Gonewildstories is great, the commitment to keeping fiction out is good, but often times an author comes by that treads a fine line between fact and fiction and gets harassed for it.
Most often these posters are really good writers and post enjoyable content but then get chased away for not being believable enough/ inconsistencies.
All fair – this is a true story sub after all.
What I suggest is a middle man sub for these stories and posts. A non-judgemental place where slightly inconsistent and unreal stories can live.
Now I understand there's already a place for fiction : /r/Eroticliterature . Yes, that's a great place to go for totally far fetched stories or made up tales of crazy exploits. That's great.
My suggestion is that we need a middleground, a sub where true stories are encouraged, but those that need some suspension of disbelief won't be punished for it.
Call me ingenuous but I enjoy the pretence of truth on a somewhat unreal story.
/u/aryaisthebest 's stories are arguably some of the best that have been posted, people still talk about her to this day. Hers were pretty out there and walked this fine line.
Since she left I'd like to give a new someone the opportunity to rise up and match that.
/u/engineeringgirl recently left the sub because of her story inconsistencies. It's a shame as her stories were developing into something really good.
Obviously the strict 100% truth gonewildstories might not be the place for it but neither is eroticliterature where it immediately gets branded as fiction.
Is this idea worth following up on? Hopefully the existing subs and the middleground will co-exist peacefully.
Thoughts?
Source: reddit.com/r/gonewildstories/comments/349rwp/we_need_a_new_sub_inbetween_true_rgonewildstories
Link for the interested: /r/Eroticliterature [**NSFW**]: — ^This ^is ^a ^bot ^and ^won’t ^answer ^to ^mails. ^Mail ^the ^[[Botowner](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=DarkMio&subject=BotReport)] ^instead. ^v0.4 ^| ^[Changelog](http://redd.it/29f2ah)
>a sub where true stories are encouraged, but those that need some suspension of disbelief won’t be punished for it. That’s what I think this sub should be. /r/gonewild has a verification process to ensure that their more frequent posters are "real." That can’t happen here, so even with the truest of true stories, we, the readers, are all taking it on faith. To pretend like we can tell a true story from an invented one seems a bit delusional, too. If I told you that I fucked my high school girlfriend beside her parents’ pool, would you believe me? Well, that never happened. How about the handjob that I got on a crowded church choir tour bus? That’s a true one. But you’ve got to take my word for it. A story that sounds plausible based on our own experiences might sound like bullshit to another reader based on theirs. Writing style also plays a factor. A story with way too little or way too much detail seems less realistic to me, but I don’t think we should witchhunt our authors for under- or over-writing. Every sub constantly struggles with whether content submissions meet their quality guidelines. Anyone who’s spent any time in the /r/wtf comments knows that the most common response to any OP is "/r/im14andthisiswtf" or "What’s wtf about ____?" Same with /r/funny. "But wait," you say, "Those are (were?) default subreddits, and we shouldn’t use them as a yardstick to measure the quality of our own sub." Fair enough. Let’s visit a fellow NSFW subreddit with similarly unverifiable submission guidelines: /r/PetiteGoneWild. I happen to follow the lovely mod /u/therealgj’s posts, so I’ve seen a lot of her recent responses to user comments complaining "This girl isn’t petite" or "You have C cups why are you in a petite sub". The subreddit actually just engaged in a discussion on what constitutes "petite," very similar to GWS’s recent kerfuffle over truthiness. [Here’s another mod’s response](http://www.reddit.com/r/PetiteGoneWild/comments/33y5yw/definition_of_petite/cqq1fp5). I think he nailed it. I’ve mentioned /r/nosleep in a previous comment, as I think they set the gold standard for true-but-unverifiable subreddits. Matter of fact, I think 90% of the posts on /r/nosleep are bullshit, *especially the really good ones*, but it’s the ability to suspend disbelief (the suggestion that it *is* true) rather than the reality that really matters to me. I can be genuinely creeped out by a story that doesn’t seem realistic but is purported to be true, just like I can be genuinely aroused by stories of impromptu anal gangbangs on this sub that sound less than factual. Take a look at /r/nosleep’s submission guidelines and, more importantly, their comment guidelines: * Readers are to act as though everything is true and treat it as such in the comments. * No debunking, disbelief, or criticism (constructive or otherwise). * Do not ask for proof. * Be respectful to one another. * Comments must contribute to the discussion. * Report all comments that violate these rules. I think we should take /r/nosleep’s model almost verbatim. Don’t like a story? Downvote it and move on. Nobody cares whether you think it’s true or not. If none of us think a story is true, it’s not going to the front page. There need be no harassing of posters as a result of an individual redditor’s incredulity. We’ve got a nasty track record of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (as evidenced by the collective mourning of /u/engineeringgirl and /u/aryaisthebest), and I think it’s the mods that have to step up and fix this. Of course, this is all my opinion, so you can disagree with me and start a new subreddit if you want.
I 100% agree with everything you said. Spot on. I was suggesting a new sub because I didn’t want to step on any toes here. People seem to like what they have – who am I to change it? I just wanted to fill the gap. but you’re totally right. /r/nosleep ‘s guidelines do sound perfect and I like what they have going there as a community.
Its amazing how determined people are to posting their made up fantasies on this sub, like it makes their daydreams more real then posting on /r/Eroticliterature
I feel like there’s both. There are certainly stories that are on here that anyone with half a brain can tell is fake, but there are definitely ones that could be or couldn’t be. The real thing I don’t understand is why people feel the need to pretend fake stories really happened? What is wrong with /r/EroticLiterature? There are plenty of good stories there.
> To pretend like we can tell a true story from an invented one seems a bit delusional, too. If I told you that I fucked my high school girlfriend beside her parents’ pool, would you believe me? Except some stories are like this but then "Oh and all the girls were watching me, playing with themselves, later I fucked five of them one after the other and the bus driver also gave me a high-five." All we need now is for everyone to bust out in applause. I said it in my other post, I don’t get why people come here to tell fake stories when there are other places for that, it’s not that fictional stories can’t be hot.
That is true, I think it falls under the "GW" oeuvre, but it’s also not an insignificant number of people there, that I’d think it matters, unless you’re really just Karma whoring. Though maybe it is me, I also think people should just use /r/dirtypenpals for their fantasies.
I agree with you that some of the stories people post are just goddamned preposterous (though, again, sometimes plausible situations are made less so by bad writing). The problem, as I see it, is that our individual bullshit meters are not reliable. If we take our pitchforks and torches to the comments when we don’t believe a story, eventually we’re going to unfairly accuse an author of lying to us. Yes, stories should be believable, but I don’t think we should encourage vocal skepticism on the part of the readers. After all, it’s the authors who are putting in the work here (in more ways than one ^*wink*), and honestly, we should be appreciating what they’re willing to share with us. Creating an environment that’s hostile for the authors is not conducive to an active community here. I’d rather see double the submissions to this subreddit even if the relative number of absolute crap stories tripled – why? Those get filtered to the bottom. Use your power to vote for quality content. Let our collective bullshit meter decide whether a story is believable. If you downvote a story that has 500 upvotes, your opinion that it’s a complete and utter fabrication is in the minority, and we should all be mature enough to accept that. Why try so hard to prevent others from reading a story that most people are obviously enjoying?
What about a story that’s embellished slightly? There are plenty of stories posted here that are recounted from years or decades past. No question there are inaccuracies in those stories, unless all of our quality authors have perfect memories. I don’t agree that stories are either true or untrue, period. A single fact can be that binary, that black and white. A story is a collection of remembered facts. It’s absolutely possible to have a mix of truth and fiction, whether the fiction is intentional or not. As I’ve said in my way-too-long posts above, if it’s obvious a story isn’t true at all, the downvote brigade will take care of it. (I’m comfortable with a mod removing a story if it breaks the submission guidelines by declaring that it is a work of fiction, but as for assessing the truth of stories not explicitly declared fiction, I’d prefer to see them all submitted to the court of public opinion via upvotes/downvotes.) I think your stories have been great, by the way. Hopefully you’ve got more to share!
> No debunking, disbelief, or criticism (constructive or otherwise) The debunking and disbelief, okay *maybe* you could get rid of that. But even then, that means we would have to completely 100% trust everything shared here, and sometimes it’s just plain obvious that a story is fake and should be removed. The more borderline stories should be allowed to stay, IMO, but sometimes they’re just so damn fake it’s like…why bother? But saying no constructive criticism? FUCK NO. Constructive criticism in a sub like this is *so* important. When someone’s writing is bad, but the content is good, I want to be able to help them improve. I just can’t read it if the writing is terrible. I want to be able to politely explain how to use paragraphs on Reddit, or correct their grammar here and there (not if they make a single mistake, but if they repeatedly make the same one and it’s clear they don’t know how to use it correctly).
Try: /r/sexystories
/r/thateroticallyhappened ?
haha. catchy. might work, yet sounds like a mocking sub instead of a real one.