I oftentimes hear complaints from users or ex-users about how they used to enjoy Asianfanfics but for any number of reasons, no longer do.

I understand how some people would feel this way, especially the early users. I've been here since the beginning and I'm acutely aware of all the changes, good and bad. That tight-knit, small community feeling isn't as prevalent as it used to be, for example. The site used to be small enough that I knew or was at least familiar with every new user that joined the site and the same could probably be said of everyone else. I even greeted each and every new user. We were a small but friendly, tight-knit community.

But as sites get bigger and more popular, the tragedy of the masses sets in and you get many different kinds of people who have varying opinions and very different ways of interacting with other people (ie. mean people, nice people, etc). As much as I've tried to set the tone of the site in general ("be friendly" is still the number 1 rule) with some success, it gets more and more difficult to keep that small community feeling going. I've tried several solutions but haven't hit it yet (I'm still working on it).

Some may say that it's because of all the features I've put into the site. Maybe a certain kind of feature like karma points makes for ultra-competitive people (original goal was to get people to comment more back when we were smaller and people were quiet) and the same could be said about wanting to gain as many subscribers as possible. These are the kinds of social features that I built in to encourage user engagement so that Asianfanfics wouldn't be just another dumb archive for people to keep their stories in. It's human nature for some people to want to be popular.

The thing is, Asianfanfics just might not be right for everyone and that's okay. There are many different kinds of fanfiction sites with different personalities and what I've built is one more flavor. Asianfanfics has evolved from just another fanfiction archive into a more social portal where people can meet others with similar interests. I wanted to create something different because what's the point in making something that already exists? But because of the increased interaction among users, it's inevitable that people will meet others that they strongly disagree with. I've tried to reduce friction among users in various capacities and I'm still working on ways to minimize conflicts like the "block" ability or the "friends-only" feature but I believe that the responsibility ultimately falls on users to be friendly or at least just be respectful of each other. We still strictly enforce our "no rudeness" policy after all.

The bottomline is that we're bigger now and you're going to meet a lot of different kinds of people and read a lot of different kinds of stories, both good and bad. Out of 20 million or so sites on the web, we're ranked around 30,000. We're pretty high up there in regards to traffic so you're inevitably going to meet people here that you won't like. I'm going to try and make it easier to help you guys carve out niches for yourselves and your friends to maybe get some of that small community feeling back for the social groups that you create but it'll take some time and a lot of trial and error. In the meantime, if you come across disagreeable people, instead of starting a pointless flamewar over the internet, just block them or mark your stuff as friends-only and move on. As someone who gets a lot of flame-mail, trust me when I say it's a lot less stressful that way.