Compare and contrast QQ: the site is much smaller, the moderation team is very responsive (even if I/you/we the people disagree with some moderation decisions, it can not be denied that the moderation team put in some serious work into making the site operate smoothly and enforce the rules in a consistent, mostly unbiased manner).
I was disagreeing with likes and dislikes being inneffective in general but I already answered to the positive with this, that QQ likely didn't need the likes or dislikes because the size of the forum making it unecessary and that any analytic system would also need more moderation oversight which means more work for the mods, which means less happy mods in general.
This is before we get into content type: on YouTube, users primarily arrive to consume the content (or produce it, either way the flow of data is usually mono-directional at any one time) with comments generally being less important. It's generally harder to establish dialogue with the author regarding feedback - if it's even possible. The point is, YouTube is a video hosting site, primarily, and it would continue to function even without comments enabled (like it's already happening for videos forcibly or voluntarily marked "for kids") or any kind of feedback at all (with algorithm being optimized, likes no longer matter that much in determining which videos you will watch - some media will be served up to you directly while other, potentially higher-quality content will be shadowbanned)
QQ however is not a fanfic archive. It's a forum. It's a place to share and debate opinions. It requires engagement to function properly - doomscrolling is generally not healthy for the ecosystem and low-comment threads tend to be the ones that die after the first threadmark or five. To come to a forum to post a fiction is to request feedback, and this is something that should be embraced. If one has already planned everything out and does not intend to make any major changes... there's AO3. There's FF.net. There's even Wattpad. All places with large userbases focused on consuming content rather than the back and forth characteristic of constructive criticism.
It's not
explicitly a fanfiction archive, but in most aspects it functions like one (partly due to the limited options for dedicated NSFW content outside of a handful of sites.) As I pointed out in a previous post, there are three forums; Writing, NSFW Writing, and Off-Topic, which implies that writing stories and consumption of those stories is the primary goal of the forums. Further enforced by the Reader Mode, which explicitely creates a low engagement environment for people who do not want to engage with the thread or any discussion. In a way very similar to AO3's comment section, which allows very forum-esque responses to those chapters if more restricted and slightly more clunky.
I agree that forums are generally for discussion and debate, however there are occasions where discussion moves so fast that it is nearly impossible for people to keep up with the flow of the thread. Brosef, one of the more prolific authors on here has had several stories where they posted routinely multiple times a week and each chapter garnered 20-30 pages of replies 6-900 comments. For someone who only has time to read once or twice a week, coming back to a story and seeing a hundred+ pages and several thousand comments (an amount of content that could sometimes span the equivalent of a small novel in it's own right.) would preclude them from jumping into the discussion at all, despite the actual date of those responses being well within a reasonable timeframe of reply
It's not common nor is it expected for that level of engagement, but there are absolutely cases where the flow of information can outpace even an authors ability to read all of said content or even keep track of it in thread. Which would necessitate a similar "least-bad" answer to the problem.
Again I postfaced that first comment with the assertion that this was not likely needed but that a like-dislike metric wasn't inherently negative so long as it was implemented correctly and when there was a need for it, currently there isn't a need because all threads aren't a Brosef thread, yet. Hopefully not ever because that would mean the site has likely quadrupled in size by that point and we're already coming up to parity with Spacebattles in their userbase, a site that's roughly three times QQ's age.
Silvercrystal said in few words what we could argue over for hours, but from my personal experience in CrW and Questing, using [X] quest format for determining the future of a story works better because one has to enter and engage with the thread before contributing as opposed to doing a flyby on a sticky poll at the top of a page. I've seen a heavily lopsided results on those where the most canon-popular or most generically-attractive character would win, even if another would (at least to me) make more sense in-story.
You don't usually use [X] format for regular stories though, and despite the name of the site not everything on here is a quest, and some people don't engage with quests, I certainly don't read quests all that often because I dislike the style of writing that's necessary for it.
And polls for the purposes of story correction/direction really only work when the Author already has enough information/feedback to determine an issue, or can't really figure out where to go so giving multiple choice answers to get more immediate reader feedback is more helpful in that usecase, very similar to a like/dislike system, or at the very least a multiple choice like system that SV has.
As for sticky polls being ineffective in their role for the purposes of feedback and story progression, I mean, the same could be said about Quest's in general. For every amazingly well thought out plan, there's that one plan where the players decided to stab themselves in the heart for power and that turned out to be a tactical fuckywucky that ended the quest immediately. And for people picking basic bitch choices, that's kinda the point? More people like the most popular thing and this is a site for NSFW so content is going to trend towards nicer tiddy when tiddy is offered. Concensus is (generally) a bell curve, where the average is
literally mid, barring very extreme exceptions.
Now this, makes sense.
Giving good threads more visibility, promoting good content, expanding users' options for expression - all very good. I also like the SB mechanism re: awards in that they are not expensive, but not free and thus not spammable; something someone would use on a story without a reason.
Which is why I offered it as a better alternative. Hell a simple once-a-day button that members can press on a story/chapter to signal boost said story/chapter would be a decent way to get better engagement. (If anyone spelunks the Rule34.xxx site, the 'I Came' button is what I'm imagining here, but not available to guest/anon users to prevent upvote bot shenanigans)
Just have a dedicated 'hot stories/chapters right now' pane on the front page that rotates every 24 hours and clicking on it takes you to a list of, say, the 100 most 'button pressed' stories in that time frame. Having it refresh every 24 hours means that a single story can't snowball engagement without actively 'button pressing' it to the top. Smaller stories could also still rise to the top because of reader enthusiasm. If I see something quality but has little to no engagement I'd certainly bump it if I had the option because that would ultimately get more people to read a story than a 'view most liked stories' option in search. One allows for dynamic engagement, the other is just the effect of snowballing.
