Story with strangely high views

TarnishedPenny said:

It really doesn't matter who's doing it. There are all kinds of possibilities, assuming somebody is deliberately inflating views.

• just an experiment, innocent curiosity
• a demonstration: Hey, guys, look what I can do!
• a practical experiment designed to determine ways of swaying votes in other ways.
• mere japery, a not particularly malicious prank
• an attempt to embarrass somebody or otherwise influence their behavior
• simple ego-boosting (back to a six-year-old cheating at solitaire)

I'm sure there are others. Does this mean that it had to have been done for one of those reasons? Of course not, but my point is that there are all kinds of possible reasons for somebody doing something apparently silly like this.

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Fucking japery. It's always japery.

Bloody japes, always getting the best of me.

JasonClearwater said:

Fucking japery. It's always japery.

Bloody japes, always getting the best of me.

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Are "fucking japery" and "mere japery" two different things?

I don't think I've ever used "japery" in a sentence before. There's always a first time.

SimonDoom said:

Are "fucking japery" and "mere japery" two different things?

I don't think I've ever used "japery" in a sentence before. There's always a first time.

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'Mere japery' is having buffoonish fun, like the surprise use of a feather in foreplay. 'Fucking japery' would be using the whole chicken.

TarnishedPenny said:

'Mere japery' is having buffoonish fun, like the surprise use of a feather in foreplay. 'Fucking japery' would be using the whole chicken.

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So many things are clearer to me now. Thank you.

It's probably a glitch.

That said, climbing the Top List, either 30 days or 12 months does give you more reads.

I've noticed that before with new incest stories. It gets a strong number of views the first 3-4 days, dips for a while, then if it's lucky enough to reach the higher end of the 30 day Top List, then the views will grow.

And if it's lucky enough to reach the top 20 of the 12 Month list, then it'll grow more. If it reaches the upper echelon of the 12 Month list, then it'll grow more.

People do look at those lists and they'll see your story.

HeyAll said:

It's probably a glitch.

That said, climbing the Top List, either 30 days or 12 months does give you more reads.

I've noticed that before with new incest stories. It gets a strong number of views the first 3-4 days, dips for a while, then if it's lucky enough to reach the higher end of the 30 day Top List, then the views will grow.

And if it's lucky enough to reach the top 20 of the 12 Month list, then it'll grow more. If it reaches the upper echelon of the 12 Month list, then it'll grow more.

People do look at those lists and they'll see your story.

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I've noticed this pattern too. I've kept track of my stories since I started publishing over a year ago, and out of interest I've tracked other stories because I'm curious how this site works, and I was curious how my story was doing compared to others.

For example, your Bus Ride story was published only 3 days before my story, but it has 50,000+ more views. But its pattern has been normal. I noticed when my story was first published that Bus Ride already was going gangbusters and it's kept on the same track. Nothing unusual, it's just been popular.

This new story M was an anomaly. Almost all the top stories on the 30-day list are incest stories, and this was a romance story with a fairly low score. Its results now seem to be normal, but for a while, they were off the charts.

More than a quarter million views in a couple of weeks for a Romance story? With a low score from some of the highest rating readers on Lit? No way is that real. Stories can take off, but not in Romance and not like that for what is apparently a mediocre story. So something went wrong or was made to go wrong. Another arbiter of quality on Lit shown to be subject to manipulation. No surprise I guess.

Views mean absolutely nothing. The good a high view count does is get you on the most read list, but that doesn't even mean anything.

I could write a batch file that looped endlessly and all it did is open a browser and got to a specific url then close the browser and start over.

Big deal.

Seems to me the only likely explanation would be that someone wrote a bot to gain votes, but failed.

The first part worked (reloading the page) but the next two parts of repeat voting didn't somehow. Probably went straight to the last stage but missed the second.

I asked my mom to open up my Literotica story list and give each submission 5 stars.

Turns out that was a bad idea.

Oblimo said:

I asked my mom to open up my Literotica story list and give each submission 5 stars.

Turns out that was a bad idea.

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"Mom, okay, I'll write something about you. Just stop the one-bombs already!"

TarnishedPenny said:

'Mere japery' is having buffoonish fun, like the surprise use of a feather in foreplay. 'Fucking japery' would be using the whole chicken.

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Boiled, Roasted or Fried ?

Handley_Page said:

Boiled, Roasted or Fried ?

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Yes.

TarnishedPenny said:

'Mere japery' is having buffoonish fun, like the surprise use of a feather in foreplay. 'Fucking japery' would be using the whole chicken.

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Would it work if vegetarians used carrot(s)?

Handley_Page said:

Boiled, Roasted or Fried ?

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'Boiled' to try it, 'roasted' when one's partner figures out what is going on and 'fried' when the story hits Facebook.

More weirdness. After gaining about 450 views the day before yesterday, "M" gained over 91,000 views in the last 24 hours. So something is definitely screwy. It's up to 359,835 views after 21 days, with a 4.02 score in Romance. If that's a bot, it's an impressive bot!

And it only has 44 votes according to the Top List.

HeyAll said:

And it only has 44 votes according to the Top List.

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Yep. A ratio of 8178 views per vote. The norm seems to be around 80-100 views per vote.

I've been tracking this story, "M", which was published on May 25, over 40 days ago, because of its bizarre view counts. Two days ago it received about 100 views in 24 hours. Yesterday it received 84,043. It's received over 569,000 views, which puts it far above any other Lit story in the last 12 months. Obviously, something fishy is going on. The story has a score of only 3.88. 4 comments (2 of which accuse the author of being a cheater) and 4 favorites.

I've read comments from people saying that someone is using bots. How does that work, exactly? How do they generate fake viewers and increase the view count, and how would you set it up to achieve such extraordinary results one day and no results another day?

SimonDoom said:

I've been tracking this story, "M", which was published on May 25, over 40 days ago, because of its bizarre view counts. Two days ago it received about 100 views in 24 hours. Yesterday it received 84,043. It's received over 569,000 views, which puts it far above any other Lit story in the last 12 months. Obviously, something fishy is going on. The story has a score of only 3.88. 4 comments (2 of which accuse the author of being a cheater) and 4 favorites.

I've read comments from people saying that someone is using bots. How does that work, exactly? How do they generate fake viewers and increase the view count, and how would you set it up to achieve such extraordinary results one day and no results another day?

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Have you quizzed Laurel? The back room should be able to interrogate something.

Maybe it's one of Vlad the Lad's boys, likes a bit of Romance before a good hack.

SimonDoom said:

I've read comments from people saying that someone is using bots. How does that work, exactly? How do they generate fake viewers and increase the view count, and how would you set it up to achieve such extraordinary results one day and no results another day?

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You don't need to call it a bot. It would just be a little script. The one I wrote and described back closer to the beginning of the thread was four lines. It used a simple utility inside a loop to access the first page of a story and dumped the results into a file that was overwritten each time it looped.

84,000 views in a day means that it's accessing the page almost once/second around the clock. It could also mean that someone is running multiple copies of their program.

Getting a hundred views per day probably just means that they didn't run the program that day, or ran it only briefly.

Why someone would do that is still an open question. If Laurel or Manu knew it was happening, they'd probably stop it.

electricblue66 said:

Have you quizzed Laurel? The back room should be able to interrogate something.

Maybe it's one of Vlad the Lad's boys, likes a bit of Romance before a good hack.

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I reported the story, previously, and again today after I saw those absurd results. No response.

SimonDoom said:

More weirdness. After gaining about 450 views the day before yesterday, "M" gained over 91,000 views in the last 24 hours.

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SimonDoom said:

Two days ago it received about 100 views in 24 hours. Yesterday it received 84,043. It's received over 569,000 views, which puts it far above any other Lit story in the last 12 months. I've read comments from people saying that someone is using bots. How does that work, exactly? How do they generate fake viewers and increase the view count, and how would you set it up to achieve such extraordinary results one day and no results another day?

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My first guess would be that somebody has set their browser to reload this page once a second. Note that there are 86400 seconds in 24 hours, which is very close to the numbers you're reporting.

This is trivially easy to do, though for obvious reasons I'm not going to give a how-to. The quiet spots might mean that they switched off their computer for a while, or were out of internet connection, or something en route detected the spammy behaviour and blocked them for a while.

edit: dunno how I missed NotWise's comment, which makes the same points.

Bramblethorn said:

My first guess would be that somebody has set their browser to reload this page once a second. Note that there are 86400 seconds in 24 hours, which is very close to the numbers you're reporting.

This is trivially easy to do, though for obvious reasons I'm not going to give a how-to. The quiet spots might mean that they switched off their computer for a while, or were out of internet connection, or something en route detected the spammy behaviour and blocked them for a while.

edit: dunno how I missed NotWise's comment, which makes the same points.

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Thanks! Yes, definitely better not to say anything further about how it's done. I think even I could figure it out, from what you've said.

SimonDoom said:

Thanks! Yes, definitely better not to say anything further about how it's done. I think even I could figure it out, from what you've said.

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Oh good mercy. Anyone who wanted to could figure it out. It's a freaking one line, trivial bash script, and probably not any harder on windows. Scripting is way easier than most people imagine and How To's are everywhere. The fact that it's apparently happening about 1/second is a huge clue that this is exactly what happened, but a trivial change could give you any rate you wanted (that your computer or internet provider can support.) It's so little time and effort that the "why would anyone do it" isn't meaningful to ask. People will do all sort of wacky things if there's no effort involved. And there's no ongoing cost to the guy running the script; it runs in the background and at 1/sec uses so little bandwidth and CPU that it's not even tying up his computer in a noticeable way. You could run handfuls of them on a $25 raspberry pi and have enough computes left over to keep streaming porn all day.

I agree there's no point in it from an author's point of view, but a (likely unintended) consequence is that Lit might use view counts to market to advertisers: "we have x thousand story hits per day" gets driven up by this technique. Not enough to matter, but maybe enough that they feel a lack of incentive to stop it.

Having done it, the guy will eventually get bored, and maybe forget to restart it when he reboots next. It might be funny if a solidly mediocre romance story topped all view statistics on an incest site, but it doesn't change anything in anyone's life. Expect this to become intermittent and then someday stop, is my guess.

Of course, having talked about it here, someone else might do it too, and then it becomes an arms race to see who can get the biggest count. Still nothing changes, except they'd both become invested in keeping it up for years.

Humans. What can you do.