I never link to other story sites. I am loyal to SOL. It meets my needs.
Is it perfect?
No.
is it trying to be?
I sure hope not.
Are there things I'd change if I could?
Definitely.
I'd nix voting. I am not going be a math bitch and start getting into all the details but anyone with a passing understanding of how voting works should realize it doesn't reflect a proper sample set for most stories.
Use Case: You are a new author. You finally mustered up the courage to post your story idea. You edited it. You did whatever to put your effort into it.
You post it up. Just going back to 3/16 (Four Days) I see maybe 300 on average for authors who don't have a big following. If you have a big following it doesn't work this way, but it's still fucking biased.
Extreme response bias is a real issue. People who take the time to vote or comment are usually on either of the outliers - they hated it or loved it.
You poured your heart out into it, you illustrated it, you checked it for grammar?
Well Grandpadick370 said it's a 1 "You call this a story"
Wanna know why? Because Grandpa dick doesn't read story codes. You clearly added a code but he leaves you a shitgram in your comments "This contained (the thing I don't like) 1 out of 10!!"
The Bliss Ninny who likes everything? He fucks up the average by giving everything a 10. Which effectively is the same as giving everything a 1 because it's not a rating, it's a pity-vote.
Then you got your trolls.
The guy you pissed off in the forums? He makes lists of people who have wronged him and revises them very Sunday. You are still #327 on the list. He created 17 troll accounts to downvote stories of people he doesn't like, because he literally has no power in real life and this little taste of Cartman-style authoritah make shim feel less pitiful.
That's quaint. Now, AI gives us skynet in the form of independent AI that can create and authenticate unlimited accounts, maintain temp email boxes and create as many downvote accounts as they like. Sure, they are almost always wrong about everything. Yes, they will soon be tied to autonomous weapon systems, outsource us into resource scarcity and mass unemployment and be used to incorrectly mass surveil the entire world. On the upside, the troll with his little personally army of accounts he created manually to troll authors just had his penis returned to it's normal size, and his troll accounts will become useless.
I doubt anyone has bothered to clawdbot this site, but to think it won't be happening is like believing Netanyahu has three arms, gives speeches with an Onlyfans model wearing a cosplay Army uniform miniskirt at the Bored of Peace. (That's a real AI picture making the rounds that people are too fucking dumb to know isn't real)
But given all that, let's say you still aren't convinced because "Hey, they do that to everyone...so we all suffer from the same biases".
Yes, So, let's say of that 300 people who clicked on your story, you get 20-30 votes. Out of how many on the site? What are the chances that they were unbiased?
The volatility of small datasets where a handful of entries dictated the entire outcome means you can't really trust the numbers. 10% of almost less than a.000001% of the users on this site thought your story wasn't cool?
Don't delete it.
Established authors may get 2,000 - 5,000 reads in the same time. Still not enough. The same day (3/16), I see someone with 5244 reads with 178 votes.
Typically, if you know this guy posted and jumped on it, it's because you followed them. What are you going to do when one of your favorite authors posts? Upvote it. The score is going to be artificially higher.
Even if it wasn't, its still around 3.4% of the vote, which is a pittance of people's opinions.
What about established authors with huge vote counts?
They have that high vote count/readership because the story was good. The total reads should tell you it was pretty damned compelling. The story codes should tell you if it's going to turn your screw or not.
There is no established criteria for objective voting. If you don't like what it was about, you may downvote it at will even if it is well written.
I'd turn this shit off, and replace it with a different metric. On another site, they give "Thanks". It's just a +1
The amount of times you thanked people is displayed to show how active you are. You can only thank once per story.
Then i would devise a calculation based on the length the story has been on a site to normalize the amount of thank you it received on a curve. That way if your story has been on the site for 10 years it is normalized to a story that's been on the site for a week.
I'd probably start it going forward and freeze the old vote system, to be honest.
I've had over 873,000 people access my home page. My highest score is 7.75.
My highest read story has 130,000 reads, and it has a 6.15
Now, objectively - how the fuck are people going to have read a chapter from that story 130,000 times (it's not 130,000 people, it just means someone clicked or downloaded a chapter, but it wasn't one motherfucker doing it, I can assure you) and you say it's 6.15?
Obviously, for the niche of Eddie fans that like my story, it was worthwhile and the piddly amount of votes I did get reflect less than a quarter of a percent, or one vote in 450 people. I learned not to give a shit about voting on my own stories.
But, what pisses me off is that many new authors are frozen because they think the votes are actually reflective of the quality of their work.
(Or, worse - they think their shit don't stink because they got 30 votes in a fucking month and that randomly got them a 7.8 or something.)
So, I'd shit can that. It serves no real benefit except scaring off new authors. Existing authors who are already popular don't need votes to remain popular.
I'd probably try to find a way to automate story posting so I didn't have to do it manually. I don't know if it would scale but it seems like by now it should be automated to some extent.
The main change I'd make is that I'd eject all AI stuff into the shitter from whence it came.
If you grab a story and it scores 97% on the "Likely AI" and Claude, Geminin and Grok think so? No need to read it. Just print it and wipe your ass with it.
It's slowing down the site, lowering quality, adds nothing. I've railed against that many times. There are things I think AI can do for me.
I was recently inspired to try my hand at another Indian Erotica story with an ENF/CMNF flair.
https://storiesonline.net/n/45794/slumdog-kuttiyan/1
Slumdog Kuttiyan is a play on the movie Slumdog Millionaire. The Kapoor sisters get caught stealing and end up getting taught a lesson in street justice by being paraded around naked in a place that is seriously repressed. I snuck in some easter eggs. I named the headman after the main character in Slumdog Millionaire.
I also created an alter-ego (as I often do) of myself and named him Tharki. That means pervert. if i had been lucky enough to be born in India, i like to think I'd be just as cool as he is.
Tharki is not his real name obviously. He has dyslexia and he's painted his sign and just rolled with it because it fits. He's sort of comic relief for the story on some level.
AI would have had me call him Thakri, and I did on a shit ton of images I already created. It would have had me call the story Slumdog Kutiyaan. It put the wrong Hindu lettering in half the fucking images I made even when i went out of my way to make sure I did it right.
I didn't know that in India they say "Tharki Uncle" instead of Uncle Tharki. I asked AI to see if I got cultural things correct and it let me fucking call him Uncle Thakri. I used Claude, Gemini, Grok and a local AI. All of them were wrong about a ton of shit.
I didn't want to insult Indian people by writing shit that is obviously stupidly wrong. I think it's a useful tool for research but it's super biased toward g-rating and will actively fight you. In Images, it gravitates towards fake, medium sized, perfect breasts.
The AI programmers have never seen or touched real titty since their mom stopped breast feeding them. They have no fucking idea that women have all sorts of shapes and sizes and the majority don't have these perfect anti-gravity knockers they default too.
AI is not only ENSHITTIFYING all literature by filling up the web with Em-dash laden turds but it is ruining body image.
Are you a big girl with curves? Too bad. You are pornography's to Gemini. One titty a little lopsided? Fucking die and fall off the earth. None of them will allow you to have anything but perfect symmetry and if you do manage it, when you go to edit it they will change it back no matter how you try to prompt it.
small titties? you are a renegade with a body type that is inappropriate for adults to be able to make an image of, even if you are fully fucking dressed and 38 years old.
The handful of billionaires that own the image making machines filling the internet like it's a fucking landfill of shitty, fake images are convinced that adults should never see anything except the most mediocre of average sized tits, flat butts, and regular shapes. They were working fine for a brief short while, but the billionaires decided that adults can't see a natural boob with natural sag and droop even in a bikini for our own good.
Despite that, I managed to illustrate the shit out of my story. I didn't want to bombard the reader with too many images but I had a lot of fun creating an Indian version of myself and spilling warm Basundi like it's jizz all over the big woman that Tharki dotes on. I use tons of editing tools, upscale, and merge many images.
There are ways around the mainstream AI image generators to make decent, real women pictures and that's what i fucking like. I like small titties, big titties, etc.
I like medium titties as well, so in general all titties are valuable but I want to see representation. It makes it implausible for me to see perfect bodies in every shot. I also love to make artistic images as well in the style of great Indian cheesecake illustrators.
It's not as simple as just pressing a button and getting a perfect outcome. it will probably never be.
So, I concede AI has a place in images. I also think it may destroy the world sooner than we think, but at least it knows how to fucking jam. There is some AI mustic that people clearly took the time to produce and edit that I prefer to regular music.
There is a lot of shitastic "Hey, no one thought of doing a cover of Nevermind by Nirvana...I made it sound just like the original" crap out there.
I have a ton I could share but this is the one I pull out when people don't believe me.
https://youtu.be/-fGGc2uPJOQ?si=GsKKjMd5sCy3m-78
This guy who made this, has an ear that I do not have. This is My Chemical Addiction's Black Parade. it's a kick ass song and the singer does a fantastic job.
This version though is so different. It's so soulful. The emotion when he sings "My FAh-Tha...." early on, and his voice cracks?
This allows people who can't sing (like me) to make shit that they want to make by giving them a tool to do it.
I can assure you this guy didn't just get lucky and press the random button and out came this fucking genius version of the song.
I say all this, because I do plan to get into trying my hand at music creation, just like i do art.
Today, for very little reason I made a Deviant Art account
https://www.deviantart.com/eddiedavidson420/gallery/all
(You need a account to access but its free) and started to put a few of my pictures on it in galleries. Some are not pubished.
If you like what i create, i may start to archive some pictures there. I tend to make hundreds of pictures now for every one I post. I will publish the one I liked enough to add to stories and the ones that were good but didn't get added (if there is interest).
I will never sell pictures or any of that shit. I don't disparage anyone who does, but I am not interested in doing this for money and my shit is frankly not good enought for that.
You will see a ton of cool images on that site. I usually don't say anything about other sites but that's not a competitor of sol.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, and yes I know this is a Wendys.