Fiction Trail Update : March 5th, 2018

Attention fiction authors, Fiction Trail has changed. Curation will occur in these posts.

What it was supposed to be like, what happened, and what it's like now.

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I may have caused some of what happened to Fiction Trail. Certainly there were other factors, social, human factors that I was simply a part of, so I don't say this to express any sense of guilt. It's just that I was there when the inevitable happened.

I was the main curator when it became popular, and I influenced a lot of the decisions that led to what happened. This may give me a little insight about things to avoid in the future, as we try to bring some life back to the community. So first let me put forward what I tried to do, and what happened as a result.

The goal was to find good writers of good stories and give them good recognition and a good incentive (upvotes) to keep writing. I'm still happy with that goal. We curators read stories, found good ones, checked them against our standards, and promoted them for the group vote. That group vote, the SteemTrail Streemian vote, was the incentive.

To give those stories readership, we also posted those stories on the conversation channel in hopes that people would discuss them as a sort of Book Club. That was the recognition we hoped to give, and for a little while it worked. The few people actually following our trail would see those stories, read them, and maybe upvote them.

But two questions occurred to us which set the path of an unstable future.

1. Are the Fiction Trail curators good authors who write good stories and deserve recognition? IOW, can we promote each other or even promote ourselves by posting our own stories?
2. If the answer to the first question is "Yes", then why can't just anyone get on the channel, post their links, and promote themselves?

My answer to these questions put us on the path to the chaotic results. Because yes, I believed that the other curators were good authors who deserved recognition. That's why I asked them to be curators. And so yes, if we were going to promote ourselves by posting stories, then so could anyone else. At the time I saw it as a way to build community, and indeed we had a lot of people visiting our channel. This meant that the recognition for posted stories would be high, since many people would see them.

But of course, that's not what happened.

That larger number of visitors were mostly people who dropped a link and left, looking for other places to drop a link. The people actually hanging around started noticing that their conversations were disrupted by pages and pages of links from anyone and everyone. Pretty soon all conversation stopped and then what was the use of the channel except for self promotion? Self promotion that didn't even work, since no one was reading it.

Then, I had scary bad health news which shocked me into Ghosthood for a long time, some other systematic changes happened, and all that was left was an unread link drop. The Silence of the Bots.

So what's happening now?

I still believe in my original goal. I think that people who write good stories should be recognized and upvoted.

The Discord channel is almost useless for that and I've set the permissions to restrict the links that can be posted. That channel is for discussion only and links to this post. Curation will occur in this post, usually twice a week. You can support the authors I curate by reading and upvoting the stories I post, and by following the Fiction Trail account on Streemian.

I promise in return to try to find well written and interesting stories for you to check out. For now, that means stories I like, but the conversation on Fiction-Trail discord channel can add variety to that. But don't bother telling me about your story, I'll see you in conversation and judge for myself. Tell me about authors you follow.

Self Promotion is discouraged.

@fiction-trail would love to hear about Authors you've read and enjoyed. That's what the Discord channel is for, as well as discussions about how to write better stories. But curation happens on this post so that spam cannot happen.

A normal curation post will follow on Thursday, since it would be unfair to connect an announcement post to a promotion post. Please look for that and support our Steemit Fiction Authors. - @baerdric