Found a Fresh Hell

 Discovered an interesting corruption technique.

 royal road has review swaps. Naturally a swapped review feels strong pressure to fall into extreme marketing-speak. "Wow your story is amazing (my story is amazing too right)." You can edit reviews, so any defection from the conspiracy can be immediately punished.

 They even helpfully tag swapped reviews as review swaps, knowing it doesn't matter and won't change anything, except for being useful for [plausible deniability]. Maybe it would be relevant with a robust reputation and introduction system, this is a more-anonymous-than-anonymous made-up-name system...
 Even if reviews had a wiki-style revision history, nobody would check them. The site isn't exactly for professional readers, it's for braindead zombie-morons.

 Hack: solicit dozens of review swaps. Result: the few genuine reviewers read all the glowing fake reviews and, well, monkey see, monkey do. 

 However, here's the best part. The rr popular list is not like the nyt bestseller list, it lists pages read per week or something of that nature. A review section, no matter how distorted, can't convince readers they like reading that trash, and they stop. Speaking of dozens, I checked two dozen page deep into popular, but it's on page 30. It's well behind short stories that last updated in '22.
 For extra context, recall that nearly all readers still stop before reading through five comments under a post. Google results beyond the first are nonexistent to illiterates.

 The second best part is that the reviews hardly mention anything you can't learn from skimming the chapter titles and reading the self-written blurb. Marketing speak is vague to avoid anyone accusing it of lying, lol, they blend right in.  

 Third best part, from the top-ranked five-star review:
"I found the constant injecture [sic] of inner thoughts into normal narration difficult to read"
"While I don't quite like how there's no real pressing plot for [any chapter I read], which mostly consists of exposition and low-stakes character building"
"Most of my issues with the writing are already mentioned"
"Admittedly, I didn't find myself greatly interested in most of the characters introduced in the first eleven chapters."
"In Conclusion: This story is a must-read."

 The rabbit hole on that one. The layers. This illiterate review is at least two qualitative levels above the story it's about.

 For reference, I find the story literally unreadable. The prose physiognomy is so bad my eyes gloss over the entire chapter. Strikes me a perfectly unalive, less vital than riverbed stones. I can't assess it properly because it's impossible to pay attention to. Or at least, I would never read it for free. Should probably charge north of $200 per hour.