I read new stories from new authors these days and all have been so rushed with no suspense or dragging wayy too long unnecessarily. Two of these extremes.
There are few good ones but then I can always expect them to be left in the dirt forever later.
It’s honestly pretty sad. I think it started around 3-4 years ago.
But before then, man so many hot stories I cant catch up and fapped to all of them. 
Interesting comment. Perhaps it’s just because more people are now writing cyber stories so, you’re getting a wider diversity of styles and content? Not a criticism just an observation.
Kyle Cicero
Cyber stories?
Stories that are posted on websites as opposed to ones that are put out on e-books
What I’ve seen is that the themes are spreaded much wider than a couple of years ago. The site started out with a heavy focus on hypnosis, but these days the stories about transformation (especially into muscle jocks) is making up the majority.
But there are still the classic hypno stories, they’re just no longer in the majority.
We have to live with the fact that, as the user base increases, so does the spectrum of topics people are interested in and writing for.
That’s why I added so many tools to select what you get shown. Like if you don’t like tf stories, simply turn off the transformation category in the category selector.
Right, Im ok with transformation. In fact, I read a few, but……like others said. It’s flooded with transformation as the main theme with barely any classic hypnosis at all. Things change I guess.
I’ve commented on this as well in the past. As you say, things change. Transformation currently dominates in writing just as chastity dominates the IRL kink world, but it certainly wasn’t always that way. You can always filter stories based on categories and/or tags.
I kind of agree. There have been some good stories put out in the last few months that appeal to my interests. But it’s certainly been a dry spell. I just chalk it up to my favorite authors having lives of their own outside this realm.
I think allowing non-hypnosis themed stories on this site was a major misstep. This is one of the only gay specific hypnosis sites. MC is great but there are too many that have women in them (which frankly nauseates me). I’m also sick of stories with boring transformations and especially chastity; nothing ruins a hot story faster than the main guy getting his cock locked.
The filter functionality is great. I actually have a few filters “blocked”, so that makes navigating the story selection better. You just have to be mindful that some good stories may be blocked because of the filter.
The scope of GaySpiralStories has never changed. Even during NCMC’s existance, there were loads of transformation stories posted on the site and Hugh continued that scope, so did I.
It’s just that the focus of the authors has shifted, something which is out of my control.
Personally, I prefer hypnosis stories, too. They make me hard, while TF or reality changing stories rarely do.
Your Web of Trust is absolute eternal classic btw.
Now if we can get Edlam to finish up Re-Educator, that’d help this site even more.
One note… so we obviously all know that the kind of ‘swing a watch for ten seconds, irreversibly mindfuck a guy’ hypnosis in stories isn’t real, but hypnosis is a real technique that can influence people. I’m personally very very suggestible.
When you submit stories here, there are a bunch of rules. One of them is:
- Non-consensual aspects of the interactions between the characters have to be fantastical, without any references to real-life methods used for such acts, such as named drugs and other substances.
That rule has sort of scared me off from posting purely hypnosis stories here. The method is real – just not effective in the same way as the fantasy suggests.
(I’m mostly a transformation guy anyhow, but it’s tempting to try a pure hypno story here and there, just to stretch the muscle. And yeah, I’ve been writing transformation stories here and at this site’s spiritual predecessor for over a decade, so it’s certainly not new.)
You know that rule has a loophole right?
What it means is dont explicitly tell audience the actual real technique or drugs or their names.
You can just make story explaining how those technique or drug effects are then exaggerated their effectiveness.
Like steroid is real, they do enhance physical performance and alter behavior, but you dont have control over it. Yet I’ve seen plenty of stories with fantasy steroid on here and even till now. What the rule is trying to say is dont wrote something like “go inject Testosterone E” so explicitly etc.
Sorry, to be clear I was intending that as a note for Martin and the admin team about one of the reasons why the focus may have swung a bit from hypnosis and towards more fantastical transformations. I think a rewording or a specific exemption for hypnosis might make authors more likely to contribute their hypno based work.
Apart from divergences on the change of themes and kinks during time, I disagree with the original post – badly written stories were always there (this can be easily checked on the archives of Nifty or BDSM Library…). As someone put it, perhaps they are more abundant because there are more stories now than before. And there are many great new ones. One can always skip the ones they dislike, or maybe even help copy editing a great project like Spiral.
Don’t overinterpret this rule, Derek.
I wanted a rule that excluded any kind of realistic rape scene, because what I don’t want is that anybody would use a story on my sites as a template on how to take sexual advantage on another person. There were some stories submitted in which GBL or similar drugs were used to knock out the victim, which was then raped.
That’s exactly what I don’t want to see here.
No matter how suggestible you are, I’m sure you’d never do anything which would be unthinkable to you normally. Noone can hypnotize anyone and force him to kill or even seriously hurt another person. And noone can suggest anyone to accept sex which that person wouldn’t at least consider under normal circumstances.
So, ANY hypnosis story on GSS is fine, you don’t have to worry about this! I will never consider any hypno story which leads to sex against the conviction and will of any person involved to be a realistic rape scene, as I don’t see this scenario as realistic at all.
Also: Don’t forget that I am not the law. The worst thing that could ever happen is that I ask you to slightly rewrite your story if I should have any problem with it.
And you should also know by now that I’m really very liberal. You cannot offend me with any sexual kink, the only limit is what I’ve said above: I don’t want my sites to be abused as a “how-to” hurt other people against their will.
Seriously, this. So many badly written stories were posted when I ran the site and that trend hasn’t changed. My take on it then, and still now, is to be encouraging to authors that seem receptive to it, and to make suggestions in comments or directly to help them improve their writing. Tell them some stuff they wrote that was good as well as maybe suggesting useful stuff. A lot of writers post here first and are looking for feedback and to improve things.
When I first discovered this site and mcstories way back when, I could not believe how many hot stories there were. Now that I’ve gorged myself on them over the years, it takes a lot more for me to really enjoy it. The stories haven’t changed; I’ve just become desensitized.
There’s a few factors and I think each one is important to know in a different way.
One—and the cruellest of me to mention—is the fact that trend-setters and seminal creatives tend to “strike earlier and more often” in newer creative communities. As a place/trend/genre/community becomes more influential, it attract subsequent-wave-rs and me-too-ers. The ‘cream of the crop’ gets diluted more severely as a community, medium, style or genre becomes bigger and better known.
Two, almost literally, “volume versus surface area.” In creative databases it works almost like a sphere (math metaphor; as a sphere gets larger, it’s volume increases more rapidly then it’s surface area). Simply, the more submissions there are, the more submissions there are but only slightly more ways a submission can be exemplarity / visible / notable in some dimension. Let’s call this “Bigger classroom syndrone.”
Factor Three is twofold; when you first discover a place you’re a kid in a newly discovered candy store; You have all the material there searchable before you and it’s all new.
I found 80~90% of my favourite material on FurAffinity within the first two months of discovering FurAffinity. Likewise Tumblr, CYOC, DeviantART, etc. It was all new and all my favourite search words were rich veins returning new things; I had several years of material to mine. There’s no way FurAffinitynow can compete with FurAffibitythen because that FurAffinty had years of content. “Now” FurAffinity has only the stuff added to it since I last visited, and so much of that seems mediocre by comparison.
Factor Three Part II; as called by @MonsterMash62, Places become victims of their own ‘best stuff’. I constantly judge everything I read on CYOC with the standard of the 10 best things I’ve ever read on CYOC.
99% of the submissions I see on FurAffinity are complete garbage in comparison to the 10 best things I’ve ever seen, and saved, and returned to, and be amazed by. This is what bands “who used to be big” have to put up with too. Like Paul Simon is disappointing compared to “Paul Simon from The Best of Paul Simon and Simon & Garfunkel.” They’re eclipsed in value and in quality by their own highlight reels, which have been refined—by them and by others—several times.
Their refined “best of” reels is sitting there, waiting in ambush for each new discoverer of their work.
When you combine all these you get something like, Less excellent creators ‘per capita’, writing harder-to-stand-out material ‘by volume’, read by readers who are judging everything they read versus their 10 favourite ever stories they found back when they freshly discovered the site and everything was new and amazing and backed up with years of excellent, newly findable gems.
It’s a bit of a tangent, but the flip side of the fact that we constantly compare new stuff to our favorite top ten is that if someone writes something similar to our favorite top ten, it’s a guaranteed smash hit (completely subjectively).
A number of my at this particular moment favorite authors (and there are only a few due to discussion already) are my favorites because they are posting stories extremely similar to what I like reading / wrote myself, but more refined. And even refined should be in quotes, because what I mean is that they’ve refined their stories to spend more time on the things I like and less on the things I’ve never cared about. But all of that is completely subjective.
Basically what I’m saying is that many readers loved Onyx’s stories from 10-15 years ago. If you now write and post another story featuring a male witch/warlock that turns his straight, asshole roommates into gay stereotypes, I’m sure some readers from 10-15 years ago will go ape shit over it. Same with me: write a story with somewhat defined characters, instant muscle growth and reality warping, I’m sure some of my readers will love it. I could think of more examples but those are some that come to mine immediately. And this is all assuming the story is written decently (broken up paragraphs, paced well, etc).