Ohko also has suggestions!

[ohko]

A) Favorites per series rather than by chapter
This was mentioned by Ace_Arriande, but I definitely wanted to +1 this, because as he said, it heavily favors longer series with more chapters! (sorry I just copy things... qwq)

B) Re-working the front page so it suits reader interests better
The current front page consists of (Trending Novels), (Latest Series), and (Recent Updates).

From a reader's perspective, none of these categories are actually that meaningful, at least in the sense of what people are interested in seeing on the front page.

Part of the reason for this is because the English fiction writing world is enormous (especially in comparison to the novel translation world), and if Scribbly ever expands to the size of something like Fictionpress or Fanficition.net or even RRL (which is very likely, imo), there are literally new updates every minute. The first page of the (Recent Updates) will only go about an hour or so back in time, and every time you refresh the page, there are a bunch more. The majority of the new updates are no-name novels that nobody is interested in. Since it moves so quickly, realistically nobody really looks at (Recent Updates) because there's an overwhelming amount of fiction being created every second/minute.

Frankly, readers only care about two things:

1. Following updates for novels they already read
2. Finding new novels they like

Generally speaking, most readers think that a majority of the amateur fiction on a website is bad. Unlike novel translations, where basically the best novels from Chinese/Japanese sites are chosen by translators (meaning, usually they're good in at least one way), the Internet is filled with bad fiction and poor writing. XD This is equally true of the Chinese/Japanese original fiction sites but as Western readers, we never see them because translators never bother with them.

Most readers on original fiction sites honestly don't bother going through (Latest Series) because (A) there are dozens of new series every minute, (B) most of the time they're not even good, and (C) new series usually only have chapter 1 and that's basically nothing to read/develop opinions on. As a result, putting (Latest Series) and (Recent Updates) on the main page is honestly a poor use of space, at least in my opinion, because nobody really looks at it. Instead, most English novel sites put them as some tab that you navigate to if you really want to see that information.

So what is the front page for?

I think taking a look at the Chinese novel sites are actually really helpful, because like the English fiction scene, the Chinese sites are over-saturated with authors and series (the Chinese population is enormous!). It's a good approximation of what it's like to be a writer on fanfiction.net/fictionpress/amazon where a majority of fiction is never read because on Western websites, we're too primitive to know how to do anything other than top 20 rankings and advanced searches. XD

When you have a novel site that has hundreds of thousands of novels (e.g. fictionpress), honestly it isn't so helpful to put things in one giant mega-ranking. This because frankly, readers aren't interested in seeing the rankings for everything.

Rather, consider the way that bookstores are organized -- prospective readers automatically go to the genre sections that they like. They don't care about which book is ranking #1 in terms of sales in the entire bookstore. Publishers care about sales rankings, but readers don't. XD A really important thing to keep in mind is that 90% of readers already know what kind/genre of novel they want when they walk into a bookstore.

I think there's a lot of value in viewing a web fiction site more like a bookstore to browse rather than just... a list of rankings.... >.<

Let's look at qidian's Chinese site:

I'll translate a few things:

• Header: [Logo] [Search bar] [My library]
• Top nav: [All Series] [Series Ranking] [Completed Series] [Free Series] [Author's Area] [Reading App]
• Left Panel: Shows genres and the number of works under each genre
  • [Asian Fantasy] [Western Fantasy]
  • [Wuxia] [Xianxia]
  • [City Life] [Modern Life]
  • [Action/Fighting] [Historical]
  • [Games] [Sports]
  • [Sci-fi] [Horror]
  • [Women's] [Cartoon/Anime]
• Center Panel: Banners from sponsored works
• Right Panel: Site announcements
• Bottom: Ads

Scroll down...

More translations:

• Left Panel: Hot novels (Weekly) ...it's a pretty long list because... there's over 1 million novels on this website. The pool is huge!
  • You see the two-word brackets to the left of each title? Like: [玄幻]
  • This is the main genre for the novel. It's listed right next to the title.
• Center Panel: Editor recommendations
• Right Panel: Top novels recommended by editors

Scroll down...

This section displays 6 different rankings focusing on entirely different things:

1. Highest ranking/trending new novels
2. Hot novels in the last 24 hours
3. Highest ranking novels by new members
4. Top novels novels receiving the most votes in the last week
5. Top novels by contracted authors (pro authors)

You can actually expand this section to show even more rankings.

• This section: Lists the top 5 or so novels in each genre.

• Left/Center panel: Features new novels that are being frequently recommended
  • A key point here is that they're new AND popular
  • There will always be veteran novels and newcomer novels, and a newcomer ranking is therefore really helpful!
  • Obviously it's hard for a novel that just started 1 month ago to compete on the same ranking as a novel serialized for 4 years
• Right panel: Ranking of novels by new pro authors

• Left/Center panel: Features highly recommended complete novels
  • Complete novels don't usually get as many daily views as ongoing serialized novels
  • As a result, they need to be separated onto a separate ranking or they basically disappear from the top-lists
• Right panel: Recently completed novels

• Left/Center panel: Recent updates
  • Note the timestamps... ^^;;;;;; There's like literally like 30+ updates being made every minute on qidian... it's a literal ocean!!!!
  • You see what I mean by how nobody actually scrolls through these....?
  • For reference, fanfiction.net gets like ~100 updated series per hour
• Right panel: Famous authors

-------

Overall I kind of wanted to go through this demonstrate that when you have a novel website that hundreds of thousands of novels (like qidian or fanfiction.net) and I really do think SH will get to that point... It's not really that meaningful to know what are the top 5 novels out of 500,000 novels, especially since most readers end up familiar with them already.

Instead, if you're... idk, primarily a shoujo reader, there basically aren't any shoujo novels that make the site-wide top 5, so you want an easy way to click to get all the novels that you do like. In fact, most of the chinese sites are designed this way.

Clicking on a genre almost brings you to a brand new "Home Page" but specific to that genre. They're almost sub-sites under the main site.

For instance, if you click on [Women's] genre on the qidian homepage, this is the sub-home-page you're brought to:

It's basically like a site within a site!!!

I know it sounds kind of crazy... and I know SH is still really young, but I wanted to bring this up to @Tony because there's a lot of potential that can be done with an original webfiction site that can cause it to really stand out against all of the current English webfiction sites out there.

The original fiction world is enormous, and there are going to be tons and tons and tons and tons of novels before you know it.

Ultimately, readers like to stick to their genres, and the Chinese sites have had enormous success in [main site] => [genre sub-site] organization, because honestly this is what.. readers are frankly interested in the most. Pooling over 1 million novels into a single ranking just... doesn't tell you very much when you have that many novels are your site.

Just something to keep in mind for the future!!!

(...I wrote too much and now I need to go, lol....)

 

[Tony]

A) Favorites per series rather than by chapter
This was mentioned by Ace_Arriande, but I definitely wanted to +1 this, because as he said, it heavily favors longer series with more chapters! (sorry I just copy things... qwq)

B) Re-working the front page so it suits reader interests better
The current front page consists of (Trending Novels), (Latest Series), and (Recent Updates).

From a reader's perspective, none of these categories are actually that meaningful, at least in the sense of what people are interested in seeing on the front page.

Part of the reason for this is because the English fiction writing world is enormous (especially in comparison to the novel translation world), and if Scribbly ever expands to the size of something like Fictionpress or Fanficition.net or even RRL (which is very likely, imo), there are literally new updates every minute. The first page of the (Recent Updates) will only go about an hour or so back in time, and every time you refresh the page, there are a bunch more. The majority of the new updates are no-name novels that nobody is interested in. Since it moves so quickly, realistically nobody really looks at (Recent Updates) because there's an overwhelming amount of fiction being created every second/minute.

Frankly, readers only care about two things:

1. Following updates for novels they already read
2. Finding new novels they like

Generally speaking, most readers think that a majority of the amateur fiction on a website is bad. Unlike novel translations, where basically the best novels from Chinese/Japanese sites are chosen by translators (meaning, usually they're good in at least one way), the Internet is filled with bad fiction and poor writing. XD This is equally true of the Chinese/Japanese original fiction sites but as Western readers, we never see them because translators never bother with them.

Most readers on original fiction sites honestly don't bother going through (Latest Series) because (A) there are dozens of new series every minute, (B) most of the time they're not even good, and (C) new series usually only have chapter 1 and that's basically nothing to read/develop opinions on. As a result, putting (Latest Series) and (Recent Updates) on the main page is honestly a poor use of space, at least in my opinion, because nobody really looks at it. Instead, most English novel sites put them as some tab that you navigate to if you really want to see that information.

So what is the front page for?

I think taking a look at the Chinese novel sites are actually really helpful, because like the English fiction scene, the Chinese sites are over-saturated with authors and series (the Chinese population is enormous!). It's a good approximation of what it's like to be a writer on fanfiction.net/fictionpress/amazon where a majority of fiction is never read because on Western websites, we're too primitive to know how to do anything other than top 20 rankings and advanced searches. XD

When you have a novel site that has hundreds of thousands of novels (e.g. fictionpress), honestly it isn't so helpful to put things in one giant mega-ranking. This because frankly, readers aren't interested in seeing the rankings for everything.

Rather, consider the way that bookstores are organized -- prospective readers automatically go to the genre sections that they like. They don't care about which book is ranking #1 in terms of sales in the entire bookstore. Publishers care about sales rankings, but readers don't. XD A really important thing to keep in mind is that 90% of readers already know what kind/genre of novel they want when they walk into a bookstore.

I think there's a lot of value in viewing a web fiction site more like a bookstore to browse rather than just... a list of rankings.... >.<

Let's look at qidian's Chinese site:

View attachment 239
I'll translate a few things:

• Header: [Logo] [Search bar] [My library]
• Top nav: [All Series] [Series Ranking] [Completed Series] [Free Series] [Author's Area] [Reading App]
• Left Panel: Shows genres and the number of works under each genre
  • [Asian Fantasy] [Western Fantasy]
  • [Wuxia] [Xianxia]
  • [City Life] [Modern Life]
  • [Action/Fighting] [Historical]
  • [Games] [Sports]
  • [Sci-fi] [Horror]
  • [Women's] [Cartoon/Anime]
• Center Panel: Banners from sponsored works
• Right Panel: Site announcements
• Bottom: Ads

Scroll down...
View attachment 240
More translations:

• Left Panel: Hot novels (Weekly) ...it's a pretty long list because... there's over 1 million novels on this website. The pool is huge!
  • You see the two-word brackets to the left of each title? Like: [玄幻]
  • This is the main genre for the novel. It's listed right next to the title.
• Center Panel: Editor recommendations
• Right Panel: Top novels recommended by editors

Scroll down...
View attachment 242
This section displays 6 different rankings focusing on entirely different things:

1. Highest ranking/trending new novels
2. Hot novels in the last 24 hours
3. Highest ranking novels by new members
4. Top novels novels receiving the most votes in the last week
5. Top novels by contracted authors (pro authors)

You can actually expand this section to show even more rankings.

• This section: Lists the top 5 or so novels in each genre.

View attachment 250

• Left/Center panel: Features new novels that are being frequently recommended
  • A key point here is that they're new AND popular
  • There will always be veteran novels and newcomer novels, and a newcomer ranking is therefore really helpful!
  • Obviously it's hard for a novel that just started 1 month ago to compete on the same ranking as a novel serialized for 4 years
• Right panel: Ranking of novels by new pro authors

View attachment 251

• Left/Center panel: Features highly recommended complete novels
  • Complete novels don't usually get as many daily views as ongoing serialized novels
  • As a result, they need to be separated onto a separate ranking or they basically disappear from the top-lists
• Right panel: Recently completed novels

View attachment 252

• Left/Center panel: Recent updates
  • Note the timestamps... ^^;;;;;; There's like literally like 30+ updates being made every minute on qidian... it's a literal ocean!!!!
  • You see what I mean by how nobody actually scrolls through these....?
  • For reference, fanfiction.net gets like ~100 updated series per hour
• Right panel: Famous authors

-------

Overall I kind of wanted to go through this demonstrate that when you have a novel website that hundreds of thousands of novels (like qidian or fanfiction.net) and I really do think SH will get to that point... It's not really that meaningful to know what are the top 5 novels out of 500,000 novels, especially since most readers end up familiar with them already.

Instead, if you're... idk, primarily a shoujo reader, there basically aren't any shoujo novels that make the site-wide top 5, so you want an easy way to click to get all the novels that you do like. In fact, most of the chinese sites are designed this way.

Clicking on a genre almost brings you to a brand new "Home Page" but specific to that genre. They're almost sub-sites under the main site.

For instance, if you click on [Women's] genre on the qidian homepage, this is the sub-home-page you're brought to:

View attachment 244

It's basically like a site within a site!!!

I know it sounds kind of crazy... and I know SH is still really young, but I wanted to bring this up to @Tony because there's a lot of potential that can be done with an original webfiction site that can cause it to really stand out against all of the current English webfiction sites out there.

The original fiction world is enormous, and there are going to be tons and tons and tons and tons of novels before you know it.

Ultimately, readers like to stick to their genres, and the Chinese sites have had enormous success in [main site] => [genre sub-site] organization, because honestly this is what.. readers are frankly interested in the most. Pooling over 1 million novels into a single ranking just... doesn't tell you very much when you have that many novels are your site.

Just something to keep in mind for the future!!!

(...I wrote too much and now I need to go, lol....)

A.) It's impossible to remove favorites from chapters at this point. I know it's no where near perfect but it's tied to a few features like being able to view which chapters you favorite, the top favorited chapters for each novel, etc etc.

Don't worry though. I can come up with something similar with a different name for the stories themselves so that's no problem.

B.) It's already possible to filter out genres you like with the Release Filtering feature but you need an account for that. You can basically design your main page however you want with that tool. I agree that the main page needs a total makeover once there's enough novels. The current layout won't work when this site has a lot of novels.

I love the "site within a site" idea for each genre. I definitely have to implement that.

Thanks for taking the time to write up and translating everything. A total makeover for the main page, rankings, etc... is something I'll have to do once there's enough novels. I'll re-visit this thread once I'm ready.

It really means a lot to me when someone takes their time to write a suggestion. It gives me motivation to do whatever it takes to improve and grow the website.

Thanks!!!

 

[Ddraig]

There is also a thing that you need to minize the number of clicks a user needs to reach a page, most probably the novel page so tge design needs to favor least clicks too
((random info I remember from somewhere))

 

[ohko]

@Tony this is an interesting read about how libraries consider arranging their books by genre:

https://natlib.govt.nz/schools/read...ng-readers/arranging-library-fiction-by-genre

 

[ohko]

I'm bumping this thread to reflect conversation in the SH discord channel. XD

I'll start with some explanations about qidian to begin with:

First of all, as many people know, qidian is a pay-to-read site. As a result, they have several features that the typical western webnovel site does not have. Particularly, one aspect that does not translate to Western novel sites is that qidian actually has editors (similar to how book publishing companies have editors). Editors are actually employed by qidian (they have to apply for it like a job) to go through all the novels on the site to identify promising novels to offer contracts to. Contracted authors are basically authors that get paid per view/purchase for their novels. Not all authors can become contracted authors (since most authors aren't that good), and part of the editors' job is to perform gatekeeping to determine which authors/novels get that status.

Now, the Chinese sites are enormous -- (qidian with over 1 million novels, right?) -- so typically there are tens of thousands of editors.

The "editor's pick" section on qidian (and most other chinese websites) are derived from the in-house editors. Since there are so many editors, you can basically line up the ALL the editor's recommendations on a ranking and just take the top from those. Take a look at the middle panel in the following screenshot:

Novel A has 38,137 recommendations.
Novel B has 194,253 recommendations.
Novel C has 38,599 recommendations...

Basically there are a ton of editors, and their job is basically to read tons and tons of novels, and this is why it works!

-------------------

Obviously, this kind of system doesn't translate to something that can be adopted for SH, but this sort of discussion is relevant because the discord channel spent a good amount of time debating the function of "editor's pick" section of the home page (and whether that's desirable in the first place).

(The following section is all opinion, so you can tldr this if you want XD)

If the objective of a novel site is to be like a bookstore, the front page of the bookstore is sort of like the display case at the front section of the store. The objective of the staff managing the bookstore is to highlight books that they they will sell among readers.

Obviously, one potential way to organize the store is just to go through your sales record and just show the covers for the top 20 books grossing the most sales. This is the ranking method that we're familiar with on RRL and other webfiction websites. However, the problem with the ranking method (discussed in the OP) is that readers actually care far less about rankings than authors/publishers. The reality is, unless this is literally the first time you've ever walked into any a bookstore in your entire life, you've probably already read one or two famous novels in your favorite genre (e.g. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer for paranormal romance), and honestly you're just looking for more novels like the ones you've already had good experiences with.

In this sense, it's a little meaningless for the front section of the bookstore to only showcase books (e.g. Naruto, Bleach, One Piece) that everyone has already read already, because people don't buy/click on things they've already read/bought. In fact, if you walk into any bookstore in real life, you'll notice that this is indeed true -- chances are, you won't recognize most of the titles in the very front section of the store.

However, that's the point.

The front section of the story frequently changes, and if you're an avid reader, it's the area that you keep an eye out for interesting novels that maybe you haven't heard of before. Generally speaking, you can feel confident that the books in that section are at least decent (or else they wouldn't have gotten there) and is worth my time browsing casually, even if I've been active reading novels for many years in my past.

The reason why this section of the bookstore is important is because you need your front store to change. If it never changes, there's no reason why a reader would ever revisit that page (or spam the refresh button like they do on NU). The problem with using a "gross sales" ranking is that generally those rankings don't change very frequently.

If you go on myanimelist and click on their ranking page, 90% of everybody knows what it's going to look like already and it rarely ever changes:

Of course, you can always use a weekly "trending" metric like RRL and other fiction websites, but the issue is that eventually (if you've been reading webnovels for more than a year), you'll already be familiar with the top 10 most poplar webnovels, the trending section generally reflects the popularity section, and you need that list to contain novels that people aren't already familiar with in order to hold the reader's interest in checking that page repeatedly.

Authors will always check the rankings obsessively (it's an ego thing haha XD), but readers generally speaking have zero interest in rankings other than as an easy metric to find "good novels I haven't read yet".

Anyhow, this is my soapbox on ultimately, the primary objective for the reader walking into a bookstore is to find "good novels I haven't read yet."

Most bookstores (and Chinese sites) have addressed this problem by featuring novels through an editor's pick or staff pick section of the home page. However, for multiple reasons, this isn't exactly easy to implement. As a result, we're sort of left scratching our head at potential ways we can broaden the scope of novels that appear on the front page to represent "good novels I haven't read yet."

Here were some of the ideas that were brought up on discord:

1. A veteran member/fertilizer ranking
Since critic who've read/reviewed tons and tons of novels generally have different tastes from the masses, subsetting the existing ratings/reviews for experienced members who've (A: been members for a really long time, or B: have read a ton of novels, or C: have earned recognition as a good reviewer, or D: written tons of reviews) basically gives a metric of the "critic's score" as on RottenTomatos for films.

The Chinese website jjwxc uses a "fertilizer" system to capture this metric, where readers gradually gain fertilizer over time by logging on the website every day, buying chapters (remember: Chinese webnovel sites are pay-to-read), reading novels, every day, etc etc. Fertilizer is rare and you have to have an immense amount of site activity before earning a single "fertilizer", and readers can spend it on novels they like. It's sort of like a "favorites" system but with limited quantities that a reader can give out.

2. A trending reviews section on the homepage
It's possible to display reviews that are trending (receiving many likes) rather than series that are trending. This provides a metric that is a bit different from "popularity" or straight page views.

3. A daily deviation system
The art site deviantart uses a "daily deviation" system, which is basically method to feature good artwork on the front page. They way this work is that users submit nominations to an editorial board, and every day the editorial board chooses several daily deviations to show on the front page. A key point about the daily deviation is that an artist who had artwork featured as a daily deviation cannot be featured again in six months. This system ensures that there is visibility to artwork/artists that may not be as famous as the others.

I personally really like this "cooldown before featuring again" system because there are actually a lot of really good artists on deviantart, and when you have a large website, frankly just showing the top 10 artists with the most views doesn't really do anything for you when you're the rank #11 artist by page views. In fact there's a confounding issues with page views as a metric -- it's biased towards authors who update frequently (e.g. every day, multiple times per day) and authors who write click-bait topics (e.g. risque/porn), making it almost meaningless to compare Naruto Shippuden to a completed one-shot short story on the same ranking. As a result, deviantart doesn't even use a ranking system of any kind -- which sort of reflects its philosophy as a community of artists rather than a ranking list for artwork.

Of course, I'm not saying that SH should become like deviantart in its mission objective, but I wanted to bring this up sort of bring the introspective thoughts to the forefront: is ScribbleHub a site for readers, or is it a site for authors, and how do you balance these two?

The benefit of sites in the style of deviantart is that the community of content creators is extremely strong. They're strong because it's fun to be an artist on that website and have tons of interactions between other artists and readers. It's a very different kind of culture than the ranking lists that Amazon/Kindle (the majority of western fiction sites), where everything is a competitive ranking.

I won't name names, but there was at least one author on the SH discord who was debating giving up posting on ScribbleHub because he wasn't getting views. This particular author is actually actually an extremely prolific writer and has dozens of stories on sale on SmashWords and other self-publishing platforms, and his opinion is that he gets better views/comments/interaction elsewhere.

The main reason why his story hadn't gotten any reviews is because there's basically very little visibility to stories on SH unless you're trending on the front page. If your story is on page two of any kind of ranking, the amount of views received is basically miniscule.

All of us have been here or there at some point in our writing careers, and the killing blow that chases potential writers off your site when there's absolutely zero activity on your novel. People give up and just sort of fade away, and we're used to that because the norm in the current English writing world is that everything is competitive and everyone's objective is to make it big on the top 20 trending list.

But I just sort of wonder... does it have to be that way?

Is there a way to have fun writing on ScribbleHub without necessarily being a top 20 most famous writer?

There are actually ways to design a website to make it more community-focused than the majority of novel sites out there. There are plenty of potential reasons why a site can be liked or disliked, and building a vibrant community is one of the possible routes. I'm sure that plenty of people might disagree with me and say that SH should be more like the traditional RRL or webfiction ranking website, but I wanted to write this post to sort of draw attention to the fact that there are also other possibilities too.

SH doesn't have to be exactly like RRL or Kindle Unlimited. In fact, I'd even say it shouldn't be the same.

Sooner or later, SH will develop a reputation for itself, and the question is exactly what kind of site you'd like to see it become.

 

[ohko]

Another suggestion for a few methods on the Recommended Novels Widget ("Similar novels like this one").

Rather than using genre/tags for doing recommendations, I wonder how it would be if you used "readers who liked this story also liked".

Basically, you could index each series and find out which novels tend to co-occur on readers' reading lists. If readers of Novel A also frequently read Novel B, the assumption is that Novel B might be a good recommendation to show on Novel A's page. You could definitely tweak this formula a little to filter for shared tags or genres or whatever, add some randomness, but this general approach might be an interesting suggestion.

This is a co-variance matrix as a heatmap! (we do this all the time in data science, and you can actually cluster things into groups by covariation and sometimes they will represent interesting groups)

 

[ohko]

This was pastebin'd today -- this is a proposal for a hypothetical site that would be more interaction-centric:

## An Interaction-Centric Writing Site ##

### Rationale ###
The premise behind this is that current novel sites are best described as ranking lists of top novels. Authors post their chapters and readers (sometimes) leave comments and ratings. Interaction between the user base is generally minimal, and visibility/exposure to non-high-ranking novels are limited.

The question I'd like to address is whether it might be possible that reverses this paradigm so that it is a writing site that focuses primarily on emphasizing cross-user interaction and a system of getting good novels to readers without depending on ordinal ranking lists.

### A Fandom/Recommendation-Based Reading Site ###
TLDR; The reading site is basically goodreads.

If you go to goodreads, you'll probably note that they don't have popularity ranking lists. If you dive deeper into how the site works, it essentially works by highlighting novels that are actively recommended by readers. It's an /active/ action (as opposed to a passive action of simply reading to gain a pageview), so already this can be manipulated to encourage activity. There's a few more interesting things that goodread does.

One is lists. Any user can create a list (e.g. "Novels that are bluberries!" or "Best tentacle girl litRPGs of 2018"), which they can add novels too. Interestingly, other users can add novels to a list and upvote/downvote them, turning these lists into quasi-ranklists on very specific topics. Lists rise to the top of the site based on the number of people subscribed to them, which I find a lot more informative than the hardcoded ranks of the typical webnovel site.

Another feature of goodreads is its attention to what your friends are reading, and it tries to make recommendations to you based on what your friends read. In fact, it sits pretty high on the page. I kind of agree with this from a community standpoint, in the sense that if you follow people, the things that they comment/review/say... everything should be high on your dashboard similar to twitter. This way, it's much easier to engage in a dialogue.

In short, I think it's worthwhile to consider goodread's model to bringing visibility to novels without relying 100% on ranking lists, and it's incredibly successful probably as the largest site that western readers use to find books (in print)... a lot to learn from!

### In-line comments and quoting ###
Another dream of mine is to envision a site where the webpage is kind of like a page out of your notebook. Your friends can doodle in the margins, your teachers can mark it up with red pen, etc, etc.

Part A is a proposal that the entire comment system occurs in-line. Of course, there would be an option to show/hide comments, but the philosophy is to turn the reading experience into a group experience. The inspiration for this is actually many of the Chinese video streaming sites. Here is a link (https://www.bilibili.com/video/av24199198/) to bilibili (Episode 1 of To Be Heroine which is an anime that aired last year), and you'll see if you click on it that there's a bunch of text that marquees across the screen. These are comments that viewers basically made and it shows on the screen at the corresponding time in real time. Of course, you can toggle-this, but the comments are actually really funny a lot of the time and kind of a fun part of the experience too. This can be adapted into a novel setting potentially with mouseover comments or comments that occur on a bubble offset to the side of the page.

Part B is a sophisticated "track changes" system as in Microsoft Word, combined with a git style forking. Somebody would like to add detailed suggestions to your writing, it would be cool if you could fork and just edit it with track changes in the browser. And also a detailed commenting system that allows people who want to do detailed in-line commentary/reviews to do that too. Extra meta points if you could fork the fork and recursively so forth blah blah.

All of these suggestions contribute to activity/community I think.

### Instagram-style Sharing ###
Sometimes as writers there's a few very specific individuals that you want to share a snippet of your writing with -- let's say your friends.

So I think it's a nice to be able to mark down the friends you'd like to send your chapter update too so it pops up at the top of their feed. There needs to be limitations to this of course (like whether you mutually follow each other) (or maximum number of friends you can send a chapter to so you're forced to pick some especially close friends etc)

I think this works better in a snippet-style. For instance, a few paragraphs of something that you highlight (either in your own writing or somewhere else that you read) that you can share with your friends with some of your own comments attached. This would work well for pointing on some lines/scenes/paragraphs or just beautiful writing you just really liked that you want to show somebody else.

### Fandoms/Circles/Communities ###
Finally, I think it would be interesting if the site was structured around fandoms/circles. Readers would basically be encouraged to join at least one upon registering (like with pinterest), and each fandom/circle behaves like a subreddit that curates their own list of novels and helps bring visibility to that fandom.

I think this is relevant because realistically, readers go by the interests and viewing a ranking list of all the different genres on a site lumped together is meaningless if say... you're a shoujo reader, because shoujo readers rarely make the top 10 or so on a site.

If you're forced to view the site from a fandom/circle/subreddit perspective, you will (A) find the novels you like faster, (B) find like-minded readers easier, and (C) bring more exposure to novels that are ranked lower on the global most-pageviews list.

Okay I'll stop for now but this soapbox could go on forever.

 

[Tony]

This was pastebin'd today -- this is a proposal for a hypothetical site that would be more interaction-centric:

## An Interaction-Centric Writing Site ##

### Rationale ###
The premise behind this is that current novel sites are best described as ranking lists of top novels. Authors post their chapters and readers (sometimes) leave comments and ratings. Interaction between the user base is generally minimal, and visibility/exposure to non-high-ranking novels are limited.

The question I'd like to address is whether it might be possible that reverses this paradigm so that it is a writing site that focuses primarily on emphasizing cross-user interaction and a system of getting good novels to readers without depending on ordinal ranking lists.

### A Fandom/Recommendation-Based Reading Site ###
TLDR; The reading site is basically goodreads.

If you go to goodreads, you'll probably note that they don't have popularity ranking lists. If you dive deeper into how the site works, it essentially works by highlighting novels that are actively recommended by readers. It's an /active/ action (as opposed to a passive action of simply reading to gain a pageview), so already this can be manipulated to encourage activity. There's a few more interesting things that goodread does.

One is lists. Any user can create a list (e.g. "Novels that are bluberries!" or "Best tentacle girl litRPGs of 2018"), which they can add novels too. Interestingly, other users can add novels to a list and upvote/downvote them, turning these lists into quasi-ranklists on very specific topics. Lists rise to the top of the site based on the number of people subscribed to them, which I find a lot more informative than the hardcoded ranks of the typical webnovel site.

Another feature of goodreads is its attention to what your friends are reading, and it tries to make recommendations to you based on what your friends read. In fact, it sits pretty high on the page. I kind of agree with this from a community standpoint, in the sense that if you follow people, the things that they comment/review/say... everything should be high on your dashboard similar to twitter. This way, it's much easier to engage in a dialogue.

In short, I think it's worthwhile to consider goodread's model to bringing visibility to novels without relying 100% on ranking lists, and it's incredibly successful probably as the largest site that western readers use to find books (in print)... a lot to learn from!

### In-line comments and quoting ###
Another dream of mine is to envision a site where the webpage is kind of like a page out of your notebook. Your friends can doodle in the margins, your teachers can mark it up with red pen, etc, etc.

Part A is a proposal that the entire comment system occurs in-line. Of course, there would be an option to show/hide comments, but the philosophy is to turn the reading experience into a group experience. The inspiration for this is actually many of the Chinese video streaming sites. Here is a link (https://www.bilibili.com/video/av24199198/) to bilibili (Episode 1 of To Be Heroine which is an anime that aired last year), and you'll see if you click on it that there's a bunch of text that marquees across the screen. These are comments that viewers basically made and it shows on the screen at the corresponding time in real time. Of course, you can toggle-this, but the comments are actually really funny a lot of the time and kind of a fun part of the experience too. This can be adapted into a novel setting potentially with mouseover comments or comments that occur on a bubble offset to the side of the page.

Part B is a sophisticated "track changes" system as in Microsoft Word, combined with a git style forking. Somebody would like to add detailed suggestions to your writing, it would be cool if you could fork and just edit it with track changes in the browser. And also a detailed commenting system that allows people who want to do detailed in-line commentary/reviews to do that too. Extra meta points if you could fork the fork and recursively so forth blah blah.

All of these suggestions contribute to activity/community I think.

### Instagram-style Sharing ###
Sometimes as writers there's a few very specific individuals that you want to share a snippet of your writing with -- let's say your friends.

So I think it's a nice to be able to mark down the friends you'd like to send your chapter update too so it pops up at the top of their feed. There needs to be limitations to this of course (like whether you mutually follow each other) (or maximum number of friends you can send a chapter to so you're forced to pick some especially close friends etc)

I think this works better in a snippet-style. For instance, a few paragraphs of something that you highlight (either in your own writing or somewhere else that you read) that you can share with your friends with some of your own comments attached. This would work well for pointing on some lines/scenes/paragraphs or just beautiful writing you just really liked that you want to show somebody else.

### Fandoms/Circles/Communities ###
Finally, I think it would be interesting if the site was structured around fandoms/circles. Readers would basically be encouraged to join at least one upon registering (like with pinterest), and each fandom/circle behaves like a subreddit that curates their own list of novels and helps bring visibility to that fandom.

I think this is relevant because realistically, readers go by the interests and viewing a ranking list of all the different genres on a site lumped together is meaningless if say... you're a shoujo reader, because shoujo readers rarely make the top 10 or so on a site.

If you're forced to view the site from a fandom/circle/subreddit perspective, you will (A) find the novels you like faster, (B) find like-minded readers easier, and (C) bring more exposure to novels that are ranked lower on the global most-pageviews list.

Okay I'll stop for now but this soapbox could go on forever.

I would love for the site to be more social and I would love to implement some of the features you mentioned but I need a much bigger user base and a larger collection of novels... for at least some of the features you mentioned to work well imo. Hopefully that'll come with more time. The current site will hopefully change a lot in the future. The social parts should come sooner than later.

I can't always reply but I am reading everything in this Suggestions & Bug Reports forums. Anyways, I just wanted to reply so you don't think I'm ignoring you.

 

[AkalE]

There has been quite a few suggestion threads around... So just thought giving this thread a little nudge would be a good idea. We need this!