As a reader how do you use the rating system?

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

The question was how do you use the rating system. And personally, when I post my work to these kinds of sites---whether it's erotica or fantasy or flash fiction---, I think of it mostly as a collaboration between people with similar passions. I don't expect a reader to adhere to the standards of a critique, but for an author not to, that's a bit disappointing.

Because that's not what the site is asking for.

Again, the site is not asking to rate submissions from "Bad Story" to "Good Story", judging it's literary value and readability. It's asking to rate submissions from "Hate it!" to "Love it!", judging the level of enjoyment I got out of it in order to identify the submissions with the most marketing value.

If you want to know how I personally do it, I rate it based on how much I enjoyed it, and then leave a comment on how to improve. That comment, in most cases, points out logical errors, typos, grammar, and, much too often, the lack of an actual plot.

But, honestly... I also operate under the impression that, if you post your story with ratings and comments enabled, you're (at least to a point) looking for validation. And in that case, you need to know what the readers were looking for when clicking your story, to understand why that validation fails to happen.

So, yeah, I get it. I look like a fat seal out of water as I clap my hands every time I get a 5/5 rating, or read a comment where someone actually fully grasped what my intent in writing my piece was. But I also accept it when people ask for different developments, because that's what they came hoping to find. It's then my choice whether I write for a purpose and am happy with the few people who get that, or if I need to please people and complain about the readers not liking my content.

 

[lustychimera]

judging the level of enjoyment I got out of it in order to identify the submissions with the most marketing value.

You're getting paid?

I don't know about you, but my motivations and the people who run this website's aren't necessarily the same thing.

It's then my choice if I write for a purpose and am happy with the few people who get that,

I don't think this is a great mindset to get into, either. If your goal is to ignore everyone who doesn't "get it," that's an echo chamber. That doesn't do much for self-improvement.

or if I need to please people and complain about the readers not liking my content.

I'm open to all feedback. I post to these kinds of sites to improve my writing. You can't do that without an outside perspective.

I think, in the end, we just have different motivations for posting. I don't take negative feedback as a personal insult, even if it's a troll. If they make a point, I take it under consideration.

And to that end, I critique other authors how I'd like to be critiqued in return. There's more than enough average readers giving their opinions already. I'm not going to change how I do things just because "everyone else is doing it" which is essentially your point.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

And to that end, I critique other authors how I'd like to be critiqued in return. There's more than enough average readers giving their opinions already. I'm not going to change how I do things just because "everyone else is doing it" which is essentially your point.

No. My point is that Literotica, the platform you chose to publish your work on, is actively asking encouraging people to not do what you just described as your ideal rating mechanism. The reason for which brings me to the next point.

You're getting paid?

I don't know about you, but my motivations and the people who run this website's aren't necessarily the same thing.

It's not about ME getting paid, it's about Lit paying for their servers. I could be way off base with this, but I see it this way:

Lit lives off the people visiting their toy store and cam sites. They profit from maximising the amount of visitors they get to this site, since it is here where the toy store and cam sites are advertised. In order to maximise the amount of visitors they get, they have a distinct interest in maximising user satisfaction to increase return rates. After all, people tend to check out higher rated content first (if not exclusively), and if other users enjoyed it, chances are that new users will as well. So, consequently, they have their stories rated based on enjoyment, not on its literary value or how much effort the author put into it, because most users are neither teachers nor authors.

So, yes, your motivation and the people who run this website's are most certainly not the same. But it's what you get when posting here, since your motivation is probably irrelevant to the people running this website.

*EDIT*

To drive the point home:

That's why there is still no blog-feature for authors to properly communicate with their readers. Because it's not about authors sharing their work, but about the readers consuming it.
That's why there is still no proper system for chaptered stories, to finally move away from the "serials" and create some structure in an author's submission page. Because doing so would reduce the number of actual stories they can advertise the site with.
That's why they still don't have a history function for read stories like most other platforms for literature have by now, and why the story-search is still screwed up. Because it's not about discovering literature.
That's why stories are split into pages of 20k Characters. Because a new set of camgirls that might catch my interest is displayed with every pageload, in addition to Lit's users possibly being discouraged from having to read for more than ten minutes at a time.

Again, I could very well be wrong with all of this. But it kinda makes sense to me.

 

[alohadave]

Because that's not what the site is asking for.

But that's not what this thread is asking for. Since none of run this site, and they are notoriously opaque about how they run things, it's pointless to even speculate what the site wants.

After all, people tend to check out higher rated content first (if not exclusively), and if other users enjoyed it, chances are that new users will as well. So, consequently, they have their stories rated based on enjoyment, not on its literary value or how much effort the author put into it, because most users are neither teachers nor authors.

You can rate stories on any scale you like. "Readers" are not a monolithic entity that vote consistently. They all choose their own criteria, no matter what the words under the stars say. For some readers, they get more enjoyment form the literary value, because not all readers are uneducated morons like you are implying.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You can rate stories on any scale you like. "Readers" are not a monolithic entity that vote consistently. They all choose their own criteria, no matter what the words under the stars say. For some readers, they get more enjoyment form the literary value, because not all readers are uneducated morons like you are implying.

This. Whenever this discussion rolls around on its weekly cycle, I often make the point that the collective input of those readers who do rate stories (and yes, in most categories it's only about one percent, which is noise), does have some meaning, because they're each using their own criteria, and one assumes (knowing human behaviour) they're fairly consistent when doing it.

The reader criteria is probably a multiplicity of things, mood dependent certainly (if my own scoring - which tends to be 50/50 - is anything to go by), and probably not the criteria most writers here in the AH seem to use, which tends to be biased high.

So when the collective sigh of readers rates one of your stories higher than another, there's probably a reason behind that difference in rating, enough to pay some attention. I reckon I've got a fair idea which of my stories are better than others, and funnily enough, my own internal ranking is similar to the actual high to low sequence, with a handful of exceptions. Which works as a positive feedback loop.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yes. And pedophilia, which I kinda expected to garner more attention, but... oh well.

Possibly because another author on this forum already did that particular topic to death. Several of us have pointed out several times over that it's a politically-motivated misrepresentation of a film whose purpose is to criticise the way girls that age are pressured into sexualised performance and to point out how damaging that can be. Since the only new thing you're adding to that discussion is misrepresentation of the actresses' ages, it's hard to find much new to say about it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

That's why there is still no blog-feature for authors to properly communicate with their readers. Because it's not about authors sharing their work, but about the readers consuming it.
That's why there is still no proper system for chaptered stories, to finally move away from the "serials" and create some structure in an author's submission page. Because doing so would reduce the number of actual stories they can advertise the site with.
That's why they still don't have a history function for read stories like most other platforms for literature have by now, and why the story-search is still screwed up. Because it's not about discovering literature.
That's why stories are split into pages of 20k Characters. Because a new set of camgirls that might catch my interest is displayed with every pageload, in addition to Lit's users possibly being discouraged from having to read for more than ten minutes at a time.

Again, I could very well be wrong with all of this. But it kinda makes sense to me.

You are assuming that all of these things are deliberate choices, made to optimise Literotica's earnings. The much more likely explanation is that it reflects the way websites were commonly designed back in 1999 back when this site was launched, and these things haven't been changed (so far) because changes require work, and changes on a website with millions of pages of content and almost a quarter-century of technical debt require a LOT of work.

 

[lustychimera]

That's why there is still no blog-feature for authors to properly communicate with their readers. Because it's not about authors sharing their work, but about the readers consuming it.

When I pick a site to post to, it's less about how it's structured and more about how much engagement I think I'm going to get out of it. Honestly, as long as the UI's at least okay-ish, I couldn't give a shit less about it. I'm posting here wholly for the readers consuming it, too. It's popular because it's popular kind of a thing (Though I do dig the early 2000's vibe. Makes it feel like the wild west of the internet all over again which has a bizarre eroticism about it, like you never quite know what's on the other side of the next link.)

Also, I do believe you can do serials as long as you put something like Ch. 1, Ch 2, etc. at the end of your titles. It shows the next chapter in the sidebar while your reading and organizes it in chronological order under the author page.

Probably the only thing I truly lament about the UI is not being able to ping someone in the comments under a story. You're right that something like that makes it difficult to have a real discussion about a work.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Also, I do believe you can do serials as long as you put something like Ch. 1, Ch 2, etc. at the end of your titles. It shows the next chapter in the sidebar while your reading and organizes it in chronological order under the author page.

You can, but the current implementation is more of a bolted-on fix than the kind of thing you'd implement if you were designing for chaptered stories from the start.

For instance, I have two long series and half a dozen single-piece stories here. On my author page, every chapter of those series gets displayed, which makes for quite a cluttered view:



I also post my stories to another site which was designed with serial stories in mind. On those, my author page has a single entry for each story, no matter how many chapters. If somebody wants to look at the individual chapters, there's a pull-down, like this:


Things like content tags, word count etc. are also implemented at the whole-story level rather than by chapter, which helps avoid the problem we have here where you might search for a tag and then get spammed with hits for all the chapters of one story.

 

[lustychimera]

You can, but the current implementation is more of a bolted-on fix than the kind of thing you'd implement if you were designing for chaptered stories from the start.

For instance, I have two long series and half a dozen single-piece stories here. On my author page, every chapter of those series gets displayed, which makes for quite a cluttered view:

View attachment 2237002

I also post my stories to another site which was designed with serial stories in mind. On those, my author page has a single entry for each story, no matter how many chapters. If somebody wants to look at the individual chapters, there's a pull-down, like this:

View attachment 2237004
Things like content tags, word count etc. are also implemented at the whole-story level rather than by chapter, which helps avoid the problem we have here where you might search for a tag and then get spammed with hits for all the chapters of one story.

Yeah, it isn't great, but it does work. I take the site's layout to be more about nostalgia than anything. I guess, out of all the web novel hosting sites, if I had to choose, Royal Road's UI is probably my favorite that I've come across.

Also, off topic, but "Autism" "Sex Work" Melbourne" and "Dad Jokes"? That sounds like a goddamn magnum opus right there!

 

[Bramblethorn]

Yeah, it isn't great, but it does work. I take the site's layout to be more about nostalgia than anything.

Not so much "nostalgia" as "vintage". It was built in 1999, around the end of those Wild West days you mentioned, and while it's evolved in various areas a lot of the site design is still a legacy from that era.

I guess, out of all the web novel hosting sites, if I had to choose, Royal Road's UI is probably my favorite that I've come across.

Also, off topic, but "Autism" "Sex Work" Melbourne" and "Dad Jokes"? That sounds like a goddamn magnum opus right there!

Why thank you! I put a lot of work into that one. (Lit version starts here if you're curious.) I guess it is my magnum opus (so far) as far as Literotica is concerned; it's the equal-longest thing I've written here, and probably the most complex.

It doesn't have a lot of dad jokes, I aimed for about one per chapter, but those tags are for Ao3 which has a very different tagging culture to Literotica. It's fairly common for authors to throw in one or two light-hearted tags along with the more practical ones, and that was one of them. I'd already tagged it for things like BDSM, CNC, and sex work, so I wanted to let people know it wasn't all going to be deathly serious.

 

[onehitwanda]

(Lit version starts here if you're curious.)

Me: "How bad can it be? You've got a few free minutes..."

Also me:

I guess that's it for work this week then. Thanks, @Bramblethorn. Thanks a lot. Really.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Definitely not, but most of the voters are.

How do you have any insight into the 99% of readers who don't vote?

There is zero data on "I've never voted" behaviour. Are you seriously trying to tell us that the 99% represent some kind of superior, esoteric intelligence who place themselves above those who vote? Far more likely to be lazy fucks with very few discriminatory skills, who couldn't be bothered at the best of times.

I must confess, I'm a fan of the Pareto principle, and I'll be the first to admit that 99:1 isn't as good as 80:20, but here we are.

I'll claim the "not most" you acknowledge do exist, and you can fuck about with the rest .

 

[Bramblethorn]

For the person who PMed me a question related to this thread: I'm not ignoring you, but your message is tagged as "closed to further replies" so I can't reply to it.

 

[Trionyx]

Around 90% of those who click on stories don't vote because they don't fucking read them!

And you obtained this statistic where?

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

And you obtained this statistic where?

I agree with Tilan on that matter, since I'm able to see proper stats on other sites. And they support his claim.
Best guess why that is... I think people click on a story because of the category it's in. Only then do they have the chance to check the tags and see if it contains what they're looking for. Other than that, there are also the ones who don't bother with checking the tags (which I can understand, seeing how more and more authors don't bother with providing them), and just start reading until they find something they don't like.

Since Lit saw fit to utitilze Matomo, they should be able to tell the percentage for that as well. And so could you, if Lit's Admins were willing to give you that information regarding your own stories. Just write a story with more than two pages and turn the comments off. By comparing the access-numbers per page, you could draw some conclusions.

If the access-numbers for the first page are significantly higher than for the following two, it would mean that people jump ship halfway through reading your story (assuming people don't accidentally open your stories).
If the access-numbers for the last page are higher than for the previous ones, that would mean that people don't just stop reading, but instead jump to the last page to tell you off (either by vote or comment).
Based on those numbers, you could even check where people stop reading, based on the drop in numbers per page.

 

[Purple_Fronds]

I rate 4-5 or I don't rate at all--with the exception that if a story is just god-awful no grammar trash---to the point that it feels insulting that they'd even expect someone to read it---then it's a 1.

I think of it like a critique, and those I break down into two categories: The people who legitimately want feedback to improve with, and the people just starting out who need some motivation and positive reinforcement. Most of the stories that I've read on here seem to be in the latter category. People are just having fun and wanting to share their writing hobby with others.

And if they want a real constructive critique where I can start to get nitpicky, I figure they'll ask specifically for that in the forums.

Also, I see a ton of non-author and anon commenters leaving harsh criticisms, not because the story was poorly written, but because it didn't hit on the tropes that they expect to see. Like, if a story doesn't satisfy their kinks or goes in a different direction than they expect, it's bad. So, going easy on the author is kind of my way to help balance that out.

There's a lot of entitled readers on here, more so than other web novel/story type sites that I've been on. I guess that just comes with the erotica territory?

Also, I should add, I try not to judge a work based on my personal feelings about it, but rather, whether or not the author fulfilled what seems to be their goal with the piece.

A good critique should never include the reviewer's personal biases. Critiques and reviews not as subjective as people make them out to be.

i feel the same way, 5 stars or no stars. Although even it’s dire I just don’t rate it. Also agree about the comments, really well put.

 

[MetaBob]

i feel the same way, 5 stars or no stars. Although even it’s dire I just don’t rate it. Also agree about the comments, really well put.

Same here. I've done differently exactly once, early in my time here, when a story I enjoyed just had too dang many errors for me to give it 5 stars, so I gave it 4. Months later, I regretted doing so, but by then my rating had somehow gotten locked in.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I agree with Tilan on that matter, since I'm able to see proper stats on other sites. And they support his claim.

You can do all that with chaptered stories. Based on my own, which includes a 17 chapter novel length piece, a 27 chapter shaggy dog tale, several shorter (but still multi-chapter) pieces, and several deliberate experiments, my assessment is that around 20% of those who click in on the first chapter will finish the whole thing. My best "finish" rate is 40%.

Typically, for every hundred who click into chapter one, fifty will click into chapter two, and 20 - 25 will click into chapter three, and most will then stay through to the end. So, in the categories I write in (seventeen so far, but not Tilan's LW), and using my story block as data (a million words or so), I disagree with his "90% don't read."

People might be a bit smarter than he gives them credit for when clicking in on a story. Of course, the retention rate past the first three or four paragraphs depends on the quality of the writing, but my overall score sheet suggests I'm doing okay on that. Not to his gloomy story criteria, I grant you, but 80% of my stories are above 4.20, thereabouts.

 

[LIDiver]

I was naive and made a rookie mistake by publishing my first story in Loving Wives.
I got hammered by the creepers with many one-stars.
So, I feel for others in Loving Wives and will upgrade my rating to them by one or two stars to counteract the creepers. I know it doesn’t make much of a difference but it’s the best I can do.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I was naive and made a rookie mistake by publishing my first story in Loving Wives.
I got hammered by the creepers with many one-stars.
So, I feel for others in Loving Wives and will upgrade my rating to them by one or two stars to counteract the creepers. I know it doesn’t make much of a difference but it’s the best I can do.

The upside is that you've experienced it early and got it done. Wear the rating as a badge of honor and carry on.

 

[Priscilla_June]

I only vote on stories I finish, and as a practical matter seldom finish stories I don't like, so I rarely actually award any scores other than 4 or 5. If I think a story is not good enough to give it a 5 but good enough that I don't want to hurt the author's chances of getting a red H (4.5) then I may choose not to vote.

You are a saint sir, honestly all the readers on this site should take note lol.

I suspect, as I am sure is obviously to all the other authors, most readers do not abstain from voting when they don’t like something.

Based on watching my scores go up and down sporadically, I wonder too if readers vote in sort of a black and white thinking. Basically they either vote 1 if they didnt like it or 5 if they did. It would be interesting to see a bell curve of what star rating is voted most.

I would LOVE if we could actually on our stories see who many of each rating we have gotten vs an average. I think if I had a lower score I’d feel better knowing for sure it was because I had a bunch of 1s weighting it down.

As a reader, I think I align with SimonDoom. I read a story, if I seem themes or a plot I don’t like, I typically just stop reading. If i managed to read through then I’m biased towards 5s because i’m a softy and know how it is as an author. I award 4s maybe if its just kinda “ok” and my coffee hasnt caught up to me yet. :3

 

[SimonDoom]

You are a saint sir, honestly all the readers on this site should take note lol.

That's definitely not true.

I don't think there's anything wrong with giving whatever score you think is appropriate for the story. If you think it deserves a low grade, give it a low grade. With me, though, I just don't finish stories I don't like, and I won't score a story I don't finish.

 

[Priscilla_June]

That's definitely not true.

I don't think there's anything wrong with giving whatever score you think is appropriate for the story. If you think it deserves a low grade, give it a low grade. With me, though, I just don't finish stories I don't like, and I won't score a story I don't finish.

Point taken, but I think if the lever was moved towards your line of thinking, it would be better.

 

[LIDiver]

I’ve also thought it would be fair (and humorous) for Lit to secretly discount all one-star ratings. That could nullify the automatic-one-star creeper trolls.