There are several possible reasons for stories getting fewer displays (a.k.a. reads). I will try to list some of them in no particular order.

• One reason is that so many stories are published. For me it is overwhelming when authors publish more than one story simultaneously. I can still handle multiple stories from one author if there is only one chapter per week from each story. For me it is best if each story is posted on a different day of the week. And I can only keep track of two, or maybe three, stories at the same time from one author.

  I know that some authors post their weekly story chapters all on the same day, but they limit it to two of their three or four ongoing stories. This is what Su Shi and Amethyst are doing.

• When the interval between chapter postings is to big, I need to back up one or two chapters and re-read to reset the context in order for the current chapter to make sense. With daily postings the individual chapters should be kept on the shorter side of things, because we readers have only a finite amount of time available for reading. With weekly or semi-weekly postings the individual parts of a story can be longer, since I the reader have several days to find the necessary time to read a longer installment.
• When two or more stories by the same author get daily postings, I quickly get overwhelmed and left behind. This was the case recently of Clara who was posting daily installments from two simultaneous stories. Since the chapter length was better suited for trice weekly postings, I became overwhelmed, fell behind and just gave up. I wrote several PMs asking her to slow down the rate of posting without any positive reaction. So I just gave up and left the last chapter I read in a tab for future reading.

  With a trice weekly posting of one story at a time, she could have reduced the overfilling of the new stories list on the front page, Thus allowing more authors to keep stories on the front page for longer. She would also have been able to give her readers more time to enjoy her stories. Now that all her finished stories are posted she is fading from readers memories, and it is unlikely that new readers/visitors will find her stories very easily.

• Another small but very important factor is the corruption of the site style-sheet since the last attack and crash of this website. It should be a quick and easy fix to edit a few specific lines of code in the CSS files. Sections 5.11.2 The link pseudo-classes: :link and :visited and 5.11.3 The dynamic pseudo-classes: :hover, :active, and :focus of the CSS standard indicate which selectors need to be present, as well as a warning as to the order of these selectors. And in section 6.2. System Colors of the CSS Color Module is a list of platform and user personalization independent color names.

  Basically the relevant CSS code would be:
  
a:link { color: LinkText } /* unvisited links */
a:visited { color: VisitedText } /* visited links */
a:hover { color: yellow } /* user hovers */
a:active { color: lime } /* active links */


  I was using the visual differentiation of unvisited from visited links as a reminder of authors I wanted to follow. As well as help me identify which chapter of a story I still need to read. I can still access those features, but only when I turn off the use of the site style-sheet by going to View → Page Style → No Style (in Firefox).

• My personal reading interests and/or preferences gravitate more toward some keywords and less toward others. Once I get to know the style of authors after reading a few of their stories I will become selective as to which stories I will try to read ASAP and which stories I will avoid at all costs. This is predicated on the free will of readers, and is part of the freedom of belief and freedom of opinion.