So, I have noticed something on RR and I am wondering if others have also noticed it as well.
I'm currently running a test with a brand new account on RR to assess what growing a following on the site is like, purely from the site's algorithms and paid ads (no shoutouts, no review swaps, no leveraging existing readership or even telling anyone I know IRL about the story, etc).
Something I noticed is within 3 days of posting the story, it got a negative review based on its first chapter. The review was hyper-critical about it for reasons that (without going into more detail) I found nonsensical.
But, over the past few days I started getting curious, so I looked at the user's account, where I learned the account is fairly new and has only ever left negative reviews on stories, and not even given positive reviews to the numerous stories the account has favorited.
I then started looking at the reviews of the stories they also downvoted, and found other accounts which have left negative reviews on these stories have also left either exclusively negative reviews or all negative except for like one somewhat positive review. And likewise, if the account is favoriting stories, often no reviews at all have been left for those stories.
Some of the accounts are new, and some of the accounts seem to have been made a year or so ago, but have no activity except the reviewing behavior.
As someone who has been on the internet since the early 1990s and seen all the kinds of ways people engage in black hat SEO to improve their rankings, I have found this to be very suspicious, especially with how the Rising Stars algorithm operates based on review scores, not other engagement such as views or comments.
This also brought to mind that back in 2024 I was invited to a certain Discord server which was pitched to me as a place for RR authors to network and discuss the platform, but which I quickly realized existed for the primary purpose of coordinating shout-out and review swapping of the group members stories on their day of release for the express purpose of climbing onto the Rising Stars feed. The group was small and I wasn't interested in participating in that, but when I recently logged into that Discord account (I'm not super active on Discord) to check on it, it was either deleted or I was kicked from it for not participating.
Anyway, I realize that RR allows authors to do the coordinated review-swapping but now I am wondering if some of these groups are engaging in black hat SEO tactics to coordinate downvoting in attempts to help their stories rank higher than other stories. There is obviously a huge financial incentive to engaging in this behavior given the success authors on Rising Stars have with Patreon.
Has anyone else noticed this, or something like it?