When do readers know whether they liked a story? · 6:18am Jan 3rd, 2014
I just posted a new story, "Happy Ending", and saw again the same thing that happens every time I post a story: I get a flurry of thumbs-downs in the first 10 votes. The first ten votes for any of my stories are almost evenly divided between thumbs-up and thumbs-down. The thumbs-up usually outnumber the thumbs-down after that, and eventually reach a stable ratio of 20 to 60 thumbs-up per thumbs-down (or lower for stories where I torment Fluttershy). For some of my stories, most of the total thumbs-downs came from the first one or two dozen viewers.
Why is this? Are people unable to judge whether they like a story until they see what other people think of it? Or unable to judge whether they like a story after they see what other people think of it? Should I pay attention to the swarm of likes that eventually comes, or those first few unbiased dislikes?
FOLLOWUP: Obselescence looked into it and said:
Investigation into some of your recent stories' rating history doesn't appear to show anything suspicious, in that none of the early downvotes appear to be the same person twice, and they generally seem to be coming late enough for the folks in question to have actually read the story. Investigation into some voting histories for the downvoting parties isn't yielding anything particularly suspicious either, so...
First thought, if this is a demonstrable pattern you may have attracted yourself someone who's vote bombing you. Consider asking a mod to check on that.
Otherwise, it is hard to say. There are people who like popular things more simply for being popular; same for things which are obscure or highly rated and whatever else. Of course, there are plenty of people who dislike popular things simply for being popular, so I don't know how that plays out statistics wise.
1677150
Your first thought was my first thought. I'm pretty sure that kind of thing has happened on FimFiction before. It doesn't have to be more than a couple of raging nutters to be the case.
If others thumb up and down like I do, then down votes would naturally be concentrated in the beginning. I only up vote stories that truly impress me (and even then sometimes I dont bother or forget), and that takes time, if not completion of the story. However, if a story is bad enough, in my own tastes, to deserve a down vote, I usually come to that conclusion in just a few clunky, cliche, unedited paragraphs.
To explain your situation, this explanation would require that your readers start reading the story at roughly the same time. Which can be true only to a degree, and the effect would depend on the length of the story.
Vidatu might be onto something when he implies that imagined social pressures have a role. Most decent stories end up heavily liked, as people who wouldnt have liked it (mostly) just avoid the story from the start. Once the story has its likes, perhaps other likers feel the pull of the bandwagon, or feel more validated in their opinion.
Or, perhaps, the down votes are coming from people who never intended to really read the story, something I believe youve suspected before. It is unkown, however, how many have that little life that they have to prowl the new story feed to downvote stories based on subject or author alone.
PS, loved Mortality Report. Reference it to creep people out all the time.
I haven't noticed a pattern like you described, but I have seen cases where downvotes appear too quickly for anyone to have actually read the story. The two times that's happened to me, I wasn't sure if there was anything to be done about it, so I just ignored them.
It might be worth keeping an eye on, however.
1677150
Oh. This is Fimfiction. Right.
I dunno what to tell you BH. I know personally that I Upvote if the story does three things-
1. Keeps me enaged from start to finish and actually makes me want to finish the story, my liking of the actual story aside.
2. Gets me to like the senario and characters presented enough to want to keep up with 1.
3. Has both of those traits, and is well to decently written. (No major grammatical errors, few spelling errors... nothing that couldn't be cleaned up with a good editor, which not everyone has access too or is on a time crunch and doesn't have time to put out. Life can be crazy after all.)
If it does those three, it gets a thumbs up. If it fails at any of those stages, thumbs down. I don't like explaining in the comment box -why- when it comes to the first two, because those are of opinion, nothing more.
The third one I'll leave a comment as to why. Of course, the third one is usually a bit more nit-picky and if 1 and 2 are good 3 usually follows along. Usually.
That's just me anyway. I wouldn't be able to tell you on the others. I don't exactly spend a huge amount of time in the community due to lack of time and dat military life.
1677197
I am with both of them though. Sounds like a lurker. Next time, see if the story somehow gets dislikes before going live.
Take it as a good sign. You are popular enough for someone like this to make the effort.
This happens to me as well. GO to my profile and look at all my stories. All the dislikes they have, mostly came from the first few viewers. Then after that it was smooth sailing... I just don't know why they do it.
Maybe I just don't have a lot of faith in the userbase, but quick thumbs downs like that, from what I know, come from people who just run around downvoting everything for whatever reason, or they have some kind of grudge against certain authors/types of stories. Heck, it could even be a downvote because they didn't care for it, not even because it's not a good story. Without a comment explaining the phenomenon, the world may never know.
Actually, this is true of the vast majority of stories on the site; every one of my stories, almost all of the downvotes come right at the start. Why is this?
I have the extremely strong suspicion that the reason is that it is on the front page. The result is that you've got the readers who are randomly scanning new stories and looking for something to read. Thus, rather than getting readers who are interested in your premise, they're just looking for anything... and as such, I think, are actually rather harder to please.
I've noticed that after my stories left the front page, they have gotten virtually no downvotes at all.
I mean, it is possible you're getting thumb-bombed... but I doubt it. My stories, I see the same thing. Shotgun Wedding got 10 downvotes in its first day... it now has 14, despite lingering for several days in the featured box, where it got a few more downvotes.
The rest of my stories, most of them have 0-1 downvotes after the first day.
I mean, it is possible someone is thumb-bombing ME... but I doubt it honestly. More likely that just whoever reads the front page stories randomly is likely either pickier or more likely to read a random story they don't like.
I suspect that is to some extent the cause of my extremely negative voting history - I read a lot of stories that I'm not sure I'll be interested in. Though it doesn't help that I'm also picky as all hell.
Basically, I'm most likely to read an older story if it is by an author I liked, if someone recommends it to me specifically, or if it is in a set of stories I'm exploring on my own (such as looking at all the RariDash fics, for instance). But when I read feature box stories (something I do fairly often), I am quite likely to downvote them.
The stories I think I'm least likely to downvote are the stories by authors who have already written at least one thing I've liked, as that sets a bar for quality. But I think I've downvoted at least one story by most people that I follow.
You are actually one of the few exceptions, as I have not downvoted a single one of your stories. That being said, I have never read some of your stories, and most of the stories you have written which I have not read are the ones which, I suspect, I am most likely to downvote.
Stories for things I'm exploring are probably the most downvoted ones by me, as I'll read as smattering of 5-10 of them and most of them are bad, even if they have a lot of upvotes. Even recommended stories aren't often safe, though the very best recommended stories have been things I've enjoyed mostly.
All it takes is 5 or so dedicated trolls to downthumb like this, and with as many people as we have on the site, that's a teeny percentage.
A dislike, without an accompanying comment, is just noise. Disregard it.
I have benefited greatly from negative comments. They point out my flaws and encourage me to be a better writer.
The rest? Well, I assume the dislike means, "not porn; I am disappoint; movin' on." Nuts to 'em. Static on the line, I say.
This seems to be a recent trend for dowvoting in general. I remember a few authors I follow, maybe it was you, I forget, always used to get 3-4 downvotes very quick, but it's been happening to more people, so it might be a sitewide phenomenon now.
In one case that one babs seed writer put out two awesome stories with flash sentry (don't worry, it's a good story, bad things happen to him) and they got quick downvotes, probably because of the tags. But tag and description wise your stories shouldn't inspire that type of ire, so don't take it personally.
1677391
Well said!
Generally this is my attitude. Without a comment, a dislike is impossible to decipher. Is it disapproval of the style? The quality? The subject matter? The torment of a character? Pique?
Mind, if the dislikes come in such a peculiar pattern as that, you may have to worry about a downvote-spewing stalker, though I think another explanation is more likely: that early flurry of dislikes comes from people who spot the story in the new stories queue, resolve they don't want to read it and slam the dislike button because they misunderstand what it means.
Kneejerk reactions, most likely. Could be due to the premise, the tags, or possibly even your name. Also, there are folks that just hang around specifically to hate everything. Not sure why they bother, honestly.
There was one person I remember from a while back (long since banned) who would go on every new story and brag how he'd downvoted it. And not only on the account he was using to comment, but with several other accounts he'd created just for the purpose of downvoting. "Good luck getting featured", he would snark before squelching off to hide in whatever swampy depths he typically lurked in.
Simply put, for every creative work that someone makes, there is someone else who looks at it and thinks, "I bet I could piss all over that." Best to get an umbrella and just ignore them.
1677197
Eh im sure there is some way to make a script, have several accounts who can do it or something such.
Remember a guy who made one that enabled him to favorite all stories (i mean all, he favorited all of my unfinished stories too so asked him how then). That was bad 1-2 years ago though.
Dunning-Kruger effect?
I suspect that you're right about users not knowing how to rate stories until they see input from other readers. That sounds kind of stupid, but I suspect it has more validity (see above) that people generally realize.
Why? Well, this is fanfiction, and everyone is acutely aware of Sturgeon's Law in fanfiction. So it's generally not unreasonable to assume that anything you click on randomly and not through recommendation is likely to be bad. Thus, more downvotes while on the front page (as
1677259 suggested) and fewer if the story is showing up in the feature box, or the popular stories box, or if you're starting to get readers in via your watchers, signal boost blogs, or outside influences like EQD. Once readers know a story is liked, opinions start to shift.
But why are readers so hard on stories when they don't have a consensus to work with? My guess is Dunning-Kruger—I think a number of readers think they have a much better understanding of how writing works than they actually do.
Case in point (and hopefully I don't sound like a bitter asshole here), I recently posted a collection space for EQD's writer's training grounds, along with a couple other authors. I tossed in an answer to their first prompt on "Bats!", a comedy/crossover story playing off "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". It got very little attention (which I kind of expected—I thought that titling the story as an EQD-related compilation would probably hurt its ability to gain traction, but I wanted to be able to dump these things together instead of filling up my profile with a bunch of mindless, tiny one-shots). Anyway, skip forward a couple days to when the EQD response post goes up. I've gotten one comment since then. The story sat at +8 / -1 when this comment was given. Here it is:
I asked for some clarification on this, but I've heard nothing—and I find the comment itself kind of mystifying. I did go back and re-read the story looking for grammar errors, and I did find two: a comma that should have been a period, and a missing end-quote at the end of a paragraph. Anyone I pre-read for can attest (*cough
1677496 cough*), I'm one of the worst grammar and usage sticklers around. And someone's telling me that my grammar was so terrible they could hardly read the story? That seems... odd.
I have a couple suspicions here. One is that fanfics have a higher bar to clear in terms of establishing author intentionality. A reader will treat a story differently if s/he thinks an author is writing in a particular way because the writer doesn't know better, vs. writing in a particular way as a conscious structural choice. Since a lot of fanfiction authors are amateurs and very few are even dedicated amateurs, there's generally a dearth of intentionality, and I suspect this affects (effects?) perceptions of writing substantially.
The second suspicion, of course, is the Dunning-Kruger effect. A lot of people on this site fancy themselves writers, and a lot of them don't have a lot of background with writing. So when an author with more skill attempts to put together a more difficult program, if you will, that's probably going to fly right past a lot of readers. It's hard to appreciate the difficulty on an iron cross unless you're fairly familiar with gymnastics beforehand—after all, anyone can stand with their arms outstretched, so how hard can it be to get into that position on a set of rings?
So I do think opinions of stories probably depend on consensus quite a lot, much as
1677504 suggested. And I suspect a lot of early downvotes come from people who think they understand what's happening in a piece of writing much better than they actually do, and who would be largely unable to give a solid critique of the writing.
For my part, I upvote stories if I think (1) they're good or (2) they deserve to be higher in the top-rated stories list than they already are. But a large chunk of my upvoting is just spam-upvoting of new stories by people I follow, without reading them, in a crass attempt to help those stories hit the feature box. I trust the people I follow enough to be pretty confident that whatever they publish is going to be high quality and is going to deserve that sort of attention. I try to get back and read those stories later, when I have a chance. But if I've got issues with a story, it's much, much more likely that I'll go dig into them in a comment—and I care a hell of a lot more about comments in general.
To me, upvotes are largely a site mechanic / community rating system, and I don't treat them any more seriously than I feel they deserve in that context. If I want to communicate approval or disapproval to an author, that's what comments are for.
1677625
What you're describing is much closer to the Asch conformity experiments - basically, the idea that if other people say something, that something must be true.
In reality if you look across the site, almost ALL stories have positive ratings. And for my personal stories, other than Wraith of Ponyville (no one cared) and Shotgun Wedding (feature box), every other one of them has an almost identical rating. Are all my stories equally good? Well, I would say Shotgun Wedding's first chapter is probably the strongest thing I've made for the site, but I wouldn't say Wraith of Ponyville is especially bad (just something no one cares about reading - who ships RariDash anyway?) but the rest of my stories all being about equally rated really just tells me that they're about equally read. In fact, ratings and views are pretty strongly correlated overall.
I mean, yeah, people aren't necessarily super awesome at writing, but writing is actually one of the skills that a reasonably large portion of the population is at least reasonably competent in - 15% of the population is considered to have top level reading skills and another 40% or so are considered to be of a reasonably high skill level (though not the highest level). Of course, a good chunk of the population is functionally illiterate, which probably shouldn't surprise anyone who reads comments on the internet. Thus I doubt widespread incompetency is really the actual explanation.
Rather, I suspect that the reason is what I said - in reality, almost no one on the site DOES downvote very much, and I strongly suspect the cause is that most people only downvote stuff that offends them in some way or which is really, really, really badly written. So you don't see a whole lot of downvotes on most anything, unless the story is about Rainbow Dash getting an abortion or something. In reality, upvotes are mostly a function of views, and aren't actually a strong indicator of quality - only stories that have ratings like 20/10 or similar (or even worse, like 10/10) are really indicators of quality. Anything beyond that is pretty much meaningless, unfortunately - I've found numerous great stories with 100 odd upvotes, and numerous bad ones with thousands.
Sure, I think there is a SLIGHT trend - stories with piles of upvotes, which aren't clop, DO tend to be slightly better than average - but the effect is pretty small.
1677631
I have only six (well, five and a half) stories to my credit, and they all started out with downvotes. My own theory is that people who read the description and think "Oh, I hate that" reflexively turn the thumb down and move on, having never even finished the first chapter.
Then again, a story of mine that got two downvotes early now has none. I have no idea why this is so.
1677631 Asch is a good fit for what I'm saying about consensus developing over time, and I did spend plenty of time on that in my comment, but I was trying to zero in more on why stories get those early downvotes with mention of Dunning-Kruger.
I don't know about population-level reading skill levels and how such levels are defined, but I do think there's a substantial difference between reading and writing, which you appear to be lumping together. I know that, personally, despite being a voracious reader all through my teens and twenties, I never started to really pick up on a lot of the issues that, say, distinguish why Skywriter is such an excellent writer until I started to dig more deeply into the craft of writing and understand more about word-efficiency and effective ways to do characterization and description. I could have recognized his stuff as good in my teens, but I couldn't have told you why he was good until about ten years ago.
You raise a valid point, I think, in that it really isn't necessary to know how to write to judge the quality of a piece of writing. I think it does contribute to one's ability to pick apart the details (cf. Feynman and the Flower), but it's not necessary to see what a writer is doing to appreciate overall quality.
But at the same time, I doubt that everyone on this site is capable of assessing quality independently, and I do think that's what's contributing to the early-downvote issue, that without a large balance of prior info, readers are more likely to judge a story based on their own perceptions. So perhaps the Asch conformity work is more directly relevant to what's going on here, yes, especially the perpetuation of upvotes with views (and this is why I usually pay a lot more attention to vote ratios than total votes). But I think the early balance of downvotes that comes in on a lot of stories like Bad Horse's is probably either kneejerk-downvoting or downvoting by readers who have poor filters for quality and for whom all stories are essentially a crapshoot.
Maybe I'm not giving the population of Fimfiction enough credit. Then again, we're not talking about that many downvotes, so I'm pretty content with my long-standing belief that you folks are generally a more discerning, better-heeled brand of readers than one might find elsewhere.
I would have no trouble believing that there are a handful of dedicated trolls lurking on the front page to reflexively downvote everything, for no other reason than that they think it's funny to give authors a hard time.
Which wouldn't be quite so obnoxious and vexing if not for the fact that some (if not most) of us never get more than 10 votes total on our stories.
1677651
Ooh!
Special request! Write a blog post telling us why Skywriter is good.
1677625 The purpose of a story is to please readers, not to please writers. It should therefore be judged by how much readers like it, not by how well-written they think it is. And everyone should be able to tell whether they liked a story or not.
1677634
While I'm fairly certain there are people who downvote stories based on their long description/tags, I don't think they actaully fully explain the phenomenon, especially given that actually sitting and watching my stories, while the downvotes come in the first day, they don't all come right up front - there's no way to show that they didn't even read the first chapter.
And you don't actually need to read the entire first chapter to tell if a story is going to be bad or not - even the first 500 words of a story can sometimes be enough to evaluate it if it is really bad.
Heck I could guess that I wouldn't like most of your stories from the first person perspective and the combination of "human" and "romance" tags, though I wouldn't bother reading most of them. Reading through the first chapter of The Sparkle Chronicles told me I wouldn't like any of those stories, though I wouldn't just go and downvote them all on that basis, I probably could.
However, it is my general experience that almost no one actually thumbbombs on that basis, otherwise HIE fics would have far, far more downvotes. Mostly people just avoid looking at the stories they're not interested in at all.
While some topics (foalcon, abortion) will earn downvotes from people who don't even read the story, while people love to hypothesize that they get auto-downvotes because of haters... I don't think it is actually all that true, I think it is just a convenient explanation for their downvotes so they don't have to think about them too much. It is basically a sign of confirmation bias.
1677651
They're actually very closely related skills. That is not to say that being a great reader will make you a great writer, but being very good at reading will allow you to evaluate someone's skill at writing. I mean, all this stuff that people talk about... well, I learned this stuff in high school, if not before. Narrative structure, word efficiency, all that noise, that was all stuff covered in english classes from elementary through high school. I also read a lot, but they actually teach ordinary students quite a bit of writing theory - I just don't think a lot of people really absorb it.
Efficiency wasn't really something we attacked really aggressively until AP English, though. But it is fairly easy to appreciate, even if it is harder to replicate.
I disagree. Very strongly, in fact. Indeed, I think this is totally the opposite of reality.
If anything, it is what causes the huge amount of upvotes. Because in reality, almost all the stories on this site are bad, and most of the stories on the site have far more upvotes than downvotes.
If the readers were actually good at evaluating writing, most stories on this site would not be well-rated at all.
1678484
Sturgeon, perhaps, applies exponentially in the case of fanfic.
1678866
Well, Sturgeon's law was originally applied to published works, which have a certain minimum level of quality and care put into them.
The lower your standards for submission are, the more garbage you'll get. I mean, Youtube is probably like, 99.9% crap at least.
1677150 1677165 1677207
A few months back I posted in passing a link to an upcoming story of mine here in Bad Horse's blog comments. It had cover art, tags and description but I hadn't yet started uploading the story to the site.
It got a downvote.
I'm oddly proud of that. I somehow managed to offend one of Bad Horse's trolls(/low-information readers) so much that they downvoted an unpublished zero-word story.
1679396
It seems like there is a certain sub-demographic here that gets really, really mad when writers get what they perceive as uppity. A lot of times this seems to mean "famous without drowning every post in self-depreciation", or "engages in analysis that I can't follow/don't agree with".
So be proud! It's a twisted honor, attracting these trolls. A sign of success!
Maybe you should take in count the comments, but not just the ooooo i love your story comments, but those deeper analisis, i certainly have seen stories with a lot of thumbs up but when i get to read them they sucks, like really really sucks, not because a story have a lot of thumbs up it means than that story is good, the same way that a buch of thumbs down, won't determined that is a bad story. If you really want to know if your work is really good, check the comments and look for the "heavier" readers, theres always some readers that take a deeper look into the stories and that wont give you a thumb up or down without a good reason.
Especially because it is true, a lot of people goes for what the rest says is ok, example, almost everyone says My Little Dashie is the best fanfic of all the fandom, personally it is good, but i have read a lot of better stories. Or at least, thats what i think.
1677823
And three upvotes to boot.
Okay, pipelined. Now here's hoping I don't embarrass myself doing this.
Also, I wonder what Skywriter is going to think when he sees "12 Reasons You Should be Watching Skywriter, You Ignorant Fuck[1]" show up in his Fimfiction newsfeed.
[1] Blog post title subject to almost certain change / de-cracked.com-ification.
1679396
That, that is slowclap worthy.
1679498 is right though. If you don't constantly belittle yourself, and you are reasonably popular, that is apparently grounds for people to harsh on you.
And of course, if you ARE constantly belittling yourself, that is grounds for people to harsh on you.
1680211
Noooo. Keep it.
1679396
Option 1: They downvoted your story because it had zero words.
Option 2: They tried to compute information per word, divided zero by zero, segfaulted, and began randomly clicking things.
1677150 1677165 1677193 1677743
Obselescence looked into it and said:
1681656
Hm! Well, alright then. Whatever, I guess.
Call it a victory for evoking strong responses in the audience or something, I dunno.
1680160
I agree with you.
Though, there are times when not even the comments can tell you the exact reasoning, because some are just generalized hatred. Like, if you have an Alicorn OC, many people will just put things of general hate for it. And sometimes, they would leave a hateful comment, and give your story a thumbs down because you do have one.
1677197
So, Bad Horse, if any of your stories have an Alicorn OC, it could be that. If it does not, then it could just be how the viewers see it. There also could be more thumbs down, because, some people would see that, think it sucks, and give it a thumbs down without even reading.
There are a few hateful people out there, so it could be them. But it is like what Tyrant Alex said, even though the story has more thumbs-up than thumbs-down, doesn't make it good. Like how more thumbs-down than thumbs-up does not make it bad.
But it could also be what
1677625
put. Some readers will not judge a story based on their own knowledge but others as well. Like, for all you know, one of the people who gave your story a thumbs-down could have a few followers/watchers, that, if they see that story, would also give it a thumbs-down. It could also be grammar usage, it could also be the fact you may "be missing a tag". I know on my story, I got a hater because I was missing an AU tag, and since I was new to the website at the time, I did not consider putting it, because it had the original characters from the show, but they are in the background and come into play here and there. It was mainly my OCs. So, after his comment (even though it seemed a bit hateful) criticizing me for the missing tag, I went back, added the tag, and replied to his comment with my own on how I did not think to put it and that I was sorry for not putting it, and that the issue was fixed.
It could also be because of your character. I do not mean that the character is a hated character (unless it is an Alicorn OC, since a lot of people do dislike them [I, personally do not mind]), I mean in the sense of the characters background. In my summary, I had put that my character was an average Pegasus. Now, I had planned my story before I actually began writing it. But, last minute I decided to make her a Pegasus with a Unicorn parent (the other being a Pegasus). I had a story hater because of this. Though, after I put that in my story, I was going to go back and fix the summary up a bit to show she was not an "average" Pegasus. But I had internet-connection issues and could not until today. Still, I had a hater for it once I logged on to go fix the issue. And, after I fixed the issue I replied to the comment saying that I was sorry for that, and explained my side of the story.
So, it could be because of grammar, haters for the sake of hating, general haters who hate a certain character/OC group who will not like a story because of that, having something that does not match your character in your summary or anything of that sort (like with mine being an "average Pegasus" before I last minute changed it), and people who cannot determine on their own whether or not they like the story.
Personally, what I do, I read the summary, and if it is interesting, I read the story. If it is not, I just skip over it and look at another story without giving a downvote. And if I did find the summary interesting, and started reading the story, and disliked it, I would not give it a downvote since it IS my opinion, and I would hate for others to be influenced when someone else can find it amazing. If I liked the story, I would not give it a thumbs-up for the same reason. Instead, I would just favourite it.
But, hey, some people are not like that. Sadly.
1685185 I realize all that about why people may vote one way or another, but the question is why they vote so differently when the story is less than 10 minutes old than when it is more than an hour old.
I encourage you to vote, thumbs up or thumbs down. Don't be afraid of influencing people. That's what they're there for. If people didn't try to influence me, I'd find it hard to find any good stories at all.
And, why, yes, I have an alicorn OC...
1689936
I guess it is due to the Alicorn OC then. I know when I first published my story, I had an explosion of down votes and most of the comments literally stated, "THIS IS WHY MARY SUE STORIES SUCK!!", and a lot of them commented that without reading the story (I could tell, because one comment was stated, "Alicorn!!!... Or will become one.... STILL ALL THE SAME!!!).
I do not mind Alicorn OCs at all and I do not get why so many people hate them. But, whatever. If you want to please these haters you gotta show the character struggle. And it cannot be indirect either, or you will still get negative results. Sadly.
With my story, I only wrote two chapters (and they consisted of the events the led to my Alicorn OC's struggle, so I could not begin with it) and I got SOOO many down votes. I literally got like 8 down votes. Then, when I added chapter three which was the beginning with her understanding the situation and realizing it will be a struggle, I started getting thumbs-up. But, I still get hateful comments from people who do not read as far as chapter three. So, it could be your Alicorn OC. So, you just gotta keep adding to it and ignore the downvotes and once the true story starts, you will get upvotes.
1690033 No, that was just one story. This is something that happens every time, and it isn't a matter of downvotes. It's a question of why the first 10 votes are always much more likely to be downvotes. Has nothing to do with the story content.
1690051
Ah, well, then it could just be people finding the summary dis-interesting, and people who read the story, disliked it, and people still giving it downvotes because they see other gave it downvotes
1677823
Well, you did ask for it.