For a long time, CYS was the only writing website that I wrote on or looked at. In my recent absence (which was do to life and family stuff, not any problems with the website), I decided to check out some websites where I could write a linear story. I found one that I liked, in terms of the actual writing site, but I wanted to share a few funny stories from there.
Now, I will not name the site. This is because I am afraid someone will go find the crappy stories that I started to write there. Also, I might continue writing my linear stories there. The platform isn't bad, but the standards are.
There is no content moderation, so a lot of stories are published without things like punctuation. By the way, they all have 5/5 star ratings because authors can modify/delete comments and ratings they don't like. Reading on that site is a sure-fire way to get a headache. Thank god CYS has the Minimum Site Standards for Storygames and reviews that authors can't self-moderate.
The authors are pretentious for how bad of writers they are too. I posted a comment on the forum about making an update so that authors couldn't delete bad reviews. Their backlash at me was fierce. One author's point was hard to argue with since they informed me that they get hundreds of comments a day that read, this story sucks! When asked what I suggest they do about those, she didn't want to hear that my answer was to not write a story that sucked so much...
Grammar doesn't exist over there. No one uses it. One story didn't have paragraphs or punctuation! Every sentence just had a line break... I made a post about using commas and a few rules about commas (like Gower's comma test), and they all commented on it like I had invented a new system for organizing prose. One of them asked me to make a post about how to structure a story. Another asked how dialogue punctuation was supposed to work. Granted, I didn't know that before I started writing here... but they had no resources to learn.
My favorite example was a crazy long story, like 200,000 words, that was impossible to read. The poor guy probably spent forever writing it, and nothing he wrote made sense. There was a part where the main character had to "be careful of the floor because dangerous." Later, he explained in the comments/chat that the character was on a "restricted floor" of a library, so if he has been caught it would have been dangerous. However, the story read as if the floor itself was attacking him.
Also, like three people knew how to write completing characters. They all broke the narrative to tell the reader every character's thoughts. Characters never reacted or had mannerisms. They were all plot devices. Basically, they were all me when I first started. I never realized how bad I was...
Thank you CYS for teaching me to write gooder.
