You must understand that I'm not trying to argue against you. I sense some level of aggression in your message: please understand that I'm not trying to fight, here. I'm trying to explain things.
Okay, sure let me take a step back
Firstly, on the matter of notability
The book is notably more popular within the site it is being released on than several other novels both on and off the site that have been published, with previously posted examples of Virtuous Sons and Book Eating Magician
To show the comparison clearer, A Novel Concept has 14mil views with an average of 33k, it has 14k followers and 5k people that have marked it as a favourite, and has been rated ~3k times, Virtuous Sons has 4mil views with an average of 22k, it has 6.8k followers and 2.5k people that have marked it as a favourite, and has been rated 1.8k ratings, Book Eating Magician (from the stats that I can find of it) has 6.2mil views/downloads over 425 chapters for an average of 14588 views
The gap between them all is stark, with Virtuous Sons having been published officially on and by Amazon to be downloaded and read on Kindle, and Book Eating Magician having gotten translated by WuxiaWorld (who for all intents and purposes, is official publishing, as they are owned by Kakao who is one of the major Korean webmedia sharing sites, in addition to them having to purchase the rights and all to get the media translated), has gotten a manhwa adapation of it's own and printed to paper back (And that we also current have pages for, but that is secondary)
The reason why A Novel Concept is not being actively published by Amazon is not due to a lack of popularity, but instead due to the author's decision not to do so, but we can draw a comparison between it and several other webnovels which have been published in one way or another, which are notably less popular than it, and say that given these other novels, which are notable enough to be seen and then published by a bigger compnay, this novel should then be allowed on a basis of being markedly more popular than them within the spaces that both are viewed.
These novels have several million views across all chapters. As you say, they average at about 6,000 per chapter, for the one example. When I say tens of millions of people have read Discord, I am not counting a unique read per chapter. These are not novels with millions of unique viewers; rather, the means by which they gather data is intensely skewed.
Yes, but the issue with such a comparison is that with webnovel reading sites, you don't really get recommended things in the same vein that you would for something such as youtube or discord, where you enter a home menu and see various recommendations, and if you do, those recommendations are
Instead (from my memory of when I used to more actively read on webnovel, and my current reading of stuff on Ao3), you are mainly given already popular works or works within your own "circle", any form of outside feed into that typically comes through promotions (by Ads or by Authors in a note), which most of the time are ignored on principle, or are ignored because they do not like the summary of the work. I would with confidence say that anywhere from 1 in 10 to 100 people actually click, read, and thus count to the view count of the resulting novel
Webnovel (and prolly Qidian as an extent but I can't stay for certain) due to it's Freemium model (that is, they lock most of the chapters of a work, and require either money or limited resources to unlock the rest over a matter of days, if not months, if not years for novels with over a thousand chapters) provides readers with ways to promote works and attaches rewards to that that those who don't pay can unlock new chapters, of note here is the power stone system, which pushes novels on a ranking and in theory allows works that are well liked to be recommended to more people and what have you, the issue is that most of the time, people will either throw power stones at a work at the top to get their quests done with so they can go back to reading, or they're a paying customer and have no reason to actually vote on works, rather than throw money at the author (which is actually a metric we can measure for webnovel, but it's scuffed and I'm not looking on webnovel to see the conversion rate between USD and a coin)
tldr; Webnovel sites kinda just suck at getting novels, especially new ones (new) viewership, so that count is more weighted against them than for them, with the only things that get recommended or that are newly read being already popular novels for one reason or another
You are more than welcome to feel upset, should we not want a verse you want to add. But our policies are based on reasonable expectations, and if these LitRPG novels don't meet said policies, then it is what it is. I encourage you to not allow that to upset you; the hobby is simply not worth it.
That said. Your post is not honest. You're arguing our standards exclude works that they simply do not. We automatically allow formally published works. And these works are important enough: your Olaf Stapledon is not even remotely the same as a self-published LitRPG novel with an average of 6,000 views per chapter. Take a moment, cool off, and think about it. I think tensions are high because its being taken personally, but our standards aren't unreasonable.
My issue isn't whether or not the verse gets added to be quite honest, my issue is that if "cultural impact" is the measure that we use to include a verse or not then I disagree with that on principle, because the cultural impact is a vague as **** term. Something can only have an impact within it's culture, and cultures are by nature insular things. The internet is then a culture of a culture, and webnovels and their genres are insular to an even higher degree, to the point that something within it's culture could be critically acclaimed as the next best thing since sliced bread, with the entire community agreeing as such, but the moment you take a step outside of the culture, any impact it has just drops off a cliff or is secondary at best.
Figures such as Dunsany or Stapledon are far, far more popular figures than the authors of these novels. I am well aware. The effect they have had continue on to this day, but I'll put it simply, it is only within their fields, because if you go right now and ask a layman if they know either, they would respond in the negative. Hell even if you asked them what a Dyson sphere is, I'd expect that they'd be able to tell you what it is in the vaguest terms or wouldn't be able to answer. If you asked them who Clarke was, all they'd do is probably be able to tell you the quote (if they actually heard who it was from), and if they were old enough, tell you about the 2001 movie, maybe.
Culture is innately deeply insular, and judging things based upon cultural relevance when most people probably have even heard the name Tezuka is absurd. People are naturally lazy and don't wish to go outside of their comfort zones and circles; typically only exposed to things through outside influences, which naturally favours multi-media giants if we wish to measure things by culturally relevant, because they have the money and influence to throw around that said media becomes nigh omnipresent, crossing continental and language barriers (another issue things webmedia faces, as they are typically made within/for a single language which cuts off more than half of the people in the world).
Also I must bring up the 6000 point, as it wasn't for the novel this thread is about to begin with, but I have to say something, as numbers get big or small enough people stop being able to properly comprehend and visualize them, it's why if something terrible happens with a neighbour, we are far more affected than if something like that happened to a thousand people in name a country on the other side of the world, we probably wouldn't even hear that it happened unless it was particularly terrible, people vs statistics and all that. But 6000 people are a lot, there are more than 6000 people in your neighbourhood, and I'd nearly put money on that, 6000 people could quite easily overfill a theater, imagine that, enough people to fill your neighbourhood, enough people that that can't even all fit in a theatre coming back to watch or read the same thing a hundred times over, a thousand times over, now imagine that multiplied by five and a half times to give us our 33000 people per chapter on average, enough that you couldn't ethically fit them all into a theatre, enough that a neighbourhood would genuinely start to resemble the Kawloon Walled City at that point, which had 35000 residents at it's peak.
6000 is a lot, 33000 is insane
