It is my humble opinion that displaying chapter depth in the preview panes doesn't provide a a lot of tangible insight into how much there actually is to the story. Retirement with Benefits displays as being 394 Chapters deep. Lois Lane's Night displays as only having 29 Chapters Deep, but has seven times as many chapters. While these are both extremes in either direction, I feel that it's still sufficient proof that the two variables do not correlate well. With that in mind, I would prefer an option to select whether to see a stories Chapter Depth, or its total number of Chapters. Or, simply change the format so that it displays both all the time.
I was thinking about this recently and like this idea, especially displaying both. I still don't think either max chapter depth or number of chapters is a perfect metric of how much you can expect to find (a story with a thousand go-nowhere starting options but only a single built out path would look unrepresentatively full by this combination), but having them both displayed would be more useful than the current depth-only method.
Simple chapter depth is definitely misleading on many stories, and gives improportionate recognition to noodles. That said, chapter depth does provide a very meaningful metric that shouldn't be overlooked: that is, how far you can possibly read before the story is over, and you have to go back and start reading a different branch. In the example, the given depths make it obvious that Retirement with Benefits provides nearly 400 chapters of sequential content, whereas Lois Lane's Night Out will only take you 29 chapters at maximum before it's game over. In conjunction with total number of chapters, it becomes meaningful, but by itself, chapter depth is just a flawed way of estimating the amount of content. I have two greater concerns with the way chapter depth currently works. Firstly, absolutely nothing in the story stats accounts for word count, so a story with 200-word chapters will almost always appear to be longer than a story with 1000-word chapters. Secondly, chapter depth ignores recursion and linking, which is especially important in Game Mode. I understand both of these are not currently fixable, however. In the former case, the total word count cannot currently be easily implemented; in the latter, it is already difficult to determine possible 'paths' when accounting for Game Mode, and infinite loops make this extremely challening to calculate algorithmically.
Word count would certainly be more valuable than view counts, but I also feel that for larger stories that the word counts would become too large to articulate properly.
30. I updated. Slow but steady! At the end of the day, chapter depth, total number of chapters, and wordcount are all efforts to quantify the potential reader experience. The question they indirectly try to answer is Is it worth clicking on this one? Will I get frustrated because it's incomplete? And there's no hard data that can really answer that. I wouldn't mind seeing metrics like total number of chapters or wordcount, but ultimately I think it's kind of arbitrary. It's not like Lois Lane's Night Out is likely to crack the Top Sex Stories list.
I did want to mention there will be exceptions even to chapter depth telling you how far you can go continuously. In particular, I'm thinking of a game mode story (darn game mode stories, always making things hard to quantify) that, upon reaching the end of a chain, loops back to a certain chapter to either change the character you're focusing on or open up a new previously locked choice for you to act on the info the other ending gave you. It's a continuous story, but chapter depth can't reflect it. I guess I felt the need to bring this up because I write for one such story. Of course, the answer to that might be just as simple as "so build your story differently if that bothers you, silly!" But I wanted to bring it up because while I feel this example is more common in a game mode story, the idea of a continuous story that the author has (for whatever reason) built to loop back to an earlier chapter and continue from there instead is not impossible and will skew the chapter depth.
Quite true; data is only as useful as what you choose to do with it. I'm sure most people who aren't (nerds) me don't look at the much, if at all. If anything, I think it's a handy way to help fight against the 20/80 rule, where 20% of the content gets 80% of the attention. (Granted, I suspect approximately half of the stories on this site are attempted in a fit of horny energy and completely forgotten about the next day, never to be seen again, so it is at least partially inevitable.)
Well, you can easily switch to 4k, 3M, and even 2G. (save it as the real number but display it like that)
i agree, my story has an okay amount of chapters spread across multiple branches so the depth doesnt improve as often despite frequent additions. i also think word count would be nice just to see how much I've done if anything lol
on the topic of what the site displays i feel it should also show favorites and bookmarks, i notice a lot of users gloss over likes and just use favorites or bookmarks unfortunately.
