The Red H Debate (yeah, i know, AGAIN)

[Smuttyandfun]

For the record; I'm not saying the Red H as it stands doesn't have it's uses.

If I'm checking out an author and I click on their story list, sure, I'll probably gravitate to the ones listed Red H first.

Because that's a good place to start to see if I like their style.

Doesn't mean I won't read something rated under 4.5 later though.

I do the same thing. If I check out an author, I often look at their highest rated stories first. If someone has a story at 4.90 and another one that's 4.20, I'll look at the higher one first. If I really like the way they write, I'll probably check out the other one, too.

 

[Bamagan]

Any more work than it is now?

Hot things generally expand, so yes, thanks to inflation, it's probably about 2% more difficult year-to-year, although recently it's been a bit higher.

 

[ronde]

Almost afraid to ask, but who the hell is getting a thousand votes?

I have several stories with more than 1k votes. That said, I believe most of my votes are from readers who happen to like what I write and who read each story as it's published and then vote. I do get a few votes on older stories, but most of the votes come within a couple weeks of the publish date.

I have written for another site where the rating was binary - thumb up or thumb down - and I can attest that it's more misleading than Literotica as far as judging how readers think about a story. I got fewer votes per read and only got any thumbs down when apparently one person voted down every lesbian story on the site. Apparently readers there either liked a story and gave it a thumb up or didn't vote at all.

As far as the "red H" is concerned, it's just an indicator that's useful if you look at the numerical rating along with the number of votes. My logic is that readers who don't like a story usually won't vote. Readers who do like a story will vote a 4 or a 5, and sometimes 3. If you look at how much a low vote really impacts the overall rating, it's minimal unless the story is already teetering on the edge of "Hot" or if there are very few votes. If a story is rated at 4.50 with 100 votes, a single "4" vote will have the same effect as a "1" vote, and most wouldn't consider a rating of "4" to be an indication the reader didn't like the story.

I think the best use of the rating system is to look at the number of votes as well as the rating and try to improve the number of readers who like the story enough to vote. For new writers that will be difficult because they're an unknown. The only cure is to keep writing, look at the ratings and the number of votes, and then look at each story to figure out why one story got more votes or a higher rating. Sometimes the comments can be helpful in that regard.

 

[dasgoodshit]

Any more work than it is now?

It's automatic now, so... yeah. The logic is, "if a story has a 4.5 or higher, put a red H next to the story."

What you are proposing entails doing an analysis of the different genres and the normal number of views, votes, etc., which I'm not against, mind you, I'm just saying that it would be a lot of work to set up, and I don't think Laurel has enough time for that, because it seems like she can barely keep up as it is.

I do agree that a story that has one vote shouldn't have a red H next to it when the one vote was cast by the author. And I do like the idea... I'm just saying that the likelihood of that happening seems... improbable (because the trends can change over time, and then people in the future are going to say, "hey, we need at least 1k votes on a story for it to be hot..."

 

[Djmac1031]

What you are proposing entails doing an analysis of the different genres and the normal number of views, votes, etc., which I'm not against, mind you, I'm just saying that it would be a lot of work to set up, and I don't think Laurel has enough time for that, because it seems like she can barely keep up as it is.

You may be confusing me with someone else's comments.

My only proposal was changing the Red H requirements by lowering the required score to 4 but raising the amount of votes need to trigger the Red H.

Nothing else would change as it would still be the same flat rating system across all catagories.

 

[dasgoodshit]

You may be confusing me with someone else's comments.

My only proposal was changing the Red H requirements by lowering the required score to 4 but raising the amount of votes need to trigger the Red H.

Nothing else would change as it would still be the same flat rating system across all catagories.

For what you are suggesting, the amount of votes would need to be different for every genre, because Incest could get a story to X number of votes 50x faster than, say Fetish or another genre. An analysis would need to be done, and judgment calls made, for every genre, and those would need to change over time due to the change in reader's habits. And that's just not going to happen.

 

[Djmac1031]

hey, we need at least 1k votes on a story for it to be hot..."

I've bounced around on the voting tally requirements in my comments, admittedly.

Let's leave the score at 4.5 or higher for the moment.

1K votes needed would wipe out a LOT of current Red H's. Including most of my own.

Even if they raised it to say, 100 instead of 10, it's at least a slightly tougher challenge.

I'd lose 11 of 51 Red H's that way.

 

[Djmac1031]

For what you are suggesting, the amount of votes would need to be different for every genre, because Incest could get a story to X number of votes 50x faster than, say Fetish or another genre. An analysis would need to be done, and judgment calls made, for every genre, and those would need to change over time due to the change in reader's habits. And that's just not going to happen.

OK I get that. You're right some categories generate more traffic and hence more votes than others.

So someone posting in a niche catagory like Fetish is gonna struggle to get that Red H no matter how good the story is.

Meanwhile multitudes of Incest Stories will have them simply on the fact more people read that catagory.

 

[Abbafan]

Technically the voting system gives us a version of hated it, it was okay, loved it in the 1-5 ratings, but it seems most people vote five or not at all, the one is mostly used by trolls and abusers, and the median votes just don't seem that common.

The big issue with the H-or in other words a score needing 4.5 or better-is that its made it so people see anything below a five as a bomb of some sort. That a 4 vote which means someone thought the story was pretty good is a poor vote, and that's where a lot of the bitching about "low scores" but the story is a 4.30 comes into play.

The playing field is the same for everyone, the difference is how people can deal with it, and whether or not you value the shiny numbers more than you do your satisfaction or a few, but really good comments that showed readers got it.

So, in the end its about us as individuals more than the site

As a reader, I admit I'm a lot less likely to click on something with less than a 4 as a score, for the reasons you mentioned. Unless it's a new story, in which case there aren't that many votes yet and a single low score can sink a story.

It just seems like a story has to be fairly inept to get scored lower than a 4, unless it's in a category that attracts a lot of trolls (loving wives). I am guilty of rarely giving a score lower than a four myself. If I do, it'll be because the author bored me with a lot of useless information like characters' shoe sizes, immediately jumped to sex in the first paragraph for no good reason, or did something else that IMHO is a major mistake. It's a free erotica site. I'm not expecting Henry Miller or anything.

Usually, though, a story just isn't to my taste so I won't leave a score.

 

[Abbafan]

I've bounced around on the voting tally requirements in my comments, admittedly.

Let's leave the score at 4.5 or higher for the moment.

1K votes needed would wipe out a LOT of current Red H's. Including most of my own.

Even if they raised it to say, 100 instead of 10, it's at least a slightly tougher challenge.

I'd lose 11 of 51 Red H's that way.

1k votes seems pretty high to me. Such a small percentage of readers vote, most of the time.

 

[SimonDoom]

A thousand votes would be an actual accomplishment WORTHY of a Red H.

No, it wouldn't. It would be more indicative of the category in which you published, because in some categories it's not that hard to receive 1000 votes and in some categories it's nearly impossible.

Of my 58 stories, nearly half are in incest, and all but one of my incest stories (a 750-word story) have well over 1,000 votes. Among my non-incest stories, six have over 1,000 votes (one is Loving Wives and five are Exhibitionist-Voyeur, which is probably my specialty), but the average is much lower than that, and some have under 100.

I've got the incest story formula down to the point that I can practically write an incest story in my sleep and be 99% certain it will have over 1000 votes within a year. It has much less to do with excellence and creativity than with just understanding the category and its readership and knowing what they respond to. There are some other authors who've got it figured out even better than I have. I think it's great, and it works for me, but I would hate to see the Site's system skewed even more toward that.

Rewarding vote totals in this way would encourage gaming and would influence the way people write stories worse than anything that exists now.

I disagree with those who think there's something wrong with the current 5-point voting system. It's fine. The only thing that screws it up is the red H.

 

[dasgoodshit]

I've bounced around on the voting tally requirements in my comments, admittedly.

Let's leave the score at 4.5 or higher for the moment.

1K votes needed would wipe out a LOT of current Red H's. Including most of my own.

Even if they raised it to say, 100 instead of 10, it's at least a slightly tougher challenge.

I'd lose 11 of 51 Red H's that way.

I do like the idea though; ideas are the best. Complacency is one of the worst things that can happen to a person.

 

[Djmac1031]

1k votes seems pretty high to me. Such a small percentage of readers vote, most of the time.

1K is indeed aiming for the stars.

It would make the Red H far more elusive for the average author, I agree.

My thoughts were that's a good thing in the sense that the Red H actually MEANS something now, as opposed to "Hey at least ten people rated it high enough."

There are pros and cons to all these ideas, of course.

And I don't seriously believe they'll be any change any time soon anyway.

Back to my final point, which was simply we writers shouldn't focus on Red H TOO much.

 

[SimonDoom]

Here's what I think would be an alternative to the red H that would be useful to readers, useful to authors, and good for the Site, and would serve a similar purpose without gaming the system by creating a phony either/or scoring process:

Let the readers know the percentile score for a story within its category. This would be FAR more useful than a red H, because it would let the reader know at once where that story ranked, score-wise, compared to all other stories in that category. The red H does a terrible job of conveying this information because a) nobody knows what percentile a red H correlates with, except maybe 8Letters, and b) the percentile rank of a 4.5 varies so widely from one category to the next.

I suppose if one wanted to one could then give a red H to a story that achieved a certain percentile rank within a category, like top 20%. I wouldn't support that, but it would be better than what we've got.

 

[Abbafan]

1K is indeed aiming for the stars.

It would make the Red H far more elusive for the average author, I agree.

My thoughts were that's a good thing in the sense that the Red H actually MEANS something now, as opposed to "Hey at least ten people rated it high enough."

There are pros and cons to all these ideas, of course.

And I don't seriously believe they'll be any change any time soon anyway.

Back to my final point, which was simply we writers shouldn't focus on Red H TOO much.

Absolutely. I've read many stories that I thought deserved one that didn't have it.

 

[mirafrida]

Whenever these endless ratings discussions roll around (and I don't mind them), I'm often struck by how bad all computer recommendation systems have turned out to be. Back when Amazon was new, I was excited by the idea that the internet would help every person find unique, compelling content that was perfectly suited to them. Welp...

To be fair, I guess TikTok or YT have succeeded in shoveling reams of lowest-common-denominator pablum to the masses. But in terms of people whose tastes are at all distinctive or outside the mainstream, my view is that it's turned out to be a pretty big disappointment.

So, yes, I get frustrated by the pernicious idea that "H"s and ratings have much to say about story quality. I wish the emphasis here was on tools that (unlike ratings) would actually help people find stuff they like. But even so, I probably shouldn't be so hard on Lit. It's not like I can point to a site that I'm truly impressed with for this kind of thing.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Here's what I think would be an alternative to the red H that would be useful to readers, useful to authors, and good for the Site, and would serve a similar purpose without gaming the system by creating a phony either/or scoring process:

Let the readers know the percentile score for a story within its category. This would be FAR more useful than a red H, because it would let the reader know at once where that story ranked, score-wise, compared to all other stories in that category. The red H does a terrible job of conveying this information because a) nobody knows what percentile a red H correlates with, except maybe 8Letters, and b) the percentile rank of a 4.5 varies so widely from one category to the next.

I suppose if one wanted to one could then give a red H to a story that achieved a certain percentile rank within a category, like top 20%. I wouldn't support that, but it would be better than what we've got.

This is all maths though. What many people seem to be forgetting is that many, many people are visual thinkers, who immediately see a symbol (the Red H) and instantly know that it represents "something". All these other schemes people are coming up with are on the basis that "numbers are meaningful", and the answer is in the maths.

For a group of, lets face it, a fairly diverse set of neuro-diverse and neuro-typical minds here in the AH, there are a whole bunch of people who simply cannot "see" the visual simplicity of the symbol, and keep falling back on "the maths".

That's why the Red H adds "value" - the mind can immediately register meaning, whereas if the symbol isn't there, you gotta trawl through a bunch of numbers. Screw the numbers, draw me a picture, every time.

 

[Bamagan]

So, yes, I get frustrated by the pernicious idea that "H"s and ratings have much to say about story quality. I wish the emphasis here was on tools that (unlike ratings) would actually help people find stuff they like. But even so, I probably shouldn't be so hard on Lit. It's not like I can point to a site that I'm truly impressed with for this kind of thing.

In theory, that's what tags are for. They help me find the niche stuff I like. But I'm sure I miss a lot because not all authors tag well.

 

[SimonDoom]

This is all maths though. What many people seem to be forgetting is that many, many people are visual thinkers, who immediately see a symbol (the Red H) and instantly know that it represents "something". All these other schemes people are coming up with are on the basis that "numbers are meaningful", and the answer is in the maths.

For a group of, lets face it, a fairly diverse set of neuro-diverse and neuro-typical minds here in the AH, there are a whole bunch of people who simply cannot "see" the visual simplicity of the symbol, and keep falling back on "the maths".

That's why the Red H adds "value" - the mind can immediately register meaning, whereas if the symbol isn't there, you gotta trawl through a bunch of numbers. Screw the numbers, draw me a picture, every time.

But this is why I suggested the Site could give a red H to stories at the 80 percentile. That would be far more meaningful than 4.5. Nobody has any clue what 4.5 means relative to stories as a whole. It's a truly meaningless number. 80 percentile is not meaningless. A red H system based on a percentile number, rather than an absolute number, would encourage far less gaming and provoke less hand-wringing, because potential voters wouldn't have as clear a road map about how to sabotage a story whose red H is based on a percentile rather than a 4.5. It would be a far more useful and truthful red H than the one we have now.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Disagree. 8 of my 9 stories have over 1,000 votes, but that’s simply because they’re in the incest and loving wives categories. They aren’t more worthy than stories in other categories with low vote totals.

I have a stand alone story in Romance with, at this time, 743 votes, which I just realized, is a pretty good achievement.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I don't consider myself a great writer. But I AM a great reader. I have read thousands of books over my 55 years and I know good writing from poor.
I've done a fair bit of reading here now and a story with an H and a snappy title will catch my eye. I'll start reading through it and realize the work is NOT GOOD. Yet it has a 4.72 rating.

So the red H and the rating numbers have diminished in my eyes as a means of feedback. Favorites mean a lot more to me. I'd take a rating above 3 as a sign that most people liked the work and keep on trucking.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

If I want to read something that I hope will be good, I rely on the red H.

Readers do the same with my stories, my higher scoring stories get read and favorited more often. And I notice if they like one, they'll move onto to read another. But the ones without the coveted red H don't get the same attention.

 

[ElectricBlue]

But this is why I suggested the Site could give a red H to stories at the 80 percentile. That would be far more meaningful than 4.5. Nobody has any clue what 4.5 means relative to stories as a whole. It's a truly meaningless number. 80 percentile is not meaningless. A red H system based on a percentile number, rather than an absolute number, would encourage far less gaming and provoke less hand-wringing, because potential voters wouldn't have as clear a road map about how to sabotage a story whose red H is based on a percentile rather than a 4.5. It would be a far more useful and truthful red H than the one we have now.

I take your point about the 80 percentile, and agree, that's a good idea (and caters for different category scoring behaviour) but my point is the usefulness of the symbol versus not having the symbol, for readers.

Also, I know from my own story list that the Red H "works", in that those stories that have one increase their View rate faster than those that don't - although it's interesting to note that every story at the bottom of my list is slowly creeping up in score, over time. Which means folk are reading my back catalogue, because generally speaking, my older stories have had lower scores for longer. And the Red H flower garden shows that, instantly. It's a bit like Alice, walking through the garden of flowers.

 

[SimonDoom]

Also, I know from my own story list that the Red H "works", in that those stories that have one increase their View rate faster than those that don't - although it's interesting to note that every story at the bottom of my list is slowly creeping up in score, over time. Which means folk are reading my back catalogue, because generally speaking, my older stories have had lower scores for longer. And the Red H flower garden shows that, instantly. It's a bit like Alice, walking through the garden of flowers.

I don't doubt you, but here's my point. "It works for me" is not a good argument for what the Site should do. For every author who can say subjectively "It works for me" there will be others who say "It screws me over."

The important question is how the system works for authors, readers, and the Site generally. That's what should guide the Site.

Most of my stories have red Hs, and I suppose if I looked into it I've probably benefited from the red H system. I've studied the way this Site works more carefully than most (to a fault, one might say), and I've profited from my study, but that has no relevance to whether it's a good system, or whether the Site should preserve it.

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

For what you are suggesting, the amount of votes would need to be different for every genre, because Incest could get a story to X number of votes 50x faster than, say Fetish or another genre. An analysis would need to be done, and judgment calls made, for every genre, and those would need to change over time due to the change in reader's habits. And that's just not going to happen.

I fail to see why.

The red H is NOT an indication of how good your story is. It's an indication of how well people liked it. It's a popularity contest. A story with a red H is not necessarily well written. It doesn't necessarily have a sound plot. It doesn't necessarily have literary value. The red H on lit serves the exact same purpose as the "top seller" marking on Amazon. It shows readers what is popular.

And if more people vote in the I/T category, then this is because more people are looking for such stories, meaning that those stories are more popular.

Going by your logic, we'd have to lower the score requirement for a red H in LW, because there are fewer people liking Cheating and Hotwife stories, leading to well-written work receiving shit scores.