You just bought Literotica...what do you change?

[Bramblethorn]

That's fair. This approach would honestly work best with a panel of judges instead of having readers perform the rating. I think your points, and @Bramblethorn's above, are valid.

Where I was coming from is that I don't find the current rating system very informative. There's not a very strong correlation between e.g. writing craft and scores a lot of the time (though there's some correlation, to be sure). And there's just no way to distinguish how arousing readers have found a story or how good the plot is. Sometimes I want to read stories for different purposes, and the all-in-one model just doesn't help much in my searches.

That's entirely valid frustration. It's just an inherent difficulty in human-subjects research (which is effectively what we're doing here): we want All The Information, but we have to get it from people who will just walk away if we exhaust their very limited patience.

Sometimes, rather than trying to squeeze more information out of those people and ending up with less, the best solution is to try to get more value out of whatever info they did give us.

If you have a bunch of readers who value "heat" highly, and a different bunch who value "plot" instead, that will create a pattern in their ratings that can be used: you can identify that there are two different groups of readers, and Group A likes these stories but Group B prefers those stories. When a new reader comes along, you can use their own ratings to figure out which of those groups they belong to and make recommendations accordingly.

This is basically how businesses like Amazon work; they know there's a limit to how much they can get out of their customers ratings-wise, so they put a lot of work into analysing the paltry info they do get.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've been through that process on another site and my first and only story there caused me to leave it. The "editing" turned out to be the "editor" re-writing my story to be like he or she wanted. I had probably a couple typos but nothing that required a complete change to the plot.

Melissa was talking about authors editing their own work, not other people's. It'd be nice to be able to fix minor typos etc. without having to go through the whole process.

 

[XerXesXu]

On the forums side, is there an ability to hide threads? I've not found one. Such an ability (to hide thread, unhide hidden threads and toggle individual threads) would help manage visual clutter. It's usually apparent from a new post whether it will be of interest.

 

[burgwad]

I freely admit I'm sleepy as I write this, so I'm sorry if this is written a little slugbrained.

Anon is obviously some sort of problem for somebody, if it's the talking point that keeps coming up the most. If I owned the place, I'd govern democratically, meaning I'd have to do something about Anon. But for all of you guys who are like "OVER MY DEAD BODY," I'd try to make sure you felt heard, too. Somehow. Assuming you were ready to speak your piece in good faith.

Right now, all anonymous visitors to Lit are free to vote for a story--as they should be. Lit is a very By-The-People-For-The-People kind of content generator. Which isn't as problematic for more popular, widely read authors, but for the vast bulk of Lit's authors--that is, those still growing their readerships--Anon is a volatile and fickle gatekeeper.

I think there's room for compromise here. First, I think we can all agree a better, more modern system of tags could only improve things. We can build something very cool from just a sophisticated tagging system. Anon would still be welcome to engage with Lit's content in much the same way they already do, but the 5-star rating system would no longer be a global system by default, and would instead form the basis of a user-centered, AI-powered algorithm designed to find and prioritize works that a user is likely to rate 4+. I hope we can all agree that readers being able to find stuff they love on the basis of what they themselves love most, rather than what 'everyone' loves most, is a neat goal? "Most popular" could still be a prominent search filter. Popular authors would not need to see a dip in readership. (Nostalgic aside: Remember when Netflix was good at recommending shit you'd never heard of but then absolutely loved? They used an AI-driven 5-star rating system like the one I'm describing, and somehow that thing f***ing worked. Alas, it didn't help them make the big money they very aggressively wanted to make, so they dumped it in the early 10s.) As for the Favorites/Bookmark system, I'd keep it as is. It's nice. It's fine. Harmless at worst, and heartening at best. "Most favorited" will also always be a popular choice of search filter. Plus, if the new-and-improved 5-star rating system has helped to bring attention to more diamonds in the rough, we'd get to see even more of those stories we hope to see when we choose "Most favorited" over "Most popular" as our search filter du jour.

What this means, however, is that even Anon would have at the very least to agree to use cookies while browsing Lit, which would then turn each visit into a gradual start-from-scratch, get-to-know-you experience between them and the (safe, legal, privacy-friendly) AI sommelier trying to guide them toward their next favorite story. Again, this gentlest-of-filters is SO worth it if it means Anon no longer poses a threat to authors with smaller readerships and a disproportionate vulnerability to 1-bombs. Although each and every story a user might care to peruse would have a 5-star rating, each story's 5-star ratings would only affect its local, not its global, standing relative to the user. Star-ratings would only help Lit to determine which content is likeliest to please them, based on other content they've rated.

For what it's worth, sign-up could remain the minimally invasive thing it already is. But the 5-star rating system would be so much more useful and worthwhile for registered users, creating a natural incentive to sign-up beyond just being able to bookmark stories (which any sufficiently determined-not-to-sign-up Anon could simply do with their browser's built-in Bookmark function). Random passersby could no longer rate a story in a way that had any lasting impact on that story's global visibility. This is where some of you will bristle, because even a minimal filter like requiring a free, zero-hassle login (just email + password; no junk mail; no credit card numbers; just a login) is tantamount to threatening to take your guns away. But I'd argue that the hazard Anon poses, that disproportionately heightened risk of harm to newer, less established, and/or less broadly appealing authors due to the ease with which any disinterested passerby can tank a story's rating (and therefore visibility, and therefore likelihood of finding its intended reader, and therefore reason for existing) is not only more than counterbalanced by the potential for good that protecting these same presently underserved writers could do for the Lit community as a whole, but rendered straight-up moot by shifting things in the direction of user-focused rather than revenue-focused content filtration.

And while I'm still here instead of in bed, let me also head off one more argument I feel like I hear a lot more than I probably actually do around here. Idk. It just sort of hangs in the air, like a smell. The exact verbiage changes, but the general thrust is this: that most successful authors on Lit get that way by writing well. Before you get out your hairsplitting shears, let me assure you the particulars of what I mean by "well" don't pertain. Either away, we've already trapped ourselves in a classic sociological boner.

The boner goes like this. Whenever a notion of that which distinguishes winners from losers solidifies in the population, a trait, ability, and/or viewpoint is broadly ascribed to it. In turn, humans who lack said virtue are regarded as inferior or less deserving (again, the exact verbiage doesn't matter, because the end result is the same: a prejudicial status quo), and before you know it, you have either outright conflict (vocal dissent) or likelier, dysfunction (silent dissent). At Lit, while there is still of course a ton of talent to admire in the top rankings, there is a less flexible notion of what it means to make those top rankings than there could be. And here, finally, I wager that verbiage does matter.

If I owned Lit, I wouldn't want to do anything to alienate folks (myself included) who adore and masturbate regularly to the highly polished content this place has cultivated. I would, however, want to take better care of the younger, more bright-eyed but less surefooted talent currently languishing under the tyranny of Anon. I would change as little as I could about the overall Anon user experience, but for asking them to click "Allow Cookies" any time they visited Lit from a new IP/VPN/incognito tab/etc. Lit's a porn site, folks. Users will tolerate a minimum of pop-up bullshit, especially if it's easy to make go away and only appears once per visit. That the trade-off is a slicker experience all around will be an unfelt, unappreciated bonus to them anyway. They're Anon. Meanwhile, alllll the users who already like Lit and have logins, i.e., Lit's true homies, i.e., fucking us, will have the option to use a Netflix-inspired, beautifully tailored, sustainably AI-powered 5-star rating system designed to give us each a better, more gratifying relationship to Lit's content, put us in touch with exciting new undiscovered talent we are surer to love, and breathe some much-needed non-boner-smelling air into the room.

Jesus, it's after midnight. I have to get the kid ready for daycare in a few hours. Goddamn it, guys, why'd you let me stay up this late?

 

[FeralSmile]

If you have a bunch of readers who value "heat" highly, and a different bunch who value "plot" instead, that will create a pattern in their ratings that can be used: you can identify that there are two different groups of readers, and Group A likes these stories but Group B prefers those stories. When a new reader comes along, you can use their own ratings to figure out which of those groups they belong to and make recommendations accordingly.

This is basically how businesses like Amazon work; they know there's a limit to how much they can get out of their customers ratings-wise, so they put a lot of work into analysing the paltry info they do get.

That's an interesting thought exercise: how could something like that be implemented in this imaginary new Literotica site? One option would be for readers to have a preference slider on the account level, which they use to indicate what they enjoy. It'd still take some fairly sophisticated analytics to then map those preferences onto the stories they voted on, creating a multidimensional rating out of a single number. Which then falls apart for anonymous readers or those who don't want to enter the data about their preferences.

It has to start somewhere though, if it's to work at all. There has to be a core to the data set, if it's to be extended. First you have to have a way to sort users into groups, then you can analyze what those groups like; OR you have to have multiple ratings for a story, which you can use to compare it to other stories liked by the same people. Amazon's metrics are simple in a sense because they're based on purchases and browsing, so it's easy to fit users into groups. "Viewed X" and "Purchased Y" are great starting points for this kind of data set. What's more, Amazon has meaningful product categories built in, a bit like story categories. We can theoretically say, "This user viewed X number of stories in this category" and "This user gave average ratings of X to stories in this category" and thus readily deduce what categories a reader prefers (not dissimilar to Amazon's approach)... but this doesn't tell us much about the heat, narrative, or craft of the stories being rated.

In order to know what heat, narrative, and craft a reader prefers, we'd need to have a rating or preference for those somewhere. Sigh.

Ah well, this is doubtless needlessly complex and discursive.

I'm just interested in how to get more useful data about which stories I'd enjoy.

 

[FeralSmile]

Melissa was talking about authors editing their own work, not other people's. It'd be nice to be able to fix minor typos etc. without having to go through the whole process.

It's theoretically possible to use AI to check edits, and thus allow spelling/punctuation/formatting changes to be self-administered, while requiring human eyes to look over any word replacements. I don't think it's probably easy or cost-effective, but it's theoretically possible.

It's far easier and doubtless cheaper to have more submission-viewers and to provide them with tools to track differences though, so they can quickly see what's been changed in a submitted edit.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's theoretically possible to use AI to check edits, and thus allow spelling/punctuation/formatting changes to be self-administered, while requiring human eyes to look over any word replacements. I don't think it's probably easy or cost-effective, but it's theoretically possible.

It's far easier and doubtless cheaper to have more submission-viewers and to provide them with tools to track differences though, so they can quickly see what's been changed in a submitted edit.

Yeah, "AI" sucks at context. On Literotica, the change from an "18" to a "15" could be pretty important, but a human reader can tell when it might be and when it's not.

One of the unusual features of Literotica (by the standards of large story-type sites) is how centralised it is. All the others I'm aware of depend on communities of moderators/etc. rather than a single mod covering everything and a lot of these changes would require that kind of shift. I don't know whether Literotica is culturally capable of making that shift, but in the long run I'm not sure if there's an alternative.

What this means, however, is that even Anon would have at the very least to agree to use cookies while browsing Lit,

Why, though? There'll be plenty of readers on this site who are happy to leave cookies enabled, more than enough to build the kind of recommender system you're discussing, without needing to require it of those who don't.

Obviously it's going to be harder to recommend stories to readers who don't want to leave a record of their reading habits or preferences, but even for those readers it could still provide a "stories similar to this one" that's a good deal more relevant than what we currently have.

which would then turn each visit into a gradual start-from-scratch, get-to-know-you experience between them and the (safe, legal, privacy-friendly) AI sommelier trying to guide them toward their next favorite story. Again, this gentlest-of-filters is SO worth it if it means Anon no longer poses a threat to authors with smaller readerships and a disproportionate vulnerability to 1-bombs.

That is a very big "if". I've already talked about why it could easily go the other way and make story scores more vulnerable, both to intentional manipulation and to volatility.

For what it's worth, sign-up could remain the minimally invasive thing it already is. But the 5-star rating system would be so much more useful and worthwhile for registered users, creating a natural incentive to sign-up beyond just being able to bookmark stories (which any sufficiently determined-not-to-sign-up Anon could simply do with their browser's built-in Bookmark function). Random passersby could no longer rate a story in a way that had any lasting impact on that story's global visibility. This is where some of you will bristle, because even a minimal filter like requiring a free, zero-hassle login (just email + password; no junk mail; no credit card numbers; just a login) is tantamount to threatening to take your guns away.

Setting up a burner email separate from one's main email for signing up to Lit isn't "zero-hassle". Signing up from one's main email is a real bad idea for anybody who could be badly harmed by having their porn-reading habits exposed to the world. (Which ain't me, but certainly is quite a few people who read this site.)

If I owned Lit, I wouldn't want to do anything to alienate folks (myself included) who adore and masturbate regularly to the highly polished content this place has cultivated. I would, however, want to take better care of the younger, more bright-eyed but less surefooted talent currently languishing under the tyranny of Anon. I would change as little as I could about the overall Anon user experience, but for asking them to click "Allow Cookies" any time they visited Lit from a new IP/VPN/incognito tab/etc. Lit's a porn site, folks. Users will tolerate a minimum of pop-up bullshit, especially if it's easy to make go away and only appears once per visit.

It's not the effort required to make a window go away, it's the permissions granted. Closing a pop-up window is not at all the same thing as giving permission to track.

 

[AchtungNight]

I’d hire Jay and Silent Bob to police certain Loving Wives commenters. In a manner similar to how they have dealt with their online harassers. Anonymity will not prevent their attention.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

The current voting system is about the only way to assure unbiased ratings of stories, though those same ratings are also biased to some extent. The only problem with the current rating system is there is no way to see what the different voters cast as votes. For instance, if you get ten votes on a story, 5-5's and 5-4's, the rating is 4.5 and you get a red H. That would tell me I've pleased most of the readers of that story. If you get 5-5's, 4-4's, and 1-1, the rating is 4.2 and you don't get a red H. The fact it didn't get a red H doesn't mean it was a bad story. It just means some reader thought it was his obligation to put his dislike into a vote. One might wonder why that particular reader even finished the story and voted at all, but some people can't pass up a chance to feel superior to another.

Not knowing each vote makes it difficult to determine if your writing is causing the votes or if it's just one or two readers who don't like what you wrote in that particular story. Making that information available is probably impossible given the number of votes cast for each story over time. I would be my guess that the average story rating is automatically calculated and displayed at least at the time of the site update.

That's only a problem for the first week or so that the story is published. After that, as long as there are more than just a few votes, 1 votes and 5 votes only change the rating by .01 or so.

That's why I think getting x favorites should yield a red h and not a 4.50 with the minimum of 115 votes. Favorites unlike votes, are hardly tamperable, thus the 1bomb fuckwits wouldn't really do much, if any harm. We know that there's good and great stories here that lack and/or are nowhere near red h territories, but the stories that have them set the standards. The votes practically wouldn't matter, a story 1bombed down to a 2.15 that... say it took 50 faves to get a red h... would still have a red h, like it probably deserved.

Much like that one-bomber you mentioned, I think there's a percentage of high voters that don't favorite the stories, which is kinda weird to me.

 

[nice90sguy]

First off, I'd rename it "Y".
Second, I'd also buy up "licteroica.com", "literoic.com" etc, and make them redirect to here.
Third, I'd train up my GPT model with the stories here, and have a computer-generated stories section.
Fourth, I'd hook up with universities and provide an API for the site.

Seriously, though, I really agree with the posts above regarding improving search, and making it more facebook-like for authors.

Visual Novels should be a thing here. Some of them are very well-written. So I'd get that happening too.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Yeah, "AI" sucks at context. On Literotica, the change from an "18" to a "15" could be pretty important, but a human reader can tell when it might be and when it's not.

One of the unusual features of Literotica (by the standards of large story-type sites) is how centralised it is. All the others I'm aware of depend on communities of moderators/etc. rather than a single mod covering everything and a lot of these changes would require that kind of shift. I don't know whether Literotica is culturally capable of making that shift, but in the long run I'm not sure if there's an alternative.



Why, though? There'll be plenty of readers on this site who are happy to leave cookies enabled, more than enough to build the kind of recommender system you're discussing, without needing to require it of those who don't.

Obviously it's going to be harder to recommend stories to readers who don't want to leave a record of their reading habits or preferences, but even for those readers it could still provide a "stories similar to this one" that's a good deal more relevant than what we currently have.



That is a very big "if". I've already talked about why it could easily go the other way and make story scores more vulnerable, both to intentional manipulation and to volatility.



Setting up a burner email separate from one's main email for signing up to Lit isn't "zero-hassle". Signing up from one's main email is a real bad idea for anybody who could be badly harmed by having their porn-reading habits exposed to the world. (Which ain't me, but certainly is quite a few people who read this site.)



It's not the effort required to make a window go away, it's the permissions granted. Closing a pop-up window is not at all the same thing as giving permission to track.

Some sites don't use editors at all. Here and Lush are the only ones I know needin' tuh take a gander.

 

[FeralSmile]

Yeah, "AI" sucks at context. On Literotica, the change from an "18" to a "15" could be pretty important, but a human reader can tell when it might be and when it's not.

You're quite right, and the simplest solution is not to allow edits of numbers (which is trivially easy). There's danger not only in decreasing them but in increasing them as well, after all. If a character is 21 and you speak of something that happened 3 years ago, that's not the same as something that happened 4 years ago.

I still favor human editors though of course.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's why I think getting x favorites should yield a red h and not a 4.50 with the minimum of 115 votes.

Incest/Taboo had 10 stories published on October 31. (Picking that date since that gives us stories that are about to finish their run in the New Stories section.) Favourite counts for those stories are: 11, 12, 12, 16, 16, 18, 23, 37, 52, 92.

On the same date, Fetish had 11 stories. Favourite counts for those stories are: 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 13.

What value would you suggest for x that's fair to both those categories (and all the others) and doesn't just turn into a "which category gets most readers" metric?

Much like that one-bomber you mentioned, I think there's a percentage of high voters that don't favorite the stories, which is kinda weird to me.

Anon readers can vote but they can't fave.

 

[Rustyoznail]

Many good points above, but the big one to me is to sort out the background programming that randomly serves me two different versions of the forums. It is bloody annoying. One version looks good and has zero functionality, the other works well but looks like it was designed in the 90's. And I have to keep reloading the site to get the functional version.

Oh, and the old news has been removed from the front page! Hurrah!

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Incest/Taboo had 10 stories published on October 31. (Picking that date since that gives us stories that are about to finish their run in the New Stories section.) Favourite counts for those stories are: 11, 12, 12, 16, 16, 18, 23, 37, 52, 92.

On the same date, Fetish had 11 stories. Favourite counts for those stories are: 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 7, 13.

What value would you suggest for x that's fair to both those categories (and all the others) and doesn't just turn into a "which category gets most readers" metric?



Anon readers can vote but they can't fave.

Maybe 15 or 20?

 

[Rollinbones]

Remove anonymous comments and list voters Id. Put up or shut up. Renew monthly category winners and have quarterly fresh challenges instead of a site full of Halloween nude day and valentines etc stories. Encourage freshness, diversity and creativity. Continue free speech in the forums. Social internet is a nanny state these days.

 

[ronde]

Melissa was talking about authors editing their own work, not other people's. It'd be nice to be able to fix minor typos etc. without having to go through the whole process.

That was my point. The site I was talking about works exactly as Melissa proposed. You can't be published there without submitting your work to one of their editors and accepting the results. I don't want someone else to change the plot or tone of my story in the name of "improving readability" which is the reason that other site uses.

 

[ronde]

That's why I think getting x favorites should yield a red h and not a 4.50 with the minimum of 115 votes. Favorites unlike votes, are hardly tamperable, thus the 1bomb fuckwits wouldn't really do much, if any harm. We know that there's good and great stories here that lack and/or are nowhere near red h territories, but the stories that have them set the standards. The votes practically wouldn't matter, a story 1bombed down to a 2.15 that... say it took 50 faves to get a red h... would still have a red h, like it probably deserved.

Much like that one-bomber you mentioned, I think there's a percentage of high voters that don't favorite the stories, which is kinda weird to me.

Some readers mark a story as a "favorite" because they happen to like the author. Some mark it to be able to easily find the story again and finish reading it. Both are probably some measure of the success of the author in reaching an audience but neither is a measure of how much the readers liked the story or even read it. I don't know what your experience is but the difference in my average ratings for stories that were favorited by 0 readers and the rating for all my stories is only 0.032. On average, my stories are favorited by 31 readers.

Your assumption is that every reader who liked a story will mark it as a favorite. That may be true, but they didn't like it very much. Stories that are rated low by readers for a reason. That reason might be that it's hard to read or that the reader doesn't like that kind of story, but the number of 1 votes didn't get it there. I also seem to remember that the red H is assigned once a story has received 50 votes, not 115.

The math involved in getting to the rating will explain how high or low the rating is. If I use your example of a story rated at 2.15 with 50 readers who favorited it, if one reader rated it at 5, and all other readers rated it as 1, the story would be rated as 2.0 after only 4 votes and at 1.08 by the time it had 50 votes. Even if the rating was comprised of half 5 votes and half 1 votes, the rating would still be 3.0. If you play with the math a little, the conclusion you'll come to is that the "1bombs" don't really affect the low ratings after only a few votes. The 1 votes only change the rating much within the first ten or so votes. The low rating after 50 votes is simply that most readers found something they didn't like about the story.

 

[SimonDoom]

That's why I think getting x favorites should yield a red h and not a 4.50 with the minimum of 115 votes. Favorites unlike votes, are hardly tamperable, thus the 1bomb fuckwits wouldn't really do much, if any harm. We know that there's good and great stories here that lack and/or are nowhere near red h territories, but the stories that have them set the standards. The votes practically wouldn't matter, a story 1bombed down to a 2.15 that... say it took 50 faves to get a red h... would still have a red h, like it probably deserved.

Much like that one-bomber you mentioned, I think there's a percentage of high voters that don't favorite the stories, which is kinda weird to me.

A favorites-based red H sense makes no sense at all, for reasons discussed, including by Bramblethorn. Every single story with a certain number of views, whether 100,000 views or whatever, will have a red H, regardless of quality. It's a system that favors older stories, not because they're good but because they've been around long enough to pick up views, and therefore favorites.

Think about it from the reader's point of view, which is what matters. How does this convey useful information? As a reader I don't care how many favorites a story has because it tells me nothing about quality, whereas a score tells me at least a little bit about quality.

My system would be to make the red H based on score, but to award the red H to stories that achieve a certain percentile rank within a category. A 4.2 in Loving Wives might be the equivalent of a 4.6 in Exhibitionism. So, perhaps, award a red H to the top 25% in each category. That conveys much more helpful information to a reader than either the current score-based system or a favorites-based system.

 

[OffNSFW]

I would institute something like the Book It! program, except for writers instead of readers. Write one story, get a pin for your lapel. Write another story, get a star sticker on your pin. Fill the pin with star stickers and get a free pizza. I assume all writers are food motivated, as I am.

I would also retire the gay male and transgender & crossdresser categories, and instead institute categories for LGBTQ+ and gender play stories.

Also some sort of free beer program.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Much like that one-bomber you mentioned, I think there's a percentage of high voters that don't favorite the stories, which is kinda weird to me.

I think of favoriting and giving a story a 5 as serving different functions. Favoriting means I might want to read this story again, like bookmarking something. It might be a great story and I might give it a 5, but if I don't think I'll want to read it again I'm not going to favorite it.

 

[alohadave]

Remove anonymous comments and list voters Id. Put up or shut up.

What a great way to kill all engagement on stories. No one else needs to to know what stories I or anyone else voted on.

It helps no one, solves no problems, and creates new problems.

 

[djrip]

That was my point. The site I was talking about works exactly as Melissa proposed. You can't be published there without submitting your work to one of their editors and accepting the results. I don't want someone else to change the plot or tone of my story in the name of "improving readability" which is the reason that other site uses.

No. She proposed letting authors edit their own stories after posting. She said nothing about anyone else editing anyone's work.

 

[ronde]

No. She proposed letting authors edit their own stories after posting. She said nothing about anyone else editing anyone's work.

These were her words.

"And most of all- self editing. I would establish a threshold, based on some sort of combination of time on the site and number of works published, that would allow authors who meet the criteria being given the privilege of editing their own work at will. Abuse of the ability would result in its revocation."

I misinterpreted that to mean that a story couldn't posted if it was self edited. I could also interpret it to mean that an author could edit a published story without going through the whole re-submission process. If that's the case, I agree, though I don't understand why it should be a privilege. Time on the site and the number of stories published have nothing to do with the need to edit out pesky typos or incorrect punctuation.

If my interpretation was incorrect, I apologize.

 

[djrip]

These were her words.

"And most of all- self editing. I would establish a threshold, based on some sort of combination of time on the site and number of works published, that would allow authors who meet the criteria being given the privilege of editing their own work at will. Abuse of the ability would result in its revocation."

I misinterpreted that to mean that a story couldn't posted if it was self edited. I could also interpret it to mean that an author could edit a published story without going through the whole re-submission process. If that's the case, I agree, though I don't understand why it should be a privilege. Time on the site and the number of stories published have nothing to do with the need to edit out pesky typos or incorrect punctuation.

If my interpretation was incorrect, I apologize.

I think the privilege part was to limit it to people who have demonstrated some trustworthiness to not abuse it, such as by posting a story with 18 year olds and then editing them to 16 or something like that.