This subreddit is about inspiring others to create engaging stories, and yet the posts that see the most eyes are ones in which a mostly complete story is told in the title, usually with a punchy twist, which leaves little room, flexibility, or… prompting, for further detail.

Think of the classic “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn” short story for a good example- an author can come along and opine on the tragedy between Margaret and Joel after before or after losing their child, or maybe even that it’s all a scam, but there isn’t exactly a ton of “what happens next?” available to them. However, to the casual reddit scroller, what an engaging one liner! Ding, upvote.

These posts, being popular, then promote lacklustre stories that are chosen by authors not because the prompt is interesting to them, but because the post itself is picking up steam and they want their work to be seen.

I’m almost certain that reddit isn’t capable of this, but this subreddit’s posts should be scored based on the cumulative sum of it’s replies’ scores, not the up/downvote total of the post itself. I’d almost argue up/downvoting of individual posts should be disabled outright.