This is, amusingly, something that I've considered a lot in context of my own personal evolution as a member and contributor to SV, and coming at it in the way I've ended up doing so has given me some personal insights on the matter that sync up quite nicely with a lot of what's been expressed so far. I'm going to give a little background first, though, because I feel it's required for later statements to make sense in context.
My initial foray into SV was as a beta/co-writer for a piece of rather well done (in my opinion) Worm/Exalted fanfiction that I came to knowing not a single thing about Worm in helping with. I wrote several scenes of my own in that piece, which remain the most highly rated posts I've ever made on this site by a full six times, to what appeared to be general success although with some failures. In this, I was clearly the secondary individual in the project, something I accepted cheerfully (even if the actual author and I had our occasional clashes). As that fic began to stutter due to various, unimportant to this discussion reasons, I discovered Questing as a medium and drank it in. The result of that, several other pieces of fiction that anyone who knows of them will be able to clearly see in the resulting work, and my own love of worldbuilding in general, Practice War was born.
Now here's the thing. What I'd created was a deliberately original work, with no ties to established fandoms or even most of the general genre conventions that SV loves so much. If you're interested, go read the quest [/shameless plug]. However, getting traction within the Quest board with a story of that type, especially as I'd chosen the Quest medium to do so, was a brutal uphill struggle. I had a few people that were willing to toss in votes for me, with
@Serafina in particular very kindly acting as a tiebreaker a few times in that regard, for which I can't be grateful enough. To make this clear, and this is a very present problem within SV as a whole were it comes to more niche quests that don't catch the eye, I am talking vote counts of 5-8 in the opening stages. Almost nothing in terms of thread feedback to what I was writing until we actually got out of character generation, and precious little there until I all but resorted to
begging. If a writer is to improve, they must be given critique, and the questing format is uniquely suited to this as it engages in a direct interaction point with the readers in terms of shaping the story. However, this is a double edged sword, as most are, in that if you have a small or generally quiet base of interest, it can be very hard to muster the will to keep on going. In my case I did, and with the help of a truly generous reader acquired a site banner for a three month period - I've since subscribed and maintained the banner continuously. This brought in the people I desperately needed to prevent the thread atrophying horribly between updates, as many quests do. In most cases, that atrophy is expected and certainly not a bad thing. But it's more complicated than that.
SV, as a board, has a tilt towards work of particular origins. Worm is one. Magical girl work (in the spirit of YA PMMM) is another. There are more, but the selection is limited. And this is problematic for growth of both site content and those who provide it, as they feel tilted towards writing towards one of those fandoms even if they don't initially intend to. I'm certainly not immune to this, as some aspects of the Practice War could be considered close enough now, given the development that's occurred. An excellent example of this would be the truly fantastic, in my opinion, work of
'Til My Last Breath which languished on low voter counts and audience engagement even though it featured one of the most interesting protagonists I've ever read about, and I include published fiction in this assessment. Its writer kept it going regardless, until the system they'd built began to creak under the strain of the mass scale combat they knew was coming, but it's a very good example of this issue. If you write outside of the Established (the capital letter is intended) genres of SV, do not expect to reap any great total of ratings (irrelevant), comments (more relevant), or feedback (literally the thing a lot of people write here for).
There isn't any solution to that I can see, however, which ends up leading me to a conclusion that I really don't like to make, but I find myself approaching nonetheless especially following interaction with certain longer term quest writers that have followed the 'fanfic' trend in their works. They're burning out, and we don't have people stepping in to replace them in a way that will actually
draw the quester crowd that they've played a part in shaping. Several of the larger fanfic quests are at this point coasting on inertia, and prospective QMs trying to make something new run into an uphill climb that trying to overcome can be utterly soul destroying. Which leads to another conclusion, that I may be wrong on and hope that I am, that questing and user fiction (I read that less so I can't comment as fully) are to some greater or less degree circling the drain. The quester community has become used to a certain form in what is written, and if you wish to run a successful quest you either abide to their implict demands, have a voter count that can be counted on one hand on average, or just refuse to give up and use mechanisms like site banners (which require money that not everyone can expend) to attract further people.
A possible solution I'd actually love to see done would be a...staff picks section, perhaps? Although that has its own issues. Basically, every month, staff or CC or
whatever pick a quest or piece of user fiction that started in that month and is still moving forward steadily. Originality and skill in writing, but not genre, should be prized here. The writer is then offered a three-month banner slot, with a simple(ish) banner to bring more people into the quest if they would wish to do so. I have no idea how doable this is, however, which is an issue all in itself, but it's one of the few ways I can see to try and break the deadlock that I see setting in deeper and deeper every day within the Quests subforum and I suspect is as prevalent within User Fiction. If it would actually work is another story, but I know just from my own personal experience that having a banner brings people to a quest. That's not always a
good thing, I suppose, but I've never suffered for it.
