I don't know if it's just that society is collapsing and this is a symptom but the toxicity of the user community is getting worse through the activity of a few trolls.
My guess is there's probably about six or seven extremely toxic and vocal trolls on this site(but create multiple accounts)
Their extremely myopic fetish/interest is their only reason for being. Any story that falls outside of that gets their wrath
And by that I mean they feel the need to downvote it, write extremely negative and unconstructive comments and send nasty grams to the author.
I'm all about freedom of speech but we have restrictions on this site to protect the user community.
I don't see any value in someone just writing "your story sucks if this gets your disgusting balls hard" from a freedom of speech standpoint.
(Which a troll recently wrote on my story)
The only thing these kind of comments do is discourage authors, encourage toxicity because it's obviously acceptable, and bring down the quality of the website overall.
I have also noticed more and more stories with author contact and comments turned off.
It's obvious why reader engagement would not be of interest after you get someone named "asdfghk123" sending you a bunch of snotty emails to discourage your writing.
I'm okay with somebody not liking my story. In fact, I know it's not for that's reality.
I'm okay with them commenting the reasons and how it might be better.
It's not an airport though. You don't have to announce your from the story on chapter 6
I would ask that the website moderators consider some approach to getting rid of the most toxic users that contribute nothing but
Trollish bullying.
I know that they're just going to create many many accounts but we've got to do something or they win