TL;DR: I think the recent change to include stories from each site on all sites by default is a bad choice. I explain why I think so in a very long and meandering post.
Recently, Martin posted another update to the site, as detailed here: Site Updates Pt. 2 - #113 by Martin. As always, I’ll speak for everyone to express how grateful we are for his dedication to this website and the extent to which he invests his time and energy into improving it.
With that out of the way… 
One of the major changes he implemented was changing the default behavior of all four websites to show every story posted to each website. So a story posted on Gay Spiral will appear on Gay Cupid, Gay Kinky, and the other one (the bondage one, I don’t read that one), even if it doesn’t include the Cupid or Bondage theme. The rationale was that the non-Spiral sites see so little traffic after being live for years, and stories posted there don’t get the attention they deserve. Makes sense. Takes advantage of the increased eyeballs on Gay Spiral Stories, which leads to more attention which leads to more repeat traffic, etc.
However, I see this change and I find myself asking, won’t this have the opposite effect?
I will admit, I don’t spend much time on the sites other than Spiral. After all, it’s what I and most people on this forum sought out and formed a community around. It targets a particular niche that has few outlets available, even fewer that have the (relatively) consistent level of quality we find here. To say nothing of the active Discord channel. It’s a vibrant community, but let’s not forget that it took quite a while to get to this point. I don’t know the numbers, but I suspect this grew over the course of 1-2 decades to reach this point. Whether it continues to grow, I’m not sure, but it’s vibrant nevertheless and shows no signs of slowing.
Martin has a noble and ambitious vision for this website, which I fully support, to diversify beyond sexy guy-on-guy hypno shenanigans. We have a site dedicated for bondage (still don’t remember the name), one for non-kink erotic stories, and an aggregate site that encompasses all of the above, as well as anything that currently doesn’t fit. One can also cross post between the sites such that if you hit multiple genres, you aren’t constrained to one or the other.
This is where I think the problem lies.
The few times I’ve popped over to Gay Cupid Stories, it looked an awful lot like Gay Spiral Stories. Scroll down the list and you’ll see spiral after spiral indicating the primary or secondary theme is hypno/mind control. Again, this is highly understandable, given the vast majority of this community was drawn here because of that interest and continues to support it. I suspect the addition of this and the other sites has challenged the authors of Gay Spiral to broaden their horizons and include themes they might not have. I wrote one (okay) story for Gay Cupid, but discovered it wasn’t my niche and I struggled to find inspiration when mind control wasn’t involved. I suspect I’m not alone in this regard.
Which leads to the inevitable: people who like writing mind control stories continue to write mind control stories. There’s no dedicated community for Cupid or Bondage or Kinky, just offshoots of the existing community that took years to form, largely in response to the absence of a quality space for those who like the gay mind-control genre. And those who are drawn to this kink will continue to discover and hopefully contribute to Spiral. Existing members will drop off, new members will join, dedicated members will persist, and so the community will presumably thrive.
So then, how does a similar community form around Gay Cupid Stories? To someone looking for a platform for free short form gay erotica, they might come across Gay Cupid Stories and consider it, only to discover that 90% of the stories relate to mind control, which to be frank, is not everyone’s cup of tea. Not that it needs to be; the particularity of this genre is what makes Gay Spiral Stories so strong. But for a new website to grow separately from Gay Spiral, it seems to me it should be differentiating itself from Spiral, not integrating further into it.
Yes, there are options to change which stories you see. Another addition with this update was a “pure” button that restricts stories to only those that were posted to a given site (enabling “pure” on Spiral will only show stories that include “Spiral” as a primary or secondary theme). Choices and customization are always welcome, but they also add a layer of friction that a new reader may not be aware of or care to have to adjust when they are looking for their preferred content. For the advanced reader, this is a wonderful addition and I don’t think it should be removed, but I suspect most readers don’t fit this category and will simply think that what they see is what they will get.
So, what is my long winded point? I think it’s a mistake to cross post all of the stories across all of the websites. I understand the impulse to want to share Cupid and Bondage stories in a space with the largest audience, but it’s not going to matter if the audience you’re sharing with isn’t looking for what you’re serving. And further, when you do actually find those members interested in the stated offerings of Cupid and Bondage, they won’t find it because it’s flooded with Spiral stories. Maybe there’s some opportunity for readers to switch between the sites. Maybe some readers prefer to view through Kinky so they can see all of it because they have a refined palette that can tolerate all manner of kink. For me, and readers like me, there’s simply not an incentive to broaden my horizons to content I’m categorically disinterested in.
So, my proposal would be to reverse the change, and go hard in the opposite direction. Completely sequester stories to their primary website: only Spiral stories on Spiral, Cupid on Cupid, and so on. I would even suggest limiting intentional cross-posting, and deferring to the most niche kink. There’s very little downside in including a Spiral/Cupid story on Spiral, but I would resist the urge to include a story with that kind of theme on Cupid unless the mind control element is so minor as to be considered incidental. I can’t speak to Bondage, but I suspect there’s more wiggle room there between Spiral/Bondage stories, but there are certainly instances where the bondage/leather/bdsm element overwhelms the Spiral element so much so that it feels out of place on Spiral, and vice versa.
I know it’s disappointing (and possibly expensive) to put up these websites only to see them pale in comparison to Gay Spiral Stories, and I appreciate how much sympathy you feel for the authors who post stories there only to have them go unread, and it is a very real concern that authors will leave the platform if they feel there’s no audience. That problem I don’t have an easy solution for. Does it make sense to commission authors to write vanilla stories to boost the content on the site? Can we collaborate with similar sites outside of our group to cross promote and draw in an outside audience? I have neither the expertise nor the resources to carry out a marketing strategy like that, but what I do believe quite strongly is that if we continue in the direction Martin has proposed, that they will suffocate under the weight of Spiral and it may not matter.
I would much rather see these sites live on their own, small as they may be, rather than be artificially supported by Gay Spiral Stories forever, which I believe will be the outcome of this strategy. Martin proposed in Discord eliminating the three sister sites altogether and just having Kinky as the singular platform. This isn’t a terrible suggestion, but it still remains that Gay Spiral will likely dominate that platform, and if that stopped being the case, readers and authors like me may not feel like this is our space anymore.
Of course, I don’t bear any of the responsibility for this website and its success. Martin does, as do the other contributors who are much more active than I am. I am quite willing to be wrong about my thesis and welcome dissenting views. I would also be thrilled to be proven wrong in the form of increased readership and traffic to the other sites and an increase in authorship to those less-contributed sites. I have full faith in Martin, enough that I feel like I can offer my unfiltered and unsolicited opinion, for him to completely ignore or embrace, and I’ll be happy with whatever he decides is best. I leave it to you, Martin.
. If no one is going there except a handful of authors saying “please let us have an empty space rather then this Spiral clone” then, wouldn’t the empty space be easier and better, then something that is not working anyways?
