What makes a story “popular”?
Popular works are determined using our special sauce™ (ahem) algorithm. It’s not all that elaborate (for now) — a combination of several weighted factors, including frequency of updates to a certain story (i.e. new comments, branches/chapters, favourites, and markers), the story’s overall rating by readers, and the “freshness” of the story. And we tend to switch it up on a regular basis, to keep everyone guessing. On top of those factors, if a story hasn’t been updated in over 31 days, it won’t show up in the popular works list. While it’s probably possible, with some effort, to “game” the system right now, we’ll work on making that a little less obvious.
