To answer the OP of the thread: reviews are meh. Positive reviews, negative reviews - they're all the same to me. They're just people's opinions. When I get a positive review, it tells me that somebody liked the story. Yay. This might boost my mood if I'm in a bad one and inspire me to write more. When I get a negative review, it tells me that somebody didn't like the story. Alright, that's their opinion and they're entitled to it. I don't really care, though, because I focus on the people who do like the story instead of the people who don't.
In my entire time posting online, I've only ever received
one review that actually sounded like the reviewer was trying to be as objective as possible. It was a 2.5-star review on my very first story over on RR. The actual content of the review was negative in its majority, but not a single negative comment was brought up that was not also accompanied by constructive advice on how to improve without telling me how to write my own story. It's still the fairest review I've ever received, and I regret not saving it since I no longer have access on it due to removing the story that it was on.
But there's a problem with that. I firmly believe that reviews are meant for readers, not authors. What an author thinks of reviews shouldn't matter. You know who is going to benefit the most from a review? Other readers. Sure, you might leave a great review for the author telling them how to improve, but how does that help the readers? The author
might read your review once or twice if they're really paying attention to it. However, you will have dozens to hundreds to potentially thousands of
fellow readers reading your review. When you go to read a review section, you want--as a reader--to know whether a story is worth it or not, right? You're not reading for writing advice to the author. If you are, you're an exception to the rule. Chances are, you're reading because you, as a reader, want to know other readers' opinions.
My point is that reviews should be for readers, not authors. The vast majority of reviews are treated this way everywhere else on the internet. For some reason, though, it's popular in web serial communities for reviewers to direct their "feedback" to the author in the form of a review. If the intent is to help an author improve, that is best left in comments or direct messages, in my honest opinion. Leave the reviews for the readers and leave the feedback, if your intent is to help the author, in comments/messages.
That aside, readers/followers/views are much more important to me. Why should I care about reviews if the numbers that actually matter are still going up? These are the numbers that tell me I'm doing a good job.
Oh, and I will say that while I generally don't care about negative reviews, I will try to give them some positive attention whenever I receive one that isn't just genre hate. Whenever I get a review that tries to be fair while acknowledging personal bias, even if negative, I'll link to it and tell people that it deserves some upvotes/likes in exchange for being an honest and fair review despite being negative. I always try to reward people when they put actual effort into their reviews, both the positive and negative reviews, even if they have little actual impact on me as an author. I get very few of these, though, and none of them have lived up to the one mentioned above.
You'll also see that stories that have a deeper "meaning" tend to get more reviews, even if they have fewer followers. That gives people more to talk about and to review. If you wear everything on your sleeve and don't bother with that, though, then you're giving people less to talk about which means less to review. Me and a few other authors I know - we don't really bother giving people anything to analyze. We put everything right out there. Rather than give readers material to analyze to try and find some deeper meaning or purpose, we explain what it is within the story through the characters discovering it themselves. Naturally, this discourages both comments and reviews. That's not a bad thing, though, unless you're specifically aiming to spark discussion and to get more of those. I write my stories to be fun, so I don't care if they don't spark massive back-and-forth discussions of philosophy and deeper meaning in the comments that leave people posting thorough, in-depth analyses for reviews.
Though, I do still get some of those. They just tend to happen in the patron-only part of my Discord server where people might have a back-and-forth for hours discussing the chapters there. The people who are the most talkative who like my series the most tend to become patrons via Patreon, so they've already had all of the big discussions / review-worthy conversations by the time the chapters make it to free platforms.
And that's enough about my own take on the topic. Now, I'll say what I have seen tons of both from RR and SH authors.
Some people are really, really,
really bad at receiving reviews. You can even see it here on the forums when people get negative reviews or ratings. I've seen too many authors to count who act like receiving a negative review is literally a death sentence for their story, or it enrages them to the point of wanting to track the person down to harass them, causes them to get depressed and consider dropping the story, and so on. As for positive reviews - well, I never really see people bring those up since they tend to focus on the negativity. I'll see authors who receive a single negative review and act like it's the end of the world, but then when I go to look at their review section, the vast majority of the other reviews are glowingly positive. There are definitely authors who 100% care far more about reviews, and both positive and negative reviews (but mainly negative ones) can have a massive impact on them. I try to tell these authors not to take reviews so personally, but it rarely works.
I don't think that is the case here. Isekai stories are actually kinda popular in Webnovel and RoyalRoad too. Though they do have their core genres, Webnovel mainly because they start with those and RoyalRoad mainly because it becomes the LitRPG hub when it started. They are expanding now, especially Webnovel and other genres find homes there.
ScribbleHub on the other hand, doesn't really have any identity (though sexual stuff thrives here). It is more like the go to for stories that doesn't find success elsewhere.
Everybody else I've talked to regarding SH, both other authors and readers, are pretty much all in agreement that SH is for "weeb" stories. RR has somewhat of a weeb audience because it has roots as a translator, but it mostly leans towards CN/Western tropes rather than JP tropes. WN is the same except even more toward CN tropes and less toward Western tropes. Both LitRPG and Xianxia/Wuxia do great on RR and WN, but RR does prefer ones that are more "mature" and with a Western spin on them whereas WN tends to stay true to the Chinese way of doing things. Also, in regard to stories floundering on WN but being successful here, that's because SH does more to promote new stories and WN has an extremely competitive environment where if you're not posting multiple times a day, your chances for any sort of success are drastically reduced.
In general, though, SH has a much higher "floor" while the other platforms have a much higher "ceiling."
But yeah. SH's identity is absolutely weeb stuff. Even the "sexual stuff" is weeb in nature. The non-weeb sexual stuff does the same as all the other non-weeb stuff. Even just looking at the covers gives this away. RR has a bunch of Western and CN-inspired covers at their top. WN has a bunch of, well, Chinese-styled covers. SH? Anime covers. Anime covers everywhere. The only way that SH is really gathering "leftovers" is in regard to sexual and LGBT content that is either banned or heavily discriminated against elsewhere, in which case I am happy to let SH be for those "leftovers."
tl;dr: it's less about genres and more about tropes.
RR: Even Western and Chinese tropes.
WN: Mostly Chinese and fewer Japanese/anime tropes.
SH: Mostly Japanese/anime tropes and fewer Chinese tropes.
Also, hey, Ral. I still have fond memories of that way-too-lengthy discussion we had that one time in RR's suggestions about Trending = P
