The Official Authors' Hangout Halloween 2023 Contest Support Thread

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

Oh boy, not me! My contest placement gave the story a huge boost in terms of views and votes, and I had nearly the same number of views in the first 16 hours after the announcement as I did in the five days prior to that. At the time I placed I had 28 votes, and now I have 47, not quite 24 hours later. But the score took a dive. It's down to 4.81 now, from 4.93. I don't care that much, because the score still is high enough to get it a lot of attention and people are going to read it, and that's what I care about. But still, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that contest placements are bad for the score.

Math tells me that, after the contest closed, to get from 4.93 to 4.81, the new 19 votes averaged 4.63. You could see that as a dive, but I see it as a reasonable result of people checking out a story that placed in a contest. It's still a really good score, for what might be thought of as regression to the mean.