Hi @theironfelix. I enjoyed your 50-word story! I almost understand it, and of course would love to have you explain it if you are so inclined.
I do have a request. (Pretty please!) Would you mind putting your 50-word short story in its own post going forward? I have a few reasons for this, but primarily I think you will get more eyes on your work from other Fifty Worders if you do that. I think you'll get more upvotes on your work too.
The best way I can explain it is this. It's kind of like if you go into a restaurant and ask for a salad, but instead of just giving you the salad you want, they also give you a plate of spaghetti. You didn't order a plate of spaghetti, so it seems a little odd. Also, you're only paying for the salad you ordered. So the restaurant is basically delivering more than was asked for and is getting less for it.
In this scenario, you're the restaurant. You're delivering a whole extra thing that those looking to find other 50-word stories aren't wishing for. And instead of getting upvotes from their respective communities on two posts, your combined posts are getting fewer eyes and votes because people can't immediately see what they are looking for. I hope that makes sense!
Now, I do enjoy the concerns and feedback. I like to humour my reasons for why I keep compounding posts.
Probably the less evident reason: statistics. I’ve went back and backlogged all the community interaction (comments) and upvotes I received pre-RC update and post-RC update. Within the terms of comments, I actually received a massive boost post-RC. Though how much this is for an influx of new faces, being fast enough to promote my post and how visible my post is on contest pages are big determining factors. But just seeing the amount of engagement I received pre-RC for more “individual” posts and post-RC for compound posts is this: I get all that I would on average get for individual posts and some more (the last part in due to new member influx most likely). Regardless, an equally determining factor is that of upvotes. And this has an awkwardly congruent trend with comments, although higher. But keep in mind that upvote bots may’ve accrued more accounts in order to deliver bigger upvotes.
An area more visibly comprehendable is that I have no time to seriously craft these posts up. So most of the time I work irregularly and found it more manageable to post every other day while compounding. This is so I can not only have, hypocritically, more time to check what I post but also time to fix any error.
Yet let’s get to the restaruant analogy: there’s problems already, even if it is meant to be an imperfect restaraunt. Firstly, the posts are segmentalized and distinct enough where they don’t blur to some super-food or basically a messy post. Secondly, Steemit is not a pay-to-see site; however people viewing a post have a choice to upvote, comment and resteem content they may like WITHOUT impacting them negatively (other than the time they could’ve invested elsewhere). Finally, there’s clear and demarcated registers for each parts of the posts; in essence, one isn’t compelled to read all the other parts of the post, just the one they came for. But however, that could be a old cultural part of the internet I still breath into today’s environment where people took the extra step to completely seperate posts. However, I still see shadows of the old part of the internet wherever I go. (I can confirm this as an old geiser since posts on forums used to contain many subjects and it was a nightmare to sift through. But hypocritically it forced people to use “@“ symbols, to demarcate parts of post belonged to which thread. Then again, forums are more cleaner and more demarcated; yer Discord hypocritically recreated to forum spirit and invited some of its olden culture back.)
What would’ve worked better is if you compared my post to newspapers. But I would stop you there and show how cluttered newspapers were and they still sold a heck ton back in their hayday and now even. Yet you could say the major pieces where clearly segmentalized and well the comparison stops working for either of us at this point.
But the most evident reason why I compound posts is this: the RC crisis and the lingering psychological effects of such. Now, I still suffer from it whenever I go crazy with delegations which decrease useable SP while wanting to interact heavily with the community (consider again I used to be a forum guru). Compounded (I swear that was on accident) with the fact that I have crunch-time with life and just seeing that de-compounding posts won’t yield more benefits, and well... the RC system gave me the perfect excuse to compound posts whenever I feel like.
Now as of recent I’ve slowly been transitioning away from compounding posts, but that’s because the situation improved economically. However, that’s just for more longer philosophical posts or whenever I do video posts that don’t share the same theme of “writing fiction.” If there’s only two reasons I would completely de-compound posts: retesting the waters to see if de-compounding posts would actually far well for me and me having more increased free-time. Note that the former is within my concerns, but the latter hogties me to continue something which is more in my benefit to follow until further notice. The only other legitimate excuse which I failed to bring up is attention-span which, I admit, would be the only valid and sound reason to de-compound my posts right now. However, I have a belief that attention spans aren’t that atrocious and its something that can be improved upon over time. (As equally as much we can kill it over time as well.)
I once again thanks for the concerns, but until life fares me a time bonus... well let’s say habits die hard.