Disclosure: Below are my feelings about this topic, not any promises/hints about changes to the FAKKU site/features/whatever.
ChrisBRosado123 wrote...
I think it's best to avoid turning people away from content unless you're sure they won't like it.
This is one of
my major points. Personally I feel like ratings will do one of two things, as said by others:
- Reduce Readership on less popular tags
If everyone rates everything 5 starts it's the same as not having a rating system. If only NTR/Forced is rated poorly, then it's also pretty meaningless because at that point it just re-states the tags on the content, and at that point we used development time to reiterate tags on content.
Now, where a rating system MAY be useful is for personalized recommendations. Ratings wouldn't be public, but associated with a user (You wouldn't see "Users rated this content 5 stars! or anything). Your ratings would be compared against tags and the system could gauge how much you'd like a certain piece of content and prioritize showing you content you'll probably like over content you probably won't.
ChrisBRosado123 wrote...
I think a better system would be to have curated content. Perhaps long time community members in good standing could apply to be a curator and they can recommend or recommend against a certain work. This way readers can gauge how closely their tastes align with a curator's and that person's feedback can guide them in the future.
The difficulty still is with visibility. How would we make it known that there are curated lists? It would also require that someone makes sure the curators themselves are active and, well, curating. While it would be
awesome if this could be 100% driven by the community, I think there would need to be considerable development to make it work and make it visible. While it would "piggy-back" the collection system, there is no way, right now, to make user collections a piece of "content". This would likely be a long-term feature, but one that definitely has potential.
XenotheWise135 wrote...
Reading Issues as a Whole
Fakku content that comes via the subscription is a simulpublishing of three different hentai magazines in Japan. The chapters are released incrementally over the month, but it's generally timed in a way that has all the content in each magazine released by the time the next one is out in Japan. After this content releases, though, it would be really cool if they were grouped together like the chapters of a book, and allowed you to read through them in one seamless session. This would also help the troubling task of clicking a bunch of links every time you finish a chapter while fapping. Any time you spend not looking at porn is wasted arousal!
This is something that we
may look into again, but the overall benefit seems to be pretty low, and here's why: People like what they like, and compared to a single book, the content in a single issue of a magazine is extremely diverse. Take X-Eros 43 for example: The first two chapters, in order are
Today's the Day We... followed by
Deflowered Maiden. Now there are people who aren't bothered by this transition, but it's definitely a
major tonal shift going from "sweet first time sex" to "Blackmail induced schoolgirl prostitution". Also, we don't release the magazine in chronological order (spoiler alert!), so the "issue" would either be not true to the original order of the JP printing, or not useful until the entire magazine was released.
I think the "solution" here is to put suggestions at the end of chapters and either automatically advance to them or allow the user to link straight to other content from the reader.
On the point of "Chapters that are part of the subscription but are also now in a book": This is a tricky point. When we release subscription chapters we will almost assuredly not know if:
- The chapter we released will ever be in a tank
- We will publish the tank the chapter is in, if any
So once we
do publish a tank with some subscription chapters in it we're faced with another problem: Do we, update the subscription release, and ostensibly give away the book chapter for free (which usually has updated art/titles and sometimes additional pages), or keep both? We're working on figuring it out.
Sorry for the wall of text, and I'm not trying to be a big old grump here. I want everyone to be able to read whatever they want, easily. I want people in the west to see ero manga as more than just "Oh sweet my favorite anime characters are fucking" (Which is 100% cool, btw, just not everything it has to offer). I want people to see ero manga as more than just "fucked up shit and tentacles". I don't want ero manga to be "porn for nerds!" or "otaku porn". I want people to see ero manga as art and enjoy it however they want.