Heyo, here's an important little blog promo! · 9:13pm Apr 27th, 2018
And here's the link to SPark's blog.
It's far more of a problem than you'd actually think, no matter what size your reader base is. I've been getting it for year after year. Readers who downvote with only a glance aren't as much as a problem as readers who don't vote at all. Yeah, voter apathy is really bad for writers, and it's actually easier to upvote than it is to favorite, especially if you have a jumble of bookshelves that form their own cluttering banner.
If you can think of one author who wrote something you really enjoyed, why not try and pull a few stories from your library and give 'em a vote? There's absolutely nothing on the site to make bookshelves worth anything. If you're excited that one of your favorite author's new stories came out and read it eagerly before shoving it in your faves and not voting, you're actually not helping them out that much. Sure, giving views is nice and so are comments, but it's the votes that put stories in similar sections, give the writer a clue to who is reading, and many more things. Upvotes are personally the most useful feedback for me. Sometimes, it can feel really hard to want to write when I'm not sure how often a story is being read - I can't tell how many live readers there were at any point, so there's only so much I can guess.
And I can certainly guess that a reader who adds one of my stories to a bookshelf with a title along the lines of 'best stories I've read' without voting on it doesn't care about the story at all.
Oh, and that has happened before. Terribly often, too.
If you think that someone else's upvote is going to fill in where yours could've been, it won't. If you're astounded that a story you've just heard about from a review just came to your attention, it probably didn't simply slip beneath the radar, but likely had so many non-voting readers to 'help' it do so. The story with the strange rating that you just read probably has that rating because the non-voting readers didn't vote on a story and that's why it has an 'unusual' amount of downvotes - because there was nothing to really balance it out. Voting closes the gap between the underrated stories across the site and stories that have been around for years and are among the top rated because of the readers that vote on them. It's also just generally a nice thing to do. If you would like to help give an author's stories some attention, give them a vote! Group adds, follows, and comments are all great, but something's just missing without that vote. Bookshelves are for you. They don't mean anything in a story's rating. Your bookshelf telling me my story was downvoted for 'LBGT bullshit' (yes, I've had this happen before) is no different than a bookshelf telling me you would track me down and deliver flowers to me at every hour of the day because you thought my story was just that fantastic... for some reason.
Your vote does matter to writer, but, the only way it's actually going to matter is if you give it.
For those looking for news about updates: There will be some! I'm not dead. Progress is merely slow. I want big ol' complicated EoM to be the best story it can be. I've also been very busy with some real life stuff lately. You don't need to worry though, just look at my record for completing stories. Things will be fine.
long blog omw4848783
long blog's gotta be long
This... very much this.
From experience, some kind of threshold between votes and bookshelf-adds is gradually approached, and once you cross that line, the problem of having bookshelf-adds without any actual votes becomes far more prominent. The most frustrating cases are moments where I've had multiple people add a story to their shelves, but no actual upvotes or downvotes were made; I oh so hate the default Favorites bookshelf for this situation.
It's not that I'm hungry for votes: ever since Fimfic swapped to a 10-vote requirement before ratings were publicly shown, I've had trouble attracting a readership for some of my smaller stories. Maybe that's just me, but either way, it certainly feels like ratings play a big role in whether or not someone will click on your story.
4848786
I've sometimes logged on to 30+ notifications from one person who decided to binge most of my stories.
And ended up leaving no votes.
A good chunk of the "favorite" bookshelf adding might just be tracking, i know i use it for tracking rather then it being any actual indication of a story being my "favorite" since back in the day at least, tracking was the purpose of it before it got renamed to "favorite" and a separate "tracking" was added (that by default didnt actually inform you about updates to stories unlike favorite... no idea if it does now lol).
4848791
There's a default tracking shelf, and if you want to get it to give you notifications, you have to go to the little editing symbol to turn them on. It works wonders having separate, organized bookshelves though!
4848787
Yeah, that would do it. I mean... it's not hard, is it? Some people seem so resilient to give up their vote and pump it up to be an accomplishment to give the vote to the author's story... like, what? Press the buttons, dammit!
4848797
Yes. This. A thousand times this!