what are your thoughts on the rating system?

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.

Favoriting is still be used just to mark stories for future read. It doesn't have a solid connection to stories being highlighted as special reads.
 
Favoriting is still be used just to mark stories for future read. It doesn't have a solid connection to stories being highlighted as special reads.

And being manipulated worse than voting.
 
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.

That's going to HEAVILY favour categories that get lots of eyeballs, like Incest, at the expense of less-read cats.
 
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).

Clarification - I don't have any strong feelings about deleting or keeping the 'H', I was just commenting that it'd be easy to do.

My preferred option would be to give people more options to custom-filter stories, including the ability to set whatever score thresholds they like.
 
Removing the red H would make sense only if one could search for stories above a specific score. But Lit doesn't let you do that. Without this change getting rid of red Hs would take away too much information that readers like.
 
Removing the red H would make sense only if one could search for stories above a specific score. But Lit doesn't let you do that. Without this change getting rid of red Hs would take away too much information that readers like.

The point being, though, with the hard 4.5 mark, the reader isn't really getting what they think they are. They are getting what is being manipulated for them to think is there.

But this gets really tiresome. The Web site owners aren't listening. They don't care.
 
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.

This would not work, the reason being that some categories of stories get a lot more views, and therefore a lot more favorites, while other categories don't. The result of this process would be that some categories, like incest, which gets huge numbers of views, would have lots of mediocre stories with red Hs while other categories would have very few stories with red Hs.
 
With the Advanced search, You can filter stories on being 'Editor's Choice', 'Contest Winners' and 'Hot'. As such, the 'Hot' status does have an influence on search results.

In addition, you can sort stories on (among other options) 'Vote Score' and 'Number of Comments'

I know that. And this is precisely why you can't get rid of the red H system unless you replace it with a system where readers can search for stories by score. If you don't do this, readers can't search for stories that they think are good. This significantly impairs the ability of readers to find stories they like.

Something we as authors need to keep in mind is that the readers outnumber us by a lot and are more important to this site than we are. It makes no sense whatsoever, from the site's point of view, to make things nicer or more pleasant for us authors by removing features that enable readers to maximize their use and enjoyment of this site.
 
This would not work, the reason being that some categories of stories get a lot more views, and therefore a lot more favorites, while other categories don't. The result of this process would be that some categories, like incest, which gets huge numbers of views, would have lots of mediocre stories with red Hs while other categories would have very few stories with red Hs.

Proof of this happening is easy to verify. Look at the top 250 most favorite stories. Roughly 90% of them are incest. But then again, this list is being manipulated as much as the top favorite authors list.
 
The point being, though, with the hard 4.5 mark, the reader isn't really getting what they think they are. They are getting what is being manipulated for them to think is there.

But this gets really tiresome. The Web site owners aren't listening. They don't care.


I agree with this somewhat, but I can say that as a reader I would be irked if the site deprived me of the ability to search for stories that have a red H. A red H is a highly imperfect proxy for quality, but it's much more than nothing. If you take a significant sample of 4.7 stories and a significant sample of 4.2 stories, the average quality of 4.7 stories will be higher. You may disagree with that assessment, but I can say confidently that having read stories here for 12 years or more it fits my assessment, and I would not want to be deprived of the ability to search for stories on terms that I think will yield the stories I want.

The alternative would be to get rid of the somewhat arbitrary 4.5/red H system and replace it with a system that enables readers to search for stories by whatever score parameters they choose. Ideally the site should have this function.

You've been wading through these dead-end debates a lot longer than I have, so I understand if it's tiresome. I'm still learning things here so it's still interesting to me.
 
Proof of this happening is easy to verify. Look at the top 250 most favorite stories. Roughly 90% of them are incest. But then again, this list is being manipulated as much as the top favorite authors list.

I'm curious what "manipulation" means. I've seen that charge made before and I'm naive/ignorant enough not to understand what it implies.
 
Something we as authors need to keep in mind is that the readers outnumber us by a lot and are more important to this site than we are. It makes no sense whatsoever, from the site's point of view, to make things nicer or more pleasant for us authors by removing features that enable readers to maximize their use and enjoyment of this site.

Not forgetting that a lot of readers here are VERY smart people. To start with they can read. LOL. Just joking with that one, but I never cease to be amazed at the backgrounds of readers that email me. I chat with a lot of them offline now and honestly, if I was here to make connections! Wow! They know there way round and they might not be too interested in the ratings and views that we are, but they know how to find the stories they like.
 
Proof of this happening is easy to verify. Look at the top 250 most favorite stories. Roughly 90% of them are incest. But then again, this list is being manipulated as much as the top favorite authors list.

Can someone enlighten me how the gamers who are 'manipulating' the top positions mobilise the sheer number of votes needed to move the stories around, against the massive inertia of the tens of thousands of Lit readers who just merrily go about their business, voting roughly one in every hundred views on the thousands of new stories?

I know the comps (used to? maybe not so much now, who knows) bring out the writer blocks (I'll vote up your story if you vote up mine, and we'll both vote down his); but isn't that just futzing with the tiny percentage of stories that are in the comps?

In any kind of trend analysis, extremes and out-riders like the top lists and the comp entries are surely the ones to disregard, with the far greater smoothing effects of the great unwashed masses voting in their thousands, on thousands of stories, being the ones who are in fact defining what a Red H indicates.

Maybe I'm just a fan of the idea that, if enough people regularly follow a behaviour, the indicators of that behaviour mean something (even if there is no consensus what that something is).
 
I'm curious what "manipulation" means. I've seen that charge made before and I'm naive/ignorant enough not to understand what it implies.

I've been watching several people on the favorites lists for a good number of years. One of which hasn't posted a story in going on five years but gets just enough favorites everyday to stay exactly 50 favorites above the guy below him who has posted dozens of stories. I'm talking top 10 of the favorites list. The same thing happens on this persons top favorited stories.

Funny thing is, the same number of favorites show up on the guys above and below me. Yes, i pissed this person off ten years ago. Also the same number of favorites show up on all of the up and coming Incest authors and stories.

Also he has accidentally put me on the wrong card a time or two. By doing some checking, I found that this Alt and others had dozens of friends with the same name but different numbers, some ranging upwards of 500+. All it takes is a throwaway e-mail address and some time. Writing a script to do the tedious part wouldn't be hard for that matter.

And yes, this information has been sent to the powers that be. Result? They can't see it even though they have complete access to the whole data base.

Funny what you notice if you know where to look and have a fairly good memory for numbers and trends.
 
This would not work, the reason being that some categories of stories get a lot more views, and therefore a lot more favorites, while other categories don't. The result of this process would be that some categories, like incest, which gets huge numbers of views, would have lots of mediocre stories with red Hs while other categories would have very few stories with red Hs.

Also (should've thought of this earlier) it favours older stories, and it becomes self-perpetuating: more faves = higher ranking = more views = more faves... so new stories are unlikely to break into the top positions, no matter how good they are.

Voting and recommendation systems are hard, even if you don't have to worry about deliberate gaming.
 
I've been watching several people on the favorites lists for a good number of years. One of which hasn't posted a story in going on five years but gets just enough favorites everyday to stay exactly 50 favorites above the guy below him who has posted dozens of stories. I'm talking top 10 of the favorites list. The same thing happens on this persons top favorited stories.

Interesting, thanks. What intrigues me is why the effort? - unless the high rankings are steering readers off-site where there are dollars involved. But if not that, what's the point?
 
Interesting, thanks. What intrigues me is why the effort? - unless the high rankings are steering readers off-site where there are dollars involved. But if not that, what's the point?

From past history, stroking their own ego and disruption of anything and everything they can.
 
I've been watching several people on the favorites lists for a good number of years. One of which hasn't posted a story in going on five years but gets just enough favorites everyday to stay exactly 50 favorites above the guy below him who has posted dozens of stories. I'm talking top 10 of the favorites list. The same thing happens on this persons top favorited stories.

Funny thing is, the same number of favorites show up on the guys above and below me. Yes, i pissed this person off ten years ago. Also the same number of favorites show up on all of the up and coming Incest authors and stories.

Also he has accidentally put me on the wrong card a time or two. By doing some checking, I found that this Alt and others had dozens of friends with the same name but different numbers, some ranging upwards of 500+. All it takes is a throwaway e-mail address and some time. Writing a script to do the tedious part wouldn't be hard for that matter.

And yes, this information has been sent to the powers that be. Result? They can't see it even though they have complete access to the whole data base.

Funny what you notice if you know where to look and have a fairly good memory for numbers and trends.

What makes my mind reel is that anyone would go to such trouble to manipulate something so . . . inconsequential. It takes a special kind of pettiness to do that.
 
Some people and their lives, huh? If I cared, I'd worry for them...

Well we had that discussion before and yes, in one category at least it's very obvious someone has figured out how to game the ratings successfully. Quite fascinating. They really do stroke their own egos. I half suspect they write a lot of their own comments because the wording is so similar. All their scores are consistently high for what is fairly mediocre writing.

That said, I only care about it when someone games the ratings in competitions and uses it to take other authors down. Gaming your own score is just masturbating publicly, it's only yourself your fooling. In competitions, it's cheating and when you target other authors stories, it's worse than that. I think Literotica does owe it to its authors to police the competitions rather better but so far, no dice.
 
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What makes my mind reel is that anyone would go to such trouble to manipulate something so . . . inconsequential. It takes a special kind of pettiness to do that.

I don't know, considering how much time, effort, and space gets devoted on the forum to story comments and ratings and how to get more and better ones.
 
I don't know, considering how much time, effort, and space gets devoted on the forum to story comments and ratings and how to get more and better ones.

Well it's not really inconsequential is it? Ratings and views are all we have to assess how readers view our stories so for those of us that care, they're important.
 
I don't know, considering how much time, effort, and space gets devoted on the forum to story comments and ratings and how to get more and better ones.

The difference is that the AH babble is, on the whole, how to write content that somehow "appeals" to our mystery 1:100 voting reader, not spending the effort to manipulate scores after the product is published.

I understand trying to target content and to improve your reader satisfaction that way, if that's important to a writer. What I don't get is the mind-set that plays behind the scenes to manipulate rankings - that's the puzzling bit of all this to me.
 
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