Authors love feedback. I feel confident saying most of us want to reach as many readers as possible and get lots of feedback. I suggest: 1. Allow people to comment without being a member and having a login. Allow members to comment anonymously also if they want. Since the obvious con here is that we might get more negative feedback and authors deal with that with varying success, have an "allow anonymous comments" option for authors for their story. Literotica works like this if I'm not mistaken. 2. Allow non-members to use the "story map" feature. Even though us authors want readers to love our stories and read every word, the reality is we will get more readers if we let them read how they want.
I don't know about this. As you mentioned harassment might be an issue, but I think spam would be a bigger one. It could lead to a lot more work for the mod as they manually delete comments or have to develop new ways to stop spammers.
Yeah, opening up the story map would be interesting, but spam on anonymous comments would be a doozy.
Beyond just negative feedback opening up, I think you'd also get a lot of spamming links and etc. like used to happen on forums in ye olden days. Considering the story owners can't even delete comments right now, I don't see it working out. The part about story maps is good, though!
Seeing some stuff from Rule34, paheal specifically, yeah no, anonymous commenting is going to be a terrible experience. It's going to be unregulated, and more people are more likely to act callously when they are anonymous, or if consequences can't be linked back to them.
Im torn on the allowing non members to use story maps part. On the one hand i agree that It would probably increase sheer readership, but on the other, if im honestly being unable to access the story map was what made me eventually cave and create an account, and by extension made me want to try my hand at writing. Not to mention, incentivizing people to create an account likely leads to greater interaction. When i wasn’t signed up my appreciation for what people wrote went completely unnoticed by the authors, now if i enjoy a story I’ll at least leave a like.
Letting non users use site maps isn’t something I have an opinion on, but the content of some anonymous comments on literotica is a hell no from me It’s not even the extra rude “you ruined this story idiot” anonymous comments but the cringey “this reminds of some totally real sex I had in real life, let me assure you that my penis is large before I casually talk about the fictional characters in this story like they are real” ones.
Just a reminder that I want the author to be able to choose for a given story whether or not to allow anonymous comments. That doesn't take away the above concerns, but it does mitigate them quite a bit and put that control with the author.
