Hello, it's me, Lire.

I hope this message finds you well. Sorry about all the announcements. I just felt like this wasn't the type of stuff you put in a chapter's Author's note.

For those who wish to read more context about the chaos a few days ago, check out this blog post by RR mods.

Recent Moderator Actions | Blog Post

If I had read about the mods' actions before I panicked, I wouldn't have panicked because I am simply innocent. Case in point, I didn't even get a warning, despite me still being on the server atm.

So yeah, I was part of the "Secret Mafia".

All I really did there was sign up for shoutout swaps (which, by the way, is not against the rules. There are even threads for it in the official RR forum); connect with other authors, goof off with them, joke around with them, share memes with them; and pretty much lurked.

That's all.

I did participate in upvoting some reviews, but only the funny reviews, or ones for stories that I already followed and read from the very start. Obviously, I would want to support reviews that painted stories I liked in a better light. Duh.

As for the other stuff, I admit that I kinda heard about some, while being totally unaware of the others.

Fucking around on Discord is fun, but I quickly noticed I spent hours there — hours I could've otherwise used to write. That's why after the first week or so, I was barely on there. Just backreading conversations that seemed interesting, looking at pretty AI-generated images that the members generated for each other, and reading some of the stuff they put out for beta-reading.

Oh, and naturally, I went back in there whenever I ran out of stories to do shoutouts with.

None of those things were wrong, which was why I was initially outraged about the possibility of getting perma-banned.

It's all good now. It has been quite a few days since then, and nothing has happened. And nothing will happen, since I really didn't do anything wrong... except know that some other people did wrong things...

Which is pretty bad too, I guess. Damn.

But I didn't want to rock the boat. Despite how badly it was painted by the blog post and everyone who commented on it, the server did a lot of good.

Big authors invited newby authors, teaching them the ways, supporting them, shouting them out to give the newbies more exposure...

I was also a benefactor of such advise, in particular, for setting up Patreon and whatnot. I also received advice for general matters like taking care of my mental health, and not neglecting to take care of myself in favor of writing and working.

It wasn't all bad.

I am aware that a thousand rights do not necessarily justify a wrong though.

I do understand where the people who did break the rules did so.

If you look at it from our perspective, we invest an incredible amount of time in our stories. Something that takes a reader roughly 10 to 15 minutes to read, requires hours of typing, editing, spell-checking, and revisions, just so the chapter we release is at a quality we're satisfied with.

We obviously want our stories to do well.

Even me. I initially started this out of passion. But naturally, I want other people to like my story too.

The thing is, people won't like the story if they never find it. Visibility is king here at the royalest of roads. That's why some stories that can afford it have constant ad campaigns running.

Authors who wish to succeed have to take every chance they can get — the aforementioned ad campaigns, shoutout swaps with other stories that have big followings, and getting on one of RR lists.

And one sure-fire way to get on those lists is to have higher numbers. Symbolic of its favorite genre, Royalroad is all about the numbers.

Review upvotes, rating stars, follower counts, view counts, number of favorites, number of reviews...

The list goes on. Lots of numbers, all of which ultimately determine how much visibility a story obtains.

Believe it or not, having good writing quality and grammar is the basics. Having good plot, characters, and world-building also helps.

But the Royalroad algorithm doesn't read words, it reads numbers. Authors here, such as myself, are forced to treat those numbers as gospel.

My story's current overall rating is 4.30 stars.

But a few months ago it was hard-stuck at around 4.40 stars. It fluctuated between 4.4 and 4.42, but it never went below that.

Then I got bombed by multiple bad reviews, and that brought it down to 4.33 or something. Then it just gradually declined to what it is today, sometimes even dipping into 4.28 stars or so.

If you look at it, there are only a few decimals worth of difference, but only authors will truly understand how depressing it is.

It takes hours and hours of hard work and multiple processes to pump out a chapter, just so lots of readers will like it. But just a few seconds for a troll to bring you down a notch.

A Surprisingly Common Situation:

A troll comes along, sees something in your synopsis that they don't like, or see the harem tag, or reads the first chapter and ends up hating how "stupid" and "weak" the MC is...

And then boom. They'll drop a 0.5-star rating and bounce. If they have a bit more conscience, maybe they'll round it off to a nice and shiny 1-star.

There are also a surprisingly large number of readers who seem to make it their sole purpose in life to give negative reviews to just about everything they dislike, but not review the stories that they do like — all in the name of giving feedback.

Imagine giving Mother of Learning and The Perfect run a negative review. Kek. There really are people like that here. They prey upon authors because they know how much it'll hurt us.

So yeah. It's pretty goddamn easy to get fucked over here. There really isn't a whole lot we can do about it when it does. Just pray to god that our followers can counteract that — which, they often do. Thankfully.

That's why I understand why some authors would want to bend the rules slightly.

I understand, but I wouldn't really do the same...

Well, that's that. Thanks for listening(?) to my Ted Talk.

Now that I'm more abreast of the situation, I can see that I probably won't have to worry about this issue anymore.

(Except for the fact that the full list of Mafia members were released by the group that reported us, so there is a possibility that some "vigilante" might drive by, thinking to "punish evil" by bombing my story. The mods literally mentioned taking measures against this precisely because it happened to a lot of people, but I'm not all that sure it'll be effective. And over time, they'll forget to watch out for these "unsung heroes".)

With all that said, I'll probably still keep posting on RR unless I die in some horrible accident. At most, I'll change my pen name... maybe even make a new account and repost the story over there.

Oh, and I'm recovering from my minor surgery really well. Now, if my relatives would just let me write while I'm stuck at home recovering, that would be great. It's great that they care, but fuck. My fingers are itching.

They have a point though, I sit in front of a computer all day at work, so resting should mean time away from computers...

Finally, this whole debacle has also made me realize some things.

One, I gotta refresh my knowledge of RR's rules. I did read them once upon a time, but it's been a long time. It's a good thing I didn't accidentally violate anything myself, but it won't hurt to be careful.

Two, I should not put all my eggs in one basket. Royalroad is the platform I started in, I really like its interface and just about everything about it. But I should invest in looking elsewhere since the feeling of liking is not mutual between me and the platform. I like RR, but I'm just one of many authors on this site — not even a big-named one. I have to look into other options, in case I suddenly can't use this platform anymore.

Three... responding to comments. One of the stuff I feared most was losing the reader interaction I had.

Lately, I've been responding to comments less and less. Mostly due to how demanding my work is steadily becoming. But my mentality to it was that my readers would appreciate additional chapters more than my useless responses to their comments.

But I liked responding, y'know? I really did.

Even if it was just a generic "TFTC" and "Thanks for the chapter", I liked seeing them and liked responding. I even played a game, challenging myself to respond differently to every comment.

It was fun. And I feared losing that small happiness once I got perma-banned or something.

So yeah, even if it'll take a bit more time and I'm late, I'm gonna respond to everything. (Except for hater comments, since I don't wanna fan the flames. Feedback is okay though.)

This got really long. The short announcement I was aiming for ballooned to a whopping 1.6k words. Just a bit more and that could've been as long as a chapter. And I wrote it in thirty minutes lol.

If I could write chapters that fast, that would be great...

TL;DR - Lire is here to stay for the foreseeable future. I am a writing machine, baby!