I'm not sure what's making you butt hurt. I'm directly addressing issues that have come up here over and over and over again, usually by folks who come in cold thinking they're the first ones who ever thought about anything there.
That doesn't make sense for so many reasons. In my opinion stories participating in a contest should all go into the same category to avoid biases. Like create a category called Contests and all stories participating for the said contest should go there and stay until voting is done. Readers would still be able to filter through contest stories based on tags. When voting for the contest ends and awards are attributed, then the stories could go into a category of their author's choosing and look like any other normal story. Nothing else seems fair to me, but I guess that is no wonder, all things considered. Oh look, I moaned about a Lit practice... again
But so do the fives.
You are forgetting what the issue here is. Almost EVERYTHING on Lit is about readers, and improving their experience, the amount of traffic and so on. Contests at least should be about authors. Making them fair should be a number one concern, so if it takes suffering less reader traffic on contesting stories for a while, so be it. The problem could be maybe even fixed with proper advertising on Lit main page. So yeah, I would put all stories in one nameless category. I would even publish those stories with Anonymous as author for the duration of the contest, to avoid/lessen the followers bias. So readers would vote without knowing who wrote the story. Sure, maybe some authors would try to let their followers know in a different way, but I believe it would be hard to reach most of them and some of them would possibly even point it out to the community, if they get triggered by dishonesty of that approach.
The solution to your problems might be to write stories which impact more readers enough to motivate them to vote!
This is where we differ, I suppose. If I was organizing it, I would be obsessed with fairness.
Oh, the 5s work wonders
I think that's what happens with me. My fetish stories are 1'd because they are not incest or something more raunchy!
Yeah, I know... Although to my defense, I got interested only when contests, and the way they work, were mentioned. I knew almost nothing about the way they work until today.
And yet you're good with personally flaming folks who do know how they work.
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Yep, it only takes one or two 1s or 2s, and your story is down on its arse, hitting the pavement like a drunk bloke on Friday night.
Part of the "issue" here is that you have arrived new on the site, have some strong views as to how you think it should work (and that's fine), yet it would appear you don't have much of an idea how it actually does work - as evidenced by this post. Contest knowledge: less than a day, but you reckon you could do it better? See the "problem" here?
Whereas the folk you're discussing it have been here a long time (in some cases a very long time), so have a very good idea of the intricacies of Lit, the home truths of a twenty-plus year old site, and its ups and downs. And, I suppose, we've leaned to live with it, work within the site's constraints, and just get on with it - and the forum babble is all a bit of an aside, a bit of banter.
It's not as if the AH is at all representative of anything. There's what, thirty or forty regulars (I don't know, I've never counted us), so we're a microcosm of writers. Truth is, it's not forum babble we've got here, it's a forum bubble. And that's also fine, but we're not representative writers, not at all. We're vaguely communal, for a start, whereas really, we should be up in our attics, totally insular.
Anyway, welcome aboard the good ship Literotica, and sail on into the sunset, bickering
On and off, I have been reading stories on Lit for more than 15 years, maybe even close to 20, but I am not exactly sure there. While it is possible that my reading experience had been uncharacteristic for Lit , I am actually speaking from it. The categories never really worked for me. While I generally like long stories, preferably with a femdom theme and with interesting characters and a lot of imagination, the natural category for it - BDSM is probably the one I browse the least, as it is such an omnium gatherum of tropes and fetishes, with rarely a sensible story in there. When they were introduced, the tags were the things that worked for me the most by far, but maybe that is just me. Also, the things I criticized in most threads didn't work for me as a reader. Maybe I am uncommon as a reader, but I DO know Lit from that perspective very well. So let's not make this about lack of reader experience, if as a writer I am indeed new.
I am not sure what you people understood from what was said, but I didn't speak out of ignorance in this thread. It is when one of the posters said something how contests work and another one confirmed it, that I found that approach unfair and suggested something else, because I think fairness is the most important thing in contests. It could be that I am in a minority there as well, but I am getting used to it rapidlyPart of the "issue" here is that you have arrived new on the site, have some strong views as to how you think it should work (and that's fine), yet it would appear you don't have much of an idea how it actually does work - as evidenced by this post. Contest knowledge: less than a day, but you reckon you could do it better? See the "problem" here?
Whereas the folk you're discussing it have been here a long time (in some cases a very long time), so have a very good idea of the intricacies of Lit, the home truths of a twenty-plus year old site, and its ups and downs. And, I suppose, we've leaned to live with it, work within the site's constraints, and just get on with it - and the forum babble is all a bit of an aside, a bit of banter.
It's not as if the AH is at all representative of anything. There's what, thirty or forty regulars (I don't know, I've never counted us), so we're a microcosm of writers. Truth is, it's not forum babble we've got here, it's a forum bubble. And that's also fine, but we're not representative writers, not at all. We're vaguely communal, for a start, whereas really, we should be up in our attics, totally insular.
Anyway, welcome aboard the good ship Literotica, and sail on into the sunset, bickering
That's the tribal thing from opinionated bastards (and we're all one of those), and I don't think you're copping the smartass thing. What you're seeing is, new guy, same grievance as the last guy, nothing new, for the umpteenth time. Some folk are more patient, is all. Once you've been around a little longer, the personalities become clearer, you put some on Ignore, and it can all be rather peaceful.
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