I am hoping y’all will reconsider this, for the reasons mentioned by Kylie, Arrows and others. Seems like it won’t be good for small authors. If we are overreacting, please clarify how this will not affect small authors.
It should fix the bug!
Good question @kylie_writes!
We review stories in the top 100 spots on each trending section to make sure they meet our content guidelines. This does mean that occasionally we find a story we want to feature on the weekly shelves, but this is not the primary source for stories. Many of the stories on those shelves come from community recommendations and tools we use that look for stories that have high reader retention. As a reminder, reader retention is based on how long your readers stay with your story, not how many reads it gets or when or how quickly it gets them.
Since the trending section is not the biggest source of weekly shelf stories, whether it updates once a day or multiple times per day doesn’t have an effect on whether a story gets noticed for shelves. I hope this helps answer your question!
Thanks for the reply, @Liz!
This does help clear things up in regards to being featured.
I am still curious as to whether or not this will positively effect authours struggling to be noticed by users, not just those who pick the shelf winners.
I feel that the lack of updates to the rank will negatively effect a lot of authours who are trying to make it into higher trending and rank numbers.
Do you have a solution, or the statistics to show us that this will only positively effect every writer on the app? Because I, as well as many others in the community, are not seeing this update as a positive.
Thank you!
But what about the small authors this isn’t fair to us at all. The stories that are trending will stay on top it’s not making much of difference for everyone just the ones who have been trending. How the system was normally small authors had a chance and now that chance is completely gone. This honestly makes me not want to write anymore
@Liz you say in Stories We <3 ? There’s supposed to be a place where new stories have a chance to be noticed?
As far I see, there’s a place only for 3 stories. Others are all “old”.
What a great update. Not like it won’t benefit everyone…
rip newbies (myself included)
Hi @Liz, I totally understand making this update to keep the servers from glitching, however I do have some concerns about updating it only once a day. It’s hard enough with the current system to get ranks to rise and hope they stay there so we can potentially get more readers and such, and I feel like if we miss the mark on the update time then it’ll affect how our stories get noticed. I’ve switched from updating with single chapters to triple updates just to get that rank rise in hopes of new readers and I feel like with the new update all that hard work won’t really be noticed. Also I know seeing the ranks rise motivates a lot of authors and with it now only updating once a day will bring a restlessness upon publishing because we have to wait to see how well our stories are doing on the app.
Maybe you can help us out here by answering the questions posted above, but I’ll try with an example (numbers are examples as well!):
Old version:
- New story with 3 episodes: Story is updated, 1k reads in the first hour > Ranks updated every 30 minutes > story trends
- Trending story with 30 episodes: Story has 500 reads every hour > Ranks updated every 30 minutes > New story can trend higher for a moment and be discovered by new readers
New version:
- New story with 3 episodes is updated, 1k reads in the fist hour > 3k reads in the remaining 23 hours > cumulated reads in 24 hours = 4k
- Trending story with 30 episodes: Story has 500 reads every hour > cumulated 12k reads in 24 hours, new story has no chance on getting anywhere near trending.
If I am completely on the wrong track here, I am very grateful for your clarification.
Thank you!
Also what about the hardcore Episode readers? They’ve more than likely already read the trending stories and want to find something new. How can they do that when ranks are only updated once a day whereas the previous system allowed for variety?
I always gain new readers when I release new episodes. And this is because the trending section gets updated frequently which creates visibility for my story to new readers before it goes back down. This would especially harm small authors who write in genres outside of romance/drama because it is easier to trend in other genres faster and with fewer reads but with this new update this would make it harder because stories have a “shelf life” in which they spike in reads and go down. The problem is that this would affect small authors because they have a shorter “shelf life” and that’s why the time we have is important.
I’m sorry but this new update is only causing more trouble for authors, EVERY author. I think most of us get motivated by the constant change in ranking. And THERE IS constant change. We feel very demotivated to publish right now, as we don’t know whether it’s the right time to do so. The first few hours after a chapter is published are the most important ones. With this update, there is a huge possibility that that these hours would be for nothing! (If I understand you correctly.)
Have the rankings actually changed since this was announced yesterday (because I don’t think mine have)? And has anyone figured out what time the change is supposed to occur?
Mine did change around midnight AEST and I have seen a change since… So that’s nearly 12 hours ago
I’m almost positive that mine are exactly the same as they were when I made my first post on this thread 22 hours ago lol.
But I wonder if that’s a side effect of this new system (and what we were afraid of)- more stagnant rankings. Did yours shift much?
Mine are exactly the same as well, for well over 24 hours now,
Lol I wonder if by trying to “fix things” they’ve created a new glitch
About 30 spots down in comedy, though my overall trending rank stayed the same