The two categories “Hotness” and “wanking Material” are famously overlapping and often confused.
What if we deleted ‘Wanking material’ and let that just be covered by ‘Hotness’.
and, we add a new 5th category?
Also what should the 5th category be?
I suggest “Love” or “Romance” (Represented by a Heart, and meaning how emotive, romantic, charming the story was)
feel free to “like this” if you believe hotness / wanking material should be made one category, and feel free to comment below on hypothetical new 5th categories if so.
I believe it’s in another thread where Martin explains the difference between the wank factor and hotness. Hotness often describes a status, while wankability is describing a crescendo of action. Someone walking around in creaking black leather with everything just right is hotness. Someone siphoning off the personality of a subject is wankable.
I’m against shifting around the categories. I feel like people use them pretty consistently - I definitely can tell the difference between my stories that get high wank ratings vs. the lower ones. And frankly, I just don’t want Martin to have to answer all the absurd challenges that come when you try to consolidate a data set.
Perhaps in Martin’s many different genre sites there will be different rankings to reflect those sites better. I believe one of those sites was going to be for more romantic stories.
I’d be very happy to consolidate “Hotness” and “Wanking” into a single category. I’m one of those people who’s never quite intuited the difference between them, despite Martin’s repeated explanations.
But I hate the idea of having “Love”/“Romance” as the 5th category. I tend not to read the more romance-focused stories, since many of them romanticize abuse (in my opinion). The last thing I would want is for the site to incentivize writers to compose more of those stories.
If I were to suggest a 5th category, it would be “Editing.” I feel like the “Writing” category is currently an umbrella term for too many disparate things, from vocabulary to characterization to plotting to proper grammar and proofreading. Having an “Editing” category would at least separate out some of the “basic writing” traits–spelling, grammar, paragraphing, proofreading–from the more advanced craft of characterization, plotting, and prose style. Also, it might incentivize writers to edit their work before posting, which could only be a good thing!
I’m not going to change the categories for existing stories, for the reason mentioned. It would screw up the existing ratings and I don’t see a way to consolidate them in a fair way.
But the primary reason I recently changed the whole database and all algorithms to allow any number and selection of arbitrary rating categories was, that I want to be able to define different categories for each of the upcoming sister sites. A story could be on more than one site at the same time (that’s the whole idea, the author can select at which sites a story of his will be listed), but on each site the list of rating categories used would differ slightly.
As for GSS it will always be those 5 we have now. On GayCupidStories (the romance site) the same story would be listed, but “Mind Control” would be replaced with “Romance/Love”. On the BDSM site, “Hot” could be replaced with “Bondage” and so on. You get the idea. Also the number of categories doesn’t have to be fixed to 5.
If I were to suggest a 5th category, it would be “Editing.” I feel like the “Writing” category is currently an umbrella term for too many disparate things, from vocabulary to characterization to plotting to proper grammar and proofreading. Having an “Editing” category would at least separate out some of the “basic writing” traits–spelling, grammar, paragraphing, proofreading–from the more advanced craft of characterization, plotting, and prose style. Also, it might incentivize writers to edit their work before posting, which could only be a good thing!
I’ve tagged this as “resolved”, as I’ve added additional categories for both Cupid and Collar. Another one will come for “Gear”.
Technically, I could add any number of rating categories easily right now, but I don’t want to reorganize the existing categories, because that would really fuck the old stories which have been rated with the old categories.
