Stories you hate.

[Banbeck]

Getting user suggestions adopted at Literotica is pretty much just so much spitting in the wind. For the price, you'll find it less frustrating to either adapt or go to something you've indicated is more to your liking. I've told you that such a site exists and offered to tell you privately where it is. It would be bad form to plug a competing site to Literotica on the Literotica discussion board. Your decision where to go from here, but I do believe, from a wealth of experience here, that making enhancement suggestions here is just so much spitting into the wind.

That's their loss then...

And I just started publishing on Lit, so I'm not that eager to switch sites already.

 

[KeithD]

It's not an either/or option. I publish my stories to multiple sites, including the two I've mentioned. I take them all as provided.

 

[ElectricBlue]

And even then, if the author failed to mention something I don’t like in the story’s tags I’ll find out on page “x” and have wasted an “x” amount of time again.
But hey, maybe I missed something, so feel free to educate me

What you're asking is for authors to anticipate everything you don't like and put it in a list.

Think about that for a moment, and now you tell me what I don't like, so you can put it in this checklist of yours. Don't be daft.

 

[Banbeck]

What you're asking is for authors to anticipate everything you don't like and put it in a list.

Think about that for a moment, and now you tell me what I don't like, so you can put it in this checklist of yours. Don't be daft.

No, not everything, really just the basics, the general things that put people off.

 

[KeithD]

This is an adult site and I expect the readers to maintain responsibility for what they read themselves and what they don't and to be adult enough to just leave and read something else if they get squeamish over something. I also expect them to go to a less-porn Web site for their reading if they tend to get squeamish to the point of needing babysitting and handholding constantly. I put the major kinks of a story in the taglines. The reader can either take it from there or just not read any of my stories. I'm not thinking "will this be too rough for the reader?" while I'm writing, while I will consider whether it will stay within the site limits, as I understand them. That's not a concern for the reader, though. It's a concern for whether I can get the story posted here.

 

[SimonDoom]

No, not everything, really just the basics, the general things that put people off.

I think you're asking for too much. It is not possible to create a system whereby the author communicates to the potential reader every possible detail about a story that might make the reader dislike that story, and if such a system did exist it would completely demolish what is one of the joys of reading a story -- the element of surprise.

The New Yorker doesn't have a tag system for its published short stories. Most short story forums do not.

I can usually tell within three or four paragraphs whether I will like a story or not. A good short story, right off the bat, has good prose, establishes characters, and provides at least the kernel of a plot. It seems to me that an astute reader can, within a minute or two, determine whether the story is worthwhile or not. So it doesn't seem to me that authors have much of an obligation to do more to make the sorting process easier for readers.

What I just don't sympathize with at all is readers who get pissed off because the story takes a direction they don't like. Put on the big-boy pants. That is part of art and part of story-telling. You don't know where the story will go, and it's supposed to be that way. You should WANT to be surprised. I had a reader of one of my mom-son incest stories complain to me once, about a scene where mom was showing off her naked body to her son . . . and then she touched her anus. And I lost that reader. He actually wrote me that "no self respecting mother would do that." And I thought, are you fucking kidding me?

We should all be adults about this. Nobody's hand has to be held. As an author I don't have to flag and tag every little detail to avoid ruffling your delicate erotic sensibility feathers.

 

[ElectricBlue]

No, not everything, really just the basics, the general things that put people off.

Which are?

Your idea is nonsensical. What you might think are "the basics", "the general things", are for others the bee's knees and the best erotic thing on the planet.

That's why there are categories, as the first source of, "there are dragons here." But if you honestly expect writers to list everything that might be in their story so the delicate don't get frightened... that's just ridiculous. Even Mary Poppins had secret stuff in her bag.

 

[Banbeck]

Why put the focus on the negative?

Personally, I find the ten tag system perfectly adequate to get across the general idea around the story. I'm not combing through my own 25k word story to find every applicable tag. I could literally have a hundred+ tags on it by the end and that's just excessive.

The ten tag system is more or less, "Here's the basics, proceed as you wish."

It sounds more like your issue is that not all authors utilize those ten tags properly?

If I came across a story that only had a single tag linking it to the category, I'd probably skip it. If they don't give enough of a shit to point out the draws of their own story, I'm not going to invest time in trying to find out if it has what I'm looking for in it or not.

Author's not using the tags system properly is part of the problem.
But the main problem is that you can search for what you want, but not exclude what you don't want from that search.
And the fact that the tags aren't standardized doesn't help either.

 

[Banbeck]

Which are?

Your idea is nonsensical. What you might think are "the basics", "the general things", are for others the bee's knees and the best erotic thing on the planet.

That's why there are categories, as the first source of, "there are dragons here." But if you honestly expect writers to list everything that might be in their story so the delicate don't get frightened... that's just ridiculous. Even Mary Poppins had secret stuff in her bag.

From what I have seen most issues are with people running into things like gay/non-consent/anal sex etc. in a story posted in "romance" for instance.
This isn't about the one reader with an allergy for girls in pink panties because he/she once had a puppy who ate one and died.
You won't have to add a tag "pink panties included."
This is about the broader topics that cause 99% of the issues, and the number of those topics is rather limited.

 

[Banbeck]

You don't need tags for that? You can just put a - in front of any terms you don't want in a story and that effectively removes them from the search.

How nice they mention that on the relevant search page...
Still doesn't solve the problems of authors not adding the required tags and the tags not being standardized though.

 

[ElectricBlue]

How nice they mention that on the relevant search page...
Still doesn't solve the problems of authors not adding the required tags and the tags not being standardized though.

Have you seen the list of all tags used? There are thousands, spread across the multiple categories. How can you "standardise" all of those? We have ten tags we can use for a story - there's only so much you can do with ten promotional tags, but you're asking for every single sexual element in a story to be listed. That's called "the story."

 

[jaF0]

Still doesn't solve the problems of authors not adding the required tags and the tags not being standardized though.

There are no 'required tags'.

 

[Banbeck]

Have you seen the list of all tags used? There are thousands, spread across the multiple categories. How can you "standardise" all of those? We have ten tags we can use for a story - there's only so much you can do with ten promotional tags, but you're asking for every single sexual element in a story to be listed. That's called "the story."

No, I haven’t, and I wouldn’t know where to find said list either.
Having thousands of different tags is a direct result of tags not being standardized.
So we have multiple tags for the exact same thing, and we also have tags that are combinations of other tags.
The result is that if I’m searching for “fellatio” I’m not going to find the stories tagged with “blow job” or “blowjob” or “blow jobs” etc.
And that’s why there are thousands of tags.

And then, again, this would only be about preventing readers from ending up with stories that offend them.
The reasons for that happening are mostly related to certain sexual practices not everyone is happy about.
So to fix the problem you only would have to make the concerning tags mandatory.
And just a few dozen of these tags would prevent 99% of the issues already.
The amount of time and effort authors would need to invest, checking a couple of dozen boxes on screen, would be negligible.
But the advantages would be considerable, unless you don’t care about other people’s opinions and see publishing stories on Lit is a way to preach your own sexual preferences to the uneducated of course.

Personally I would like for as much people to read my stories as possible, and the best way to achieve that is making sure my stories get good ratings.
Having people reading my stories end up being offended by certain sexual practices described in them won’t get me good ratings though, so I want to prevent these people from reading my stories, to everyone's benefit.
And for the same reason I don’t like the current category system, because it restricts a stories exposure.
Basically, with the current category system, when you write a romance story about a couple of lesbians who like some spanking in a fantasy setting the story belongs in four different categories, but you can only place it in one, and thus miss the exposure to three quarters of the potential readers.
And then you still get the complaints, and accompanying bad scores, from people who think BDSM doesn’t belong in Romance, or lesbians don’t belong in Sci-Fi & Fantasy, etc.

 

[Banbeck]

There are no 'required tags'.

Yeah, that's one of the problems.
Another one is those tags not becoming visible unless you click the tags button.

 

[KeithD]

From what I have seen most issues are with people running into things like gay/non-consent/anal sex etc. in a story posted in "romance" for instance.
This isn't about the one reader with an allergy for girls in pink panties because he/she once had a puppy who ate one and died.
You won't have to add a tag "pink panties included."
This is about the broader topics that cause 99% of the issues, and the number of those topics is rather limited.

News flash. A story can have gay characters and be a Romance. (You are beginning to be very irritating in your need to have a babysitter to protect you from a whole bunch of kinks that make you--personally--hyperventilate.) I've told you what's likely to happen here to serve your perceived needs and offered to help you to get to somewhere that does that more closely than here. But you keep chipping away at granite with a wet noodle.

 

[Banbeck]

News flash. A story can have gay characters and be a Romance. (You are beginning to be very irritating in your need to have a babysitter to protect you from a whole bunch of kinks that make you--personally--hyperventilate.) I've told you what's likely to happen here to serve your perceived needs and offered to help you to get to somewhere that does that more closely than here. But you keep chipping away at granite with a wet noodle.

Yeah, well, if you had actually read what I’ve been saying you would have known that I’m not talking about ME having problems with gays in romance stories.
The only thing I have been saying is that some readers get offended by gays (or non-consent, or BDSM, or anal, or whatever) turning up in a romance (or whatever) story when they haven’t been warned off beforehand, and that the current system is often failing in that regard.
But because YOU are convinced this isn’t going to change on Lit I’m not allowed to talk about it, even better, I should have just packed up and left as you told me.
You know what?
I’m already done with this forum.
Have a nice day sir.

 

[KeithD]

That's a relief.

 

[jaF0]

But because YOU are convinced this isn’t going to change on Lit I’m not allowed to talk about it, even better, I should have just packed up and left as you told me.
You know what?
I’m already done with this forum.

You don't have to be done. You just have to have a thicker skin and accept that others feel differently than you do. You also have to understand that there are no new topics here. Virtually everything has been discussed multiple times over the 10-20 years most of us have been here.

 

[lovecraft68]

News flash. A story can have gay characters and be a Romance. (You are beginning to be very irritating in your need to have a babysitter to protect you from a whole bunch of kinks that make you--personally--hyperventilate.) I've told you what's likely to happen here to serve your perceived needs and offered to help you to get to somewhere that does that more closely than here. But you keep chipping away at granite with a wet noodle.

You're right that there's no rule as to what can and can't be in a romance.

But you also know that at least on this site, if you're going to have GM sex it is far better off in the GM section because people will bitch.

Whether that's right or not in a real world sense is irrelevant here, because here is what we're talking about and Lit has categories and the readers expect the category they pick to not have other 'trump' categories tossed in.

Just the way it works here.

 

[KeithD]

It's not relevant here. You're just stalking.

 

[lovecraft68]

It's not relevant here. You're just stalking.

No one stalks you, we just reply to your posts so the people you try to bully into your way of thinking know you're often wrong and just being a troll filling a thread with argumentative BS

Above we have yet another poster claiming to be done here because of your crap.

Maybe some day we'll have a real mod who'll do something about you, then the forum may actually grow instead of shrink.

 

[Banbeck]

You don't have to be done. You just have to have a thicker skin

No, I don’t have to, LOL
In my thirty years or so on the internet I have been on so many forums I don’t even remember half of them.
So I have some experience, and looking at this bully’s post count I know he’ll be all over this forum all the time, crapping on people that don’t see things his way.
And what this post count also tells me is that the powers that be aren’t going to do anything about it.
For me that’s a sign to be on my merry way if there ever was one.
Live is short and I have better things to do with it…
So I bide all you friendly ladies and gentlemen farewell, with the best of wishes, and may we meet again some day in a more pleasant environment

 

[jaF0]

There are no bullies. But there are those of us who have been in the collective long enough to know that insistence is futile.

 

[KeithD]

Did I mention Lovecraft's obsessive campaign of stalking me?

 

[Bramblethorn]

From what I have seen most issues are with people running into things like gay/non-consent/anal sex etc. in a story posted in "romance" for instance.

"Things like..." makes no sense here. These things are not remotely like one another and it's gross to conflate them like this. Gay love/sex is not parallel to rape. We don't warn readers for straight content.

Yes, they're both common reader squicks, but for very different reasons. One is about people being reminded of actual RL trauma, the other is about reader bigotry. Many people are still offended by mixed-race relationships but the solution isn't to indulge them in that sensitivity, it's for those readers to get over themselves and join the 21st century.