members should try to be as objective and unbiased as possible and not vote on what they like the most. (But that's hard to do.)
I think the idea of awards for specific categories (as mentioned in another suggestion thread) would ultimately be more appropriate when it comes to voting. That way, if a majority of committee members have a certain preference, they can simply vote for the best story in that preference. Recommendations by individual authors would be best if they were just showed on profiles, and not recorded in story stats. Consider it a formalisation of something that's already possible.
