I get it, some of the Episode Original stories are good, but seriously, there’s a problem.
There are small authors that write the best stories, and they put a lot of thought, time and effort into them, and they get 2 reads. In the meantime, Episode Original stories that were created just for money and with little to no effort literally get millions of reads. It’s frustrating.
I’m not saying that popular stories and authors are bad, but a lot of them could be better. The main point is that small creators don’t get the attention that they deserve.
I think Episode should add a shelf that shows new stories with few reads from small creators. Not small creators that they think will squeeze a lot of gems and passes out of readers, jut small stories in general. Sometimes, there’s a reason that the stories aren’t getting reads, like shabby directing, errors, etc, but a lot of the time, small authors put the most effort into their stories, and they t rush to create new ones as fast as possible because they don’t make money from them.
Smaller stories also usually use less gem choices and less gem per choice (eg. 1 gem choice per story that only uses the lowest amount, 5 gems, and a support the author choice). Nowadays, Episode Original stories have 10 gem choices per chapter (literally no exaggeration) and each choice costs 35 gems. There are even these crappy choices that only affect 1 line of dialogue and are low effort and just an attempt to basically just steal gems and to make the reader feel bad if they don’t choose the gem choice, even if it only influences 1 speech bubble (choices: Flirt with him or snap and tell him to stay away). These are actually really annoying.
If you’re reading this, I highly encourage you to search up random keywords and to click on stories made by unpopular writers. I found a good story just by doing this.
If you want, you can share your opinion and promote your small story (try to make the promotions in a dropdown, because this topic isn’t necessarily an r4r or promotion topic i guess)