User blog comment:HopelessNightOwl/Has the narrator community written us off?/@comment-28266772-20180502121927

Reddit is a strange community, and I was profoundly disappointed by what I saw on nosleep. "I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I have some stories to tell" was genuinely abysmal. I can't easily verbalise how profoundly disappointed I was after reading it and then discovering it was going to be a strong inspiration for the next season of Channel Zero, so I'm just going to say "ass-cancer" and hope the words invoke a momentary recreation of my emotional state after reading the story. But, the stories nosleep produces are much more appealing to the bulk of online users. It takes advantage of the online format to post stories that are short and salient. And the sheer volume of material is sufficient to give people enough choice that they will eventually find something original. The Search and Rescue story is like the Tweet equivalent of a horror story; idiosyncratic ideas that stimulate the imagination and offer a momentary nugget of something interesting. By artifically forcing its users to submit in first-person and making everyone roleplay it massively limits variety but it also means all the stories hone in on what people want. You will get a first-person narrative that tries its best to convince you it could be real, and there's a 1/30 chance it'll feature some imagery, or ideas, that are original. I will say, some of the best horror stories I've ever read are on nosleep. It's just that the focus is on the reader, not the writer, so it can be an uncomfortable place to flex your writing muscles. So, what do we want to do? As a community, why are we all here? We are a literary community. We are almost all writers, and I feel confident in saying almost everyone here has aspirations of being published. We help each other out, and we have a great workshop with great users. But what we produce is simply incompatible with what mainstream audiences want. We produce short-stories of varying quality and there's no guarantee of what you'll get. And, most importantly, because the community is largely made up of writers there's just not enough focus on interesting stories to read. There's POTM, sure, and Dupin's done fantastic work with the Featured Author, but aside from that there's no real impetus to browse. Reddit's upvote mentality means there is a non-stop dialogue between users over what stories are worth a read, and without hundreds of thousands of people reading and commenting we can't get that same user-driven experience. So put simply, we just need to accept that this is, for all intents and purposes, more of a writing community than a reading community. That means we won't get huge audiences, and it means many of us will be looked over by narrators (some still lurk). But, learning to write is difficult and it often requires you to accept failure. Don't be discouraged. It takes a shitload of work but if you keep at it, who knows, you could be a huge talent, maybe even a popular one. If you'd like, just write a first-person story and throw it up on there. Keep at it and you might catch the flow just right and get a big hit. It's definitely worth a try!