Hiding this because I wrote a lot. 😬
I’m a firm believer in the actual story and in its power to entertain me as both a reader and as a consumer of media. I think if a story is entertaining enough it doesn’t really have to be that out of the box in order to get the reach.
What matters to me and I think to a lot of others is 1. How entertaining the story is. I don’t care if your story is the most diverse, most original thing in the entire world if it’s boring I’m not going to read it. On the same side I don’t care if your story has every cliche in the book. If it’s written well and I’m entertained…I’m going to read it.
I think one of the benefits of the recent guidelines change, enough people in the community making a fuss, and a few other things is that the trending sections seem to slowly be getting a bit more diverse in terms of actual content.
For starters we all need to learn the difference between a cliche story and a bad story. Because they’re not the same thing. I’m a firm believer still that if a story is written well it can have every cliche in the book. What matters is the actual story. How it’s told, how any cliches are presented, and even how original it is to a certain extent.
I’m going to add though that in terms of reads it depends on a bit more than just how cliche it is. How often authors update, the chapter length, promotion, skill of directing and grammar usage all really play a part.
This depends highly on where you’re coming from. I think for a lot of people active on the forums this is true, but I think for the majority of episode users this is false. We have to remember that episode is an interactive platform still very much aimed towards roughly 13-25 year olds who are here to be entertained by what they read. If the story is at least entertaining enough a lot of them will stay.
You also mention that a lot of users aren’t really active in terms of the community and I definitely agree with you, which is part of the reason why the same stories stay so front and center all the time.
But I’m also going to elaborate a bit on the idea of the same stories and authors. I think it’s important to know that a lot of the bigger authors have been on the community for 2+ years. They’ve gained a good amount of readers who will at least try what they put out. Barring the fact that episode has to review stories to show up on the trending section a lot of them could probably throw a story out today and be ranking by tomorrow. I’d get mad but at the same time they’ve been working for years now so I’m going to choose to be happy for them and try to work better on my own stories. 