NoTalentHack
Corrupting Influence
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2022
- Posts
- 2,620
The chaos is part of why there are so many comments. I posted three stories in the last seven days. Two of them are four pages long, one in LW (Unwanted Memories) on 12/31 and my first in I/T (A Very Long Engagement) on 1/6.
Here are a breakdown of their stats as they stand right now:
Same rating, basically. The LW handicap probably means if I'd written something that was similarly popular in another category, it would have scored higher, but it's hard to quantify that. I will say that a large number of comments on Unwanted Memories said, basically, "this is the best thing you've written here," including from other writers whose opinions I respect. The comments for AVLE were mostly complimentary, but largely not on that level of effusiveness.
Double the number of views is pretty much as expected; one has been out for a week longer than the other, and it's in a genre I have (I think) a good rep in. Favorites follows similarly along with that; those tend to be exposure-related regardless of category. But the two things that I found really interesting were the votes count/views disparity and the comments/views disparity. In the case of the former, it's about a fivefold disparity. In terms of comments/views, it's an order of magnitude!
The comments themselves are also illuminating. For AVLE, there were three comments that said something like "the anal ruined it." There was one that said "It's NTH's usual quality, but I only read a page, because I don't like incest stories," and then another one saying "what kind of idiot comes into the incest section if they don't want to read incest stories?" The rest were very positive, with many of them asking for more stories about Matt and Sam.
On Unwanted Memories... I'm not doing a detailed breakdown of 250 comments. But they were wildly disparate: people saying that I had written the story wrong, that the MC shouldn't have forgiven his wife, that I was a beta cuck, that they hated the anal, that the MC should have banged the friendly doctor instead, deep analyses of the themes, straight up attaboys, just a huge mix of stuff. There was the 1* contingent, the ones that said "I hate that you made me like a reconciliation story," the ones that said that I was clearly lying about how the actual end of the story went (because of course she would cheat again and/or the MC would be unhappy and/or the wife had faked her memory loss). It's a wild ride, y'all. Go check it out if you want to have some fun.
I tend to write the "things have gone wrong in this marriage, here's how the people involved deal with it" subgenre in LW. I've dipped my toes into BTB and (sort of) RAAC, but mostly just "flawed people doing human things after other flawed people wrong them" stories. And I get a LOT of comments. Looking at the other LW stories that are similar in style, getting 70-100 comments in the first week isn't uncommon, regardless of what type of story is written. And I think it's because it isn't broken down by subgenre.
If I was concerned about rating, other than as a poor metric for how I get reluctant readers to accept challenging themes and outcomes through (hopefully) decent writing, I'd definitely prefer to have it broken out. But because I like comments, to find out how people react to what I've written? Gimme that Thunderdome.
They are venting their sexual frustration being in LW and that's all that is. They should rather find some p. or d. to fuck with in real life and... well. Get a life, actually!
