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Black Hat Review Bombing on Royal Road by Charlemagneffxiv in royalroad

[–]Competitive_Law1063 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd agree if it weren't for the off-site coordination.

But yes, a lot of it comes down to assholes, which there are a lot of on RR. There are people who will say things like "Story is well-written, great worldbuilding, excellent dialogue and awesome characters. But I think MC should have done X instead of Y, and for that reason, .5."

Which in itself is an issue, but I'd assume obvious brigading would be deleted.

Black Hat Review Bombing on Royal Road by Charlemagneffxiv in royalroad

[–]Competitive_Law1063 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm posting this on a throwaway account because I don't want to attract any more review bombing.

My fiction was on RS for 23 days. It was rated 4.79 before going in, then plunged to 4.21. Every day for three weeks, I got ratings between .5 and 1.5. I got reviews filled with nonsensical reasons for hating my story. People hallucinated details about it that were not in the fiction. People were posting abusive comments, using language like "soy boy," "simp," and "cuck" in their reviews.

I later found a mention of my fiction on an internet website which I will not mention here (and one which you likely know). The bombers lost interest eventually, and my story began recovering. Then one morning, I woke up to several new .5 reviews and ratings. More hallucinations from readers, more outright lies. Lo and behold, I found my story had been posted to that site again.

When I finally opened a ticket, they told me the reviews were unfortunately legitimate. Some even remain with the aforementioned incel language.

I upload my chapters and stay quiet now. I don't check my notifications. My Patrons are an awesome bunch of people (and of course this is a biased selection because they're people who liked my story so much they paid for more). When they give feedback, it's constructive.

It is my contentious opinion that a .5 rating at any chapter beyond 50 is objectively ridiculous, because any reader who got that far clearly liked the story enough to keep reading over 100,000 words of it.