Another mission statement: A social network for erotica readers

[elfs]

Another one:

Project E

Mission Statement

We are the Internet's stash of amateur erotica hiding under your bed. Only you carry us in your Kindles, your Nooks, and your iPhones, and nobody knows what you're really reading.

Elevator pitch

There are thousands of talented, talkative people on the Internet who love to write about one thing: sex. They love to write fiction, they love to write memoirs. And they love to read about it, too.

Project E is a place that brings readers and writers together. With a laser focus on getting readers to exactly the story they want— and providing writers with the tools to make sure their stories are exactly on the vast map of human activity where they want it to be found— Project E promises to take the vast library of erotica on the Internet and give it a modern home: one accessible by e-book readers of every size and shape.

Significant elements of this project

Project E is, in the main, an aggregate blog collection with two major features differences: a comprehensive heirarchal taxonomy of fiction that allows writers to organize their work into meaningful collections of "universes," "series," "novels," "chapters," "episodes," and so on, and a comprehensive "heirarchal tag"-based taxonomy of erotica that allows writers (and certain customers) to tag and identify the stories that arouse them, such that the machine learns what the reader enjoys, and the reader can easily find more of what he or she wants in the future.

Paying customers will be allowed to review, rate, and tag stories with their own tags. In effect, project E monetizes authority. Paying customers will also have access to a special set of tags: "copyright violation," "spam," "inappropriately tagged by author," and so on.

Certain high-priority tags will be gated: they will receive their own top-level domains, and people who visit those domains will only see the series, stories, and authors tagged. Right now the major tags planned are "Romance," "Fanfic," "Kink," "Supernatural," "Gay," and "Furry."

Each story will have its own comments section. Registered users will be allowed to make comments.

Authors will be given their own blogs, if they want.

Author sections will have limited themability capability.

When an author reaches a certain minimum word count, the system will inform the author and provide a ready-to-print download of his/her work, suitable for transfer for POD systems such as Lulu.

Technological issues

Low-level second-tier addressing: author's usernames, forums, blogs, and tag clouds will all be off the first URL tier, making bookmarking dead-easy.

The system must be usable via mobile devices. That's the whole point.

The fora and story heirarchies (indeed, anything fitting) must be accessible via NNTP. The intended heirachy is http://projectk.com/authorname-slug/series-slug/story-slug.html. For those authors who request it, this will assist SEO significantly.

Anonymity must be secured as much as possible.

Monetization

Project E has three courses for monetization: advertisement for the anonymous and registered user. Subscribers will not see advertisement, and will be purchasing the rights to create their own tags and to tag stories as they see fit.

Depending upon volume, Project E will ocassionally publish "The Best Of Project E" (tentative name) in paper, and make POD sales available through the website. This could be annual; it could be per-gated-community; it could be quarterly.

If the system proves popular, we might even go with a monthly magazine via MagCloud (if MagCloud ever lifts— as it has stated it intends to— it's "no adult materials" ban). If this happens, a "best of Project E" website will appear as a sub-domain.

Challenges

• Spam
• Apathy
• Monetization failure
• Competition
• Graphic design failure
• Scaling failure

Comments

.... and quality?

[(Anonymous)]

"With a laser focus on getting readers to exactly the story they want"

The stories I look for also need good quality. How would the site recognize that? This can not be done with categorization (since categories are assigned by authors, who are not exactly unbiased about their own work), and doing that well presents a couple non-trivial problems, for instance rating inflation and rating bias due to self-selection (nobody will rate every story ...)

Re: .... and quality?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

There are two answers for that. Categories might be assigned by authors, but if I did it right then tags assigned by other people (remember, who spent good money to get the authority to do so) would accumulate; one of those tags might be "quality," or maybe a few tags with stars on (1, 2, up to 5) so people could tag them. (Although research indicates that "I like this" and "I hated this" are about all people care to comment: ratings are 1 and 5, and a valley between them.)

Also, raters themselves would develop reputational multipliers, that would apply; eventually, you'd develop a ranking of stories by quality, cross-indexed by tags.

And then you'd start to get "People who like this also liked that." It would be nice to start a "fiction genome," like the "music genome" of Pandora.