Re-reading isn't a factor here since you can only like a chapter once. On June 19, I posted the
like count for chapters 1-51. If you look at chapters 2-6, there's only a 3,000-like increase over three months. Below is a graph showing the current like count for chapters 1-57:
I made the graph vertical due to the forum's image width limitations.
Here is the data for your reference. Excluding the data from the first three chapters, we see a drop of 89.41% in the number of likes from chapters 4 to 57. That’s a brutal decline. It looks like the author lost a big chunk of the audience after the Kaede arc (chapter 35), and with this latest arc, the decline has only deepened.
I believe two main factors have led to this decline:
- It seems there was an unintentional genre shift by the author between arcs, moving from drama to outright misery porn.
- In hindsight, it appears that splitting the story of the three boys into separate arcs was a mistake.