I'm the only one demoralized by this?

Thousands of thumbs up in a few day just compiling a list ...

https://chyoa.com/story/Chyoe---Choose-Your-Own-Erotica.11325

https://chyoa.com/story/"Build-A-Bitch".11313

Just saying ...

 

Likes do nothing more than show that people are interested in things. They are inherently useless and not to be paid attention too in a non-profitable setting. The more common/shallow a story is the more likes it will get in early chapters. It doesn't get much more shallow than lists. It is the readers that stay through thousands of words with your story that you should pay attention too. You know, the people that actualyl show up regularly and do shit like commenting, writing you PM's about mistakes you made and stuff like that.

So, No. I am not demoralized by this. It only reaffirms what i already believe in.

 

Ok maybe demoralized is a bit too strong of a word and i can partly agree with your considerations, but you can't just dich likes like that.
They are not useless.
At very least they impact the visibility of your story.

Surely we could always keep telling ourselves that they are not important...

 

Increase visibility. Exactly. That is why I said 'in a non-profitable setting'. As long as I don't stand to gain money from views, why the hell would i care about visibility? If you write for the clicks, okay, then we simply have different attitudes towards this.

 

It's the nature of those stories.

I like getting clicks and likes.

Each one of those little guys are important to me.

But that's for what they mean about *my* story, not as a running competition between my story and what a click or like means to or about another story, especially one of a fundamentally different nature.

 

I'll be honest, I tend to look at view counts to determine story popularity more than likes.

It's fairly easy to write a story that gets a whole bunch of likes...as the examples given in the first post show and you can also inflate your likes easily by asking for likes as shown by Javalar's little experiment here. That's fine to do if you like, but in my opinion it's getting the readers to come back over and over that's probably a better determination for the overall quality of the story. There's plenty of popular stories on the site that have lots of views and lots of people like, but since they don't have as many "Likes", there's not really much of a chance to get onto the Top Stories List...if that is your intended goal.

Of course, there's flaws with going off of view counts as regardless of how good your story is; the views on it are naturally going to increase over time and you can artificially inflate views too by just writing a whole bunch of chapters. However, there's a fine line between writing a bunch of short chapters to get views and writing a bunch of spam.

I hope someday the Top Stories list goes off of something a bit more than just arbitrary likes, or views and implements a system that takes both of those(and maybe favorites/bookmarks too) into account.

 

I didn't create these stories for the likes or dislikes. I did it for the readers who keep coming back to vote. If a chapter ever gets into the top ten or something I will gladly delete it. The readers like them because it gives them a sense of feed back and the writers like myself can look at the story map and gauge the readers opinions on what they want to read about. For me it just gives me a break from the other projects I have been working on.

 

well, yeah... Ultimately it doesn't really matter how popular or highly rated your story gets. You should be writing, because you enjoy it and if your story gets popular, then it gets popular.

 

RicoLouis is doing all of the authors of the site a huge service. He is giving us a centralized resource that we can use to gain insight on the myriad of preferences our readers have and what we can do to help provide for them should you choose to. The various polls that he has put out will probably not seriously alter the way I write or what I write about, but it's something I can keep in the back of my mind. For example, when I am creating a character that I would have made blonde, I see that the "Build-A-Bitch" hair category has a strong winner in red-heads. I would probably see if I have recently created a red-headed character and if not, I'll go for it. I'd like to think of the various rankings as very subtle suggestions. At the end of the day, my content will more or less still be the same.

Of course though, the resources should probably never be the "Top" stories of "Story of the Week" since they're not actually stories, but that shouldn't ever happen since they don't meet the 25 chapter depth minimum which is what I believe to be one of the criteria. One of the chapters may eventually crest into the "Top Chapters", but that seems like something for the web designer to deal with, maybe flagging the chapter so that it cannot be added to the list. Deleting the chapter seems like a bad choice since that would erase all of the valuable information we received from that poll choice.

I guess my point is to not be discouraged from this and just keep writing. These resources shouldn't have any serious negative impact on other stories, it's just someone trying to help.

 

Imagine there was not only a "like", but also a "dislike" option, then we could even better compare the preferences!
Just kidding ;-)

I agree that these stories can be helpful, for example i wouldn't have guessed that so many people like incest.
Although as a non native English speaker i like https://chyoa.com/story/"Encyclopedia-Erotica-".11116 and https://chyoa.com/story/Character-Creator.11175 even more to get some more variety in my vocabulary.

Like Swallows999 i hope, that in case the "top chapters" or "top sex stories" should get flooded with some of these options, that Friedman is able to find a solution.

 

Ok, that's not exactly what i expected ...


I suppose i cant take your replies as a series of 'no'.


I just want to point out that I didn't say

"This is bullshit! This dude is cheating, you should all be angry for this!"

I just expressed a personal feeling.

And while I congratulate with you all for you superior maturity, I just didn't ask you to convince me to change my opinion.( which is a different thing from the feeling).

Also i was pretty surprised by the fact that no one seemed to notice those odd stories and i wanted to have a taste of the general feeling about them.

But meh, too late now to regret it.
I really feel outnumbered, though, so you will excuse me if I prefer stop here the discussion.



I just want to add a couple more consideration.

1-What I actually felt depressing was how easily people pushed the like button, crushing my previous idea that many readers just don't bother to partecipate and simply lurk on, even if they love the content.

2- I find it silly to come her claiming I write just form myself, or stuff like that. I do enjoy writing, but i also do like the fact that someone likes what i write. That's why i share here ...



To RicoLouis


I didn't want to accuse you or anything, really.

I hope this gets through, but i doubt it.

But i'm really forced to ask you, now that you posted.

Are likes important to you?

Because either you write to please the readers or you don't.

I'm convinced that I wouldn't use your poll to set a story up. (but that's just me)

I'll probably just write what I feel like to write.

But hey, I'm just a click whore envious of your idea....

 

I wouldn't be surprised to find that the vast majority of readers do NOT bother to participate and do just lurk. Sometimes they may favorite and bookmark, sometimes they may provide a like or comment, but most just read and move on. The only exceptions to that is when they are prompted to either through the format of the story, or asked to such as in Javalar's experiment that i linked to in post #6.

However, those are just that...exceptions.

 

> Are likes important to you?

Of course i like to get likes ;-)

When i started writing on choya, i wanted to get the "Awards":

• Somebody Likes You - Somebody out there liked one of your chapters. Keep posting like that for more!
• I Like It a Lot - Your chapters have been liked 25 times.
• Seriously Likeable! - Content you have published has attracted 100 likes.

I had a lot of time at my hands, and it was a motivation to write more chapters, to get more likes.
Also to improve the quality of my writing, in the hope that this would generate even more likes.
After that initial period though, i started to no longer really care. It didn't matter if i had 300 or 400 likes.

Now i rather write for my enjoyment, and especially when i have the time, which is sadly not that often.
Still, the likes show that the content you create gets appreciated. Obviously its better to get more than less ;-)

Checking the ratio of chapter-views to likes and comments: I agree with the assumptions, that many readers (or the majority) do not comment or even hit the like button, that they are just "lurking" and that they are probably not even registered on the site.
And when you check who is liking your chapters, you will likely find that its often the same readers within a story who are hitting that button.
But still, a few weeks or months after you have published some chapters, you can compare between them. For example a chapters with 2000 views and 2 likes, compared to a chapter with 2000 views and 20 likes.

---

Regarding the stories of the original topic:

• https://chyoa.com/story/Chyoe---Choose-Your-Own-Erotica.11325
• https://chyoa.com/story/"Build-A-Bitch".11313

The ratio of views to likes is phenomenal (example: Chyoe: 2,196 likes, 11,644 Views), and the ratio is likely beyond anything a traditional story can generate.
But in the case of these stories, the likes are abused as "votes", that show the preferences of the readers regarding certain ideas and fantasies (redhead or blonde? etc.),
in contrast to the likes in traditional stories, where they show the appreciation of the content and of the story you create.
What is perhaps having another big impact on that ratio: The "lurkers", the readers who read but don't hit the like-button, are most likely skipping over these stories, as there is no story to read, while the people who do check the chapters, are the ones who have the intention to vote.

So i would see these likes as something different, and certainly not as a cause to become demoralized.

 

I have implemented a finish line for the Chyoe that after it hits so many likes I delete all of the threads in it and post the results on one central page for the writers to read the results to help insure that none of the pages knock out the top ten and anyone can post their ideas onto it. The impregnation branch for example was added by another person and has taken off. Something I hadn't thought of. I generally write what I feel but when people give comments I generally took them into consideration when deciding what to write next. Sometimes they might be better then what i had in mind. I have been on choya for about ten years now, back on the old site, and I like it when I get likes but its not something I stress about.

 

It doesn't bother me other than its total violation of the scientific method. This self-selected sample cannot speak on behalf of the general readership and so the results are useless. I wouldn't worry about changing your stories based on the alleged preference for redheads, for example. Maybe, like me, the vast majority of the readers saw no value in telling the contributors what to write and moved on without registering a 'like'.

 

Pointing it out makes me look more concerned of what i really am.
Can't deny your story has some value, at least for curiosity.

The question was for Rico.
Really there is no need to continue stressing how much you all don't fuss over likes ... Excusatio non petita.

And that's just it, im asking a question, not giving an aswer.

 

I even added a couple of voices i felt were missing to your poll.
Feel free to use them or re-post them in a more suitable format, they just came to my mind like that.

 

hadn't actually noticed all the likes until you posted this topic, so i guess i can't claim to care all that much, tho i will say that getting likes isn't at all a bad feeling, but i am more happy with favorites, bookmarks and comments.

 

...and so they are both in the top ten ...

 

already asked for them to be deleted.
I thought they where not suppose to be able to get into the top if they where short stories but I guess wrong I guess.