Where do you find stories?

[Dracos]

Just expanding my outlook a bit.

These days I am mostly looking at:

http://fanfiction.net/ - has been useless for some time :(

https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/creative-writing.18/ - Got into going here a year or two ago.  Don't post, just read.

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/forums/user-fiction.2/ - sometimes I glance over here

But not many other places outside of manga sites.

Where do you guys find fiction? :)

[Anastasia]

The same. FFnet's an old classic that still has some good things and the other two are where a lot of authors are.

To be honest I don't really like SB or SV, but again, it's where the authors are.

[Merc]

I will ocassionally go through the fanfic recs section of tv tropes pages for series. I recommend avoiding shipping sections of these, but that's just me. I tend to find fics written as centered around a romance and NOT being primarily a romance to be poor stories the majority of the time.

Also look at fanfic rec threads in SB/SV, and in those I do keep an eye out for AO3 fic recs, since sometimes those can't be found in ff.net and there are a few decent ones. The recs from SB/SV typically feel better than those of tv tropes, I think.

If I find something I like in AO3, I might feel adventurous and look through that author's favorite list. Generally I don't like to be too adventurous there though. Lots of NSFW stuff there too.

Oh yeah, and there's the SR "What are you reading?" thread too. That sometimes has stuff to read, obviously =p

For light/web novels, there's pretty much just https://www.novelupdates.com/

[Merc]

To be honest I don't really like SB or SV, but again, it's where the authors are.

SV I dislike because they have features locked behind a flagging system, you have to be a regular poster to unlock things like thread aggregation, and the site;s kind of a mess with locked features. The suckier the site is, the less likely I am to read stuff there and the less likely I am to post there, meaning I won't get unlocked from a lurker account. Oh well!

SB might have the above too, not really sure, but I post there from time to time, so I actually have access to them. Community-wise, I usually don't have problems either unless they get nitpicky about things in a story. I don't mind where they post once about something that didn't work for them, or have some suggestion. The problem is when they will get into full out WARS with the author or with other readers about things in the story. I mean, holy hell, that's obnoxious. They actually have cases where the authors have to flag the mods and tell them "Please stop this! Please!" and have threads mod flagged with warnings. And sometimes people KEEP DOING IT, eventually driving authors away.

A lot of times it's also really stupid stuff like someone writing details where they're not a technical expert, and some "technical expert" swaggers in and tells him all about how terrible it is and how it ruins the story...but almost never how to improve the story. Sometimes they do, and the author may say "I just want to keep moving with the story, I'll accept that I got it wrong" and the expert dude gets pissed off. Eventually leading to mod intervention.

That part of the community feels pretty toxic, and it's surprisingly common for people to focus in on minor points and not give feedback on overall story, so I've also seen people leave because of that.

[Jason_Miao]

I've been looking at translated LNs/serials, lately.  The way I've been finding them is looking at a pirate site which happens to has a cruddy recommendation system built in, glancing at the recommendations, if any title seems potentially interesting, then performing a google search on the title to find whomever actually did the translations so I can read it from there instead of feeding a piracy site. 

Sometimes, I end up getting bored of the translated story, but find that some other novel is interesting.  e.g, I stopped reading Death Mage, but I find The Tutorial is Too Hard to be unexpectedly interesting.

I find that the novel updates indications of similar titles works a little too well - great if you really like reading one kind of story which is like the one you just read, but my tastes tend to be too varied for that.

[Dracos]

@Merc - I totally find things out from our reading thread too.  But feels like my searching be weak these days.