Further Ideas for Reader Engagement

Feature Requests
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I’d like to preface this post by saying that I don’t think GKS has any issues with giving readers ways to engage with a story – quite the opposite, in fact! This site has an amazing community of readers who are way more vocally appreciative of the writing here than most other sites on the internet. I may get more clicks on my stories if I were to post them on, say, AO3, but between the faves, ratings, and comments on GKS uploading here feels much more rewarding.

So it’s in the spirit of helping a good community become even better – and with gratitude to @Corin for all the work he and others put in to add all the features of this site – that I wanted to offer some ideas I’ve considered for how to give readers and authors more ways of engaging with each other.

We have many ways of telling authors that they’re doing a good job and encouraging them to post their work here, things like badges, favorites, and contest results. Could we be doing more to reward readers for the part they play in encouraging authors to write? My latest series is one that I’m very proud of having written, but I’ll be the first to admit that it didn’t do crazy high numbers out of the gate. What kept me going to see the story through to the end were all the people who wrote to tell me how much they were enjoying it. One fan approached me on this forum to talk about the series and my plans for it, and that was an excellent way to stay motivated to write and publish more over several months. In recognition of how this kind of reader feedback gives authors motivation, are there more ways we could incentivize readers who feel moved by a story to reach out and share their thoughts?

I’m grateful to Corin for adding the reply function to comments a while ago, since that gives me a chance to thank readers for leaving helpful messages. But what about a way to simply mark comments as “the author loved this message?” That would be a much easier thing for authors who might be too preoccupied to write a full reply. Then registered commenters who earn a certain number of those marks could earn some badge to indicate “leaves great comments,” “helpful to authors” or something along those lines. Since I’m pretty sure most authors love to see people respond to their writing, I think it makes sense to reward the people that give them that feedback.

I welcome any criticism of this idea, and would be happy to refine it so that it doesn’t just lead to spam saying “Please write more of this!” without elaboration since I personally don’t like that type of feedback even if it’s given in good faith. But in general, I think it’s good for the GKS to recognize that the reader base it draws in is a lot of what helps to make the site great, and rewarding the type of reader feedback that authors love to get is probably a good incentive.

1 Like
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You’re not the first person to suggest a “like” button for comments.

Another thing I was thinking about ages ago is to hand out badges or awards for people who comment and/or rate most frequently, as an incentive to do just that. Because the number of ratings and comments is rather low compared to the number of hits.

However, I’m not so sure if this makes that much of a difference. Also, it would be easy to exploit the mechanism to gain those badges.

So I’m open to ideas and suggestions and ideas.

2 Likes
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I think likes and dislikes would be a good addition to comments. I also like the system of badges you can get here on the forum and it might be nice to include something like that there too, but you also don’t want to bog everything down and make it confusing. If you did do badges maybe they could be displayed on user profiles similar to here?

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I personally find the “I love your comment” button quite hollow. I’ve seen enough on other social media sites where people feel obliged to just thumbs up or love cause otherwise the other person/author may think they don’t care. I much prefer to see a message from the author thanking the collective of messages and engaging directly if they want (same goes the other way).

Some individuals respond well to badges and if they’re targeted at getting more comments (with a word do-minimus) I think they can be quite positive.

In the end, I think this falls into the same issue as trying to get more people to rate stories. A small number will rate/comment but the majority will read and move on without (sorry to be negative, but it’s been a challenge for a long time).

Anything that helps should be tried if it adds value, just don’t add a like button to comments, we already have a detailed rating system and other platforms for engagement (such as the forum or DM)

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I’d really love if comments could be liked by everyone. Not for the author liking comments part, it seems implied that authors enjoy most comments since they are so rare. But the site lacks ways to quickly say “I liked that story”. If you plan to rate, the system feels as a long survey most want to skip, hence the shortcut of putting 5 in everything. Favoriting means adding it to a list in addition to saying you like it, so it’s too much commitment for many.

As an author, getting those rare comments bring so much joy, and seeing that 20 people agreed with that comment, wow that would feel so fantastic, a way to multiply the encouragement with very little added effort to the readers.

The way to increase feedback is not so much to reward those who do, it’s to make it as simple and fast as possible.

3 Likes
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Thanks to the people who’ve offered their own opinions.

To an extent I agree with Mafisto that the best way to get more comments on the site is simply to make it as easy as possible for readers to leave a comment. Even so, I appreciate having a way to thank the readers for the role they play in making the site more than just an archive.

I wouldn’t even consider the amount of comments on here to be particularly small relatively speaking. It’s a given that far fewer people are going to comment on something than the sample that will read it in the first place, and if anything the readers-to-comments ratio that I observe here is a lot higher than on other sites where fiction like this is published. Hardly any of the stories I published on this site have zero comments, and scrolling back through recently published stories I can see that most of what goes up manages to draw at least one or two comments if not more.

I’m somewhat curious as to what GKS does to draw this level of engaged readership, whether it’s to do with the type of writing itself, the site layout, or something else entirely. But also the dynamics seem to favor commenting on stuff that just got published in the last couple of days more than on stuff that’s been published for years. I still get the occasional late comment on stuff that I published ages ago, but most of the feedback I get on my writing tends to be within a week of its first going up.

And while I do my best to separate my motivation to write from just craving the feedback that my writing gets, anybody will probably acknowledge that hearing how much a commenter enjoyed your story is one of the most encouraging things you can see after publishing on this site. So in light of that I think it’s nice to do something for the registered users who leave those types of helpful comments, even if it’s just a cosmetic touch.

I can understand certain failure modes of this as well, since I definitely don’t want to just see the comments system turn into Reddit, nor do I want to read tons that just say “Great work! Please write more!” But it might be fun to give authors a space on their page to highlight the favorite responses they’ve gotten to their own work, to give readers a clue as to what reactions are well-received and welcome.

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I was actually saying that the best way for authors to receive more feedback was to make that feedback as easy to give as possible. And it can’t get easier than just one click on the like button of a comment you agree with, “what he said”. Super easy for the reader, and for the author it’s almost like receiving another full comment. Any little scrap helps.

On my end, I’m not sure really that having a comment featured as the favorite on an author’s page will encourage more comments, or that anyone would start commenting in the hope of getting their comment favorited by the author. Also, highlighting it might feel like boasting, and feel like you didn’t like the other comments. I don’t even know if I have favorite comments, I love them all equally.

But what you said about the profile page is a good idea, showing the most liked comments by the readers would be very useful to get a glimpse of how that author has been best received on the site. I like that.

Replying to comments seems enough as a tool to highlight comments you enjoy. You can say exactly why you enjoyed it.

I’m just being honest here as for my experience, others may feel differently.

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I think even back in the days of NCMC, comments played a huge part on the site. I remember that even back then, they had a page where they collected all comments given, showing the latest ones first. And I guess, many people just look at those latest comments every day.

That also creates a kind of community feeling. It’s a step further from a simple one-handed literature and wanking site.

When Hugh designed GSS, he also included the comments from very early on, and he also added the page listing all the latest comments.

Honestly, when I look at the new.nifty.org UI, I have to admit, that GKS starts to get a bit dated. For the first time I have the feeling that they provide a cleaner interface, mostly because it’s better structured and less cluttered.

I think I might have gone overboard with all the features I crammed into GKS over time. They all have good reasons to exist, but for the new first time user, they must be overwhelming. And Mafisto is right, that a simple “Like” button might work better than the whole rating system, just to give an example.

On the other hand, I remember back when the “Favorite” button was still labled “Like” (as it has been implemented by Hugh) it didn’t attract that many more clicks.

But I’m just as receptive to reader reaction as any other author, so I totally feel you. The series ITO-K and I have published over Christmas has good ratings and nice comments, but it has an exceptionally low number of readers, so it will never get any badges. I’m usually the one who’s telling authors that they shouldn’t care, that they write the stories for themselves and not for the audience… But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this seriously demotivates me to finish the final chapter.

So while I would love to do anything to motivate people to give more feedback to the authors, because I know how essential it is, I’m also hesitant to add even more features to an already overblowing site.

This is a dilemma.

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I’m neutral (to the idea)

I just tend to reply with a quick “thanks for the comment,” (or some such) as a reply to the comment.

The only thing that could go wrong is, what if a reader finds me who has a complex about aways replying to comments; the two of us would get stuck in a reply loop forever.