what are your thoughts on the rating system?

SimonDoom said:

About 70 percentile. A "C." I'm distressed.

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I told you. If it gives me wood, it's an automatic 5*.

rj

My two highest scoring, red-H stories are probably my favourites that I’ve posted here (Bowling for Clothes and Nikki!s Naked Weekend). Conversely, a recent story I posted which was a bit of a leftover, behind-the-sack-of-the-sofa job (I wrote it earlier in the year and only remembered and posted it last week) sits around 4.39-4.41 - not bad but likely to be ignored by those who only read the Hot stuff.

And that’s... okay, because Roommate’s Revenge wasn’t something I worked hard on or felt attached to.

All ratings systems are flawed in some way but to me at least, it seems the ratings I receive here match my own opinion of my work, so I’m inclined to trust them even if, as you say, there is a great disparity between number of readers and number of eaters.

As much as I like a graded ratings scheme, I think Lit should go for a binary "Thumbs up/thumbs down" voting system. I mean, considering that most votes either are 1's or 5's and anything below a 5 is considered bad anyway, why bother with anything more? Ask the reader if they liked the story and tally the "yes" and "no" votes, with the option to comment.

Blind_Justice said:

As much as I like a graded ratings scheme, I think Lit should go for a binary "Thumbs up/thumbs down" voting system. I mean, considering that most votes either are 1's or 5's and anything below a 5 is considered bad anyway, why bother with anything more? Ask the reader if they liked the story and tally the "yes" and "no" votes, with the option to comment.

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What do you do with the millions of votes already cast?

It's not that simple. It would also be just as flawed. An internet poll is an internet poll.

sr71plt said:

The regular zapping pattern on my stories pretty much negates any thought that the ratings mean much of anything in the way of comparative quality (of the stories of others or even to my other stories). I think I have a good idea how good my stories are comparative to my other stories, which doesn't match the ratings they are given, and I read very few stories here by anyone else, so I have no idea or belief on how mine compare with others (beyond getting the impression that most others are much more uncertain about their stories than I am about mine).

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You're also publishing and selling your stories successfully which gives you an independent measure of the market and I'm sure this contributes to your sense of security about your story telling abilities. Me, i haven't got to that stage although I'm getting closer. The only measure of "successs" I have right now is how well my stories rate on LIT and how viewed they are relative to other stories in the same category.

NotWise said:

The ratings are a popularity thing. They have little or nothing to do with technique and everything to do with content.

...

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That isn't wholly true - of stories. Sometimes I get low votes because I post on the General Board and some of my opinions are unpopular. How do I know? Because I've had a couple of emails telling me that they have deliberately down-voted my latest story. Of course those emails are from disposable accounts.

I also get low votes in the Fetish category. Fetish stories are odd. If the story is YOUR fetish - it's brilliant no matter how badly it's written. If it ISN'T your fetish and particularly if it's a fetish that you think is sick - a 1-bomb is left. It is hard to get a 4.5 in fetish.

Votes schmotes... whatever. I write what I write, and it seems every time I want to something more serious than 'fuck & suck', I get low votes. Stopped caring about it. The story in my signature, 'Abandonement', is one of my lowest scored stories, and yet it's one of my favorites. C'est La Vie...

Scores can be gamed. Write a lurid series of 2-page incest strokers, or pulp modeled on top-listed tales in less-read categories. My first successes were in Group Sex -- not many votes, but high scores. If you want to be rewarded with brownie points (views, votes, scores, faves) then write to formula. After awhile they may become tedious; then you can write for yourself.

What I'd like to see is a "Favorite story of the month" voting added to the site. Each user account can select one story published in that month as their favorite story of the month. So I could select one story published in November 2017 as my November 2017 favorite story of the month. There would be a Favorite Story of the Month page for each category so readers could read what's the most liked. It'd have archives so readers could search back for prior hits. It would be another way for writers to get positive feedback for their story and another way for readers to find "top" stories.

Four ways to burn it down, one way to burn it down, it doesn't matter. If someone wants to burn it down, they will.

Any internet rating system is going to be dominated by the extremes. The people who finish it and love it are going to vote. The people who hate it or are just jerk-offs/trolls are going to vote. Everybody else will go "Meh..." and move on.

What a two-tier system would do is kill new authors and low-vote categories, because the number of up-votes will become the new attractor. Don't get enough of them, and it's tumbleweeds. The ratio won't mean crap to readers.

RubenR said:

No, an up/down vote is not just as flawed. If you only consider stories with hot, >4.5 rating to be good, a single 1* vote compensates seven 5* votes.

I think I would be more inclined to vote when there would be the "Thumbs up/thumbs down" voting system. The way the vote values turn out now, there is only one way to indicate you appreciated the story (5* vote), but four ways, in different gradations, to burn it down. I know, I should be happy with any indication that the reader likes the story (3* or more) but it just doesn't work that way.

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I don't know what the solution is.

It can get pretty frustrating to get reads/feedback if you don't have a following and your story is bombed out of the gate and lingers in the 3-point-somethings when it's at the top of the heap.

My latest story has the comment, 'Don't understand why this isn't rated higher.' which shows how important the ratings are. I don't know if it deserves to be rated higher - it's pretty niche (gay bears & UK English) - but many say they go by score and 4.2-3 just ain't cutting it. It was the top story on the New list for half a day, but on 3-point-something for most of it. I doubt I would have clicked on it.

It does discourage me from adding stories here though. I'll never be prolific - posting a story a week is beyond me - so I don't get a loyal following. Feels like shouting into the void.

C'est la vie. *shrugs*

I think it works fine the way it is. There's ups and downs to every option and this one works ok. Changing it would be fiddling with something that works fine most of the time. You'll never fix trolls, they'll find a way round any preventatives

RejectReality said:

Four ways to burn it down, one way to burn it down, it doesn't matter. If someone wants to burn it down, they will.

Any internet rating system is going to be dominated by the extremes. The people who finish it and love it are going to vote. The people who hate it or are just jerk-offs/trolls are going to vote. Everybody else will go "Meh..." and move on.

What a two-tier system would do is kill new authors and low-vote categories, because the number of up-votes will become the new attractor. Don't get enough of them, and it's tumbleweeds. The ratio won't mean crap to readers.

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i guess one of the things i've been wondering about is the troll vote which i've read of in other threads. i guess i'm naive, it just never occurred to me that people bash for the sake of bashing. also, i've gotten repeated comments re: gay incest stories griping "Why is this here and not in the gay male section?". i'm sure they also give me a crappy vote for something i can't control, i'd rather be in the gay section. also, i've gotten two feedback comments a month apart. one complained that my stories aren't romantic enough, the other complained that i was putting too much romance in the sex scenes. obviously, you can't please everybody and i'm writing to entertain myself more than anything else, so fuck'em if they can't take a joke. but when a story shows over 10,000 hits and only 200 people have voted i think that is a misleading situation. i already know that the voting is stupid and worthless, i just wondered if i was the only one who feels that way.

I prefer to have the voting and comments system we have compared to no response at all.

Before I came to Literotica I posted on Yahoo Adult Groups. With a few very rare exceptions my stories got no response at all. I didn't know whether anyone had looked at them (no views counted) or if they liked or hated them. There was nothing.

Even Literotica's views give me some indication about which of my stories (or story titles) have attracted people (and bots) to look at them.

The votes and ratings? If I'm writing in the Fetish category I know I'm unlikely to get high ratings. Those who like THAT fetish will like the story but they are always outnumbered by people who hate it, or who think it misses their fetish by a little bit and are disappointed.

redzinger said:

I don't know what the solution is...

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The solution is to stop looking at the ratings as pass/fail or wank/eww.

The ratings system lets the author know where he stands in the overall scheme. A 3.XX means you have to work harder to find the sweet spot that pleases the readership. A 4.XX means you found it - for THAT story. A 2 means you need some serious help somewhere in your writing, organization, plotting, and presentation.

Use the ratings for what it is. A tool to help you write better; not something to stroke your own ego.

HisArpy said:

The solution is to stop looking at the ratings as pass/fail or wank/eww.

The ratings system lets the author know where he stands in the overall scheme. A 3.XX means you have to work harder to find the sweet spot that pleases the readership. A 4.XX means you found it - for THAT story. A 2 means you need some serious help somewhere in your writing, organization, plotting, and presentation.

Use the ratings for what it is. A tool to help you write better; not something to stroke your own ego.

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As far as my stories are concerned:

A 3.xx lower than 3.50 usually means it was Femdom. That annoys 'real men'.
A 2.xx means it was Femdom AND Fetish. That incenses 'real men' who can barely avoid spluttering their beer all over the keyboard.
A 3.xx higher than 3.50 is a reasonable story that is unpopular.
Anything above 4.00? The trolls haven't found it yet.

RejectReality said:

What do you do with the millions of votes already cast?

It's not that simple. It would also be just as flawed. An internet poll is an internet poll.

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I think it would be doable to do what has been suggested for years--since the site presentation was changed so that ratings were revealed to readers on the author's list for all stories after ten votes had been reached. Just drop the Hot marking altogether and the reader can look at the rating number to decide whether they want to read that story or not. Over time readers would forget that 4.5 was a magic target number for trolls and authors alike. This should be doable with minimum program change, shouldn't it?

rae121452 said:

....but when a story shows over 10,000 hits and only 200 people have voted i think that is a misleading situation. i already know that the voting is stupid and worthless, i just wondered if i was the only one who feels that way.

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That's one vote for every 50 views which is about twice as good as the average. You've got HIGH reader engagement there. Way better than the norm. If I got that on all my stories I'd be happy. Very happy. Dancing and singing in fact.

ChloeTzang said:

You're also publishing and selling your stories successfully which gives you an independent measure of the market and I'm sure this contributes to your sense of security about your story telling abilities. Me, i haven't got to that stage although I'm getting closer. The only measure of "successs" I have right now is how well my stories rate on LIT and how viewed they are relative to other stories in the same category.

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It's not the royalty report that tells me what individual work is selling well and what isn't. I have over 200 words in the marketplace under various pen names, so I only look at the bottom line on the royalty reports. I can tell what is selling best, though, by looking at the store sites of the various distributors and seeing from the book page marking of sales rank what work is selling better than others (the extreme fetish themes). And I suppose that, if I were obsessed with what readers thought or even bought, I'd pay a lot of attention. But I write what I want to write and am just happy that it brings in some return rather than just is a hobby I shell money out for. If it were that, just a hobby I shell money out for, I'd probably still do that. I run a mainstream writing contest and anthology for developing authors that loses money, but I still want to do it to help writers get publishing credits, so I do it and consider it's my cigarette money that I save by not smoking.

HisArpy said:

A 3.XX means you have to work harder to find the sweet spot that pleases the readership. A 4.XX means you found it - for THAT story.

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The whole point here is that it doesn't mean that. It doesn't necessarily mean anything concerning your story. The greater meaning is in who voted on your story and why. This Web site is a voting sieve. It doesn't provide a set group of knowledgeable readers who are voting on it, and the system is open (although it tries to mitigate that with the sweeps) to your ship of writing to be struggling in the waters because of the number of malicious troll barnacles that have attached themselves to the hull.

The whole point is that the ratings don't come from a knowledgeable, objective base assessing the story in all of its elements. So, as an author, just don't think of it as a reliable assessment of either your writing or story-telling ability--or that readers here telling you how to "improve" your writing have any idea what the hell they are talking about or are as interested in helping you improve as they are in puffing themselves up.

sr71plt said:

I think it would be doable to do what has been suggested for years--since the site presentation was changed so that ratings were revealed to readers on the author's list for all stories after ten votes had been reached. Just drop the Hot marking altogether and the reader can look at the rating number to decide whether they want to read that story or not. Over time readers would forget that 4.5 was a magic target number for trolls and authors alike. This should be doable with minimum program change, shouldn't it?

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I'd think so. The easiest way to do it might be to replace the 'H' image that currently displays with something so small as to be invisible.

Originally Posted by HisArpy View Post
A 3.XX means you have to work harder to find the sweet spot that pleases the readership. A 4.XX means you found it - for THAT story.

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sr71plt said:

The whole point here is that it doesn't mean that. It doesn't necessarily mean anything concerning your story. The greater meaning is in who voted on your story and why.

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Yes, that's the whole point. It doesn't mean what most readers and writers think it means. It's a precise measurement of nothing. "I liked it" on a scale of 0 to 5 to three significant digits!

The whole thing reminds me of the voting on tunes on American Bandstand in the 50's.
Kid #1: "It had a great beat and you can dance to it."
Kid #2: "I like the way my poodle skirt twirls when I dance to it."

Everyone assigns the same numbering system to entirely different parameters.

Anyway, enough of that. My interest in the subject wasn't to see it eliminated. A lot of people enjoy it, and it's easy enough to ignore or shut off.

I agree with you and Bramblethorn that deleting the Red H would help. It removes some of the built-in bias towards stories that tend to score high making them score even higher (definitely a positive feedback loop).

As Bramble points out, it would be a very easy fix. Replace the H image with an image of a single white pixel. Done.

Ha ha. Done. Right. I can hear the screaming now as the listings go black and blue...

rj

another simple solution would be to employ the "favorites" function. get rid of the whole voting process and instead, after a story is "favorited" a certain number of times it would get the red h.

ChloeTzang said:

I think it works fine the way it is. There's ups and downs to every option and this one works ok. Changing it would be fiddling with something that works fine most of the time. You'll never fix trolls, they'll find a way round any preventatives

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Agree. As a trend indicator of something (exactly what is for each writer to worry about individually) it's ok. It's got some sort of scaling (for better or worse); it's understood by each of us in the way we each understand it and react to it; it's got a line in the sand (the Red H) so there's a bar set.

Alternatives such as a pure binary yes/no don't have the subtle whatever it is that's inherent in a 3:97 vs a 4:94. Provided people don't think a high score means "literary merit" they'll be OK - but a high score does mean merit of a sort, especially when coupled to other inputs like comments.

Anyway, it is what it is, it's not going to change in a hurry. Meanwhile, the approx 1:100 vote to viewers are out there doing their thing, with whatever logic they do it. And they're not going to change in a hurry either. Any human activity done en masse generates a pattern, and any change in that pattern might be a trend, it might be error. But it's something.

(You can probably tell here that my world doesn't operate in black and white, but every shade in between... and sometimes I get colours too.)

rjordan said:

Yes, that's the whole point. It doesn't mean what most readers and writers think it means. It's a precise measurement of nothing. "I liked it" on a scale of 0 to 5 to three significant digits!

The whole thing reminds me of the voting on tunes on American Bandstand in the 50's.
Kid #1: "It had a great beat and you can dance to it."
Kid #2: "I like the way my poodle skirt twirls when I dance to it."

Everyone assigns the same numbering system to entirely different parameters.

Anyway, enough of that. My interest in the subject wasn't to see it eliminated. A lot of people enjoy it, and it's easy enough to ignore or shut off.

I agree with you and Bramblethorn that deleting the Red H would help. It removes some of the built-in bias towards stories that tend to score high making them score even higher (definitely a positive feedback loop).

As Bramble points out, it would be a very easy fix. Replace the H image with an image of a single white pixel. Done.

Ha ha. Done. Right. I can hear the screaming now as the listings go black and blue...

rj

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If you want to remove the perception that a high-score has a bias then the best thing would be to hide the ratings and the H for 30 days. No one knows what it scores until after the 30 days from published date has run so all a reader has to go on is the fact that a story is "new" or not. This is what a real life author has to face - no info for at least 30 days (sometimes 60) so it wouldn't be uncommon.

This might weed out the 1-bombs and trolling. It might not so sweep frequencies may have to be increased. Or take away anonymous voting. Authors don't need to know who voted, just the mods/Laurel/Manu to get rid of the trolls. X number of 1-bombs or ridiculously high voting frequency in a short period of time and that account is closed permanently.

Latecomers would get the benefit of all the earlier risk takers but shouldn't be allowed to vote. Views, feedback and comments yes, but no votes. Thus, after 30 days, that's the score the story has for eternity.

I actually like the H because it's like a merit based gold star. I try hard to write well and make the stories interesting. That someone recognized that kind of expenditure of effort and wrote code to give an "award" for it means something. What, exactly, it does mean I don't know, but it IS something more than "meh" or "thanks for contributing". A high rating score doesn't give that extra kick that the H does either. If you want the H you have to write something that earns it. Not so easy to do and for some it's a prize like a brass ring on a merry-go-round.

Has Laurel ever given out an E?