Voting scores and double posts

[astuffedshirt_perv]

Many of us authors are interested in the rating our stories get. While we write for free, knowing that people like our stories is rewarding. The voting system is fairly transparent, but often I wonder if my stories would have done better if I had posted them in a different category, at a different time, or with a different description. In other words, maybe the story rating isn't just based on the story.

I found an author who, for whatever reason, double posted several stories. This is not the Literotica bug that mirrors the stories, but an actual double (and in two cases triple) posting. The stories have some differences, but are almost identical. Some were posted years apart, some in different categories, some with different descriptions. At one point he apparently made a new account and posted more stories. A few other authors have double postings. In all, I found 11 stories that were posted more than once. Although a small data sent, the interesting thing is that they do not have the same scores. Of the 11 stories:

Average (Mean) spread, lowest score to highest: 0.19
Median spread: 0.13
Mode: 0.06
Max: 0.54
Min: 0.04
standard deviation: 0.16

Most interesting to me is the standard deviation. Assuming the data is a bell curve, roughly 7/10 data points should fall within 1 standard deviation of the mean. Plus or minus 1 standard deviation is a whopping 0.32!

Conclusion: Even without changing a word of you story, reposting it will result in a different score, one that could be quite different from the first posting.

Anyone else know of double posted stories?

My data set: Title (Score) Posting date

Shawalphamale

Baked 'N' Shaked (3.55) 03/16/05
Baked 'N' Shaked (4.11) 03/24/07

Home Sweet Homeland (4.41) 08/07/02
Home Sweet Homeland (4.45) 05/09/07

Special Effects (4.35) 11/12/00
Special Effects (4.31) 05/02/08

The Beat Meet (4.48) 03/05/05
The Beat Meet (4.62) 04/18/07

The Gunpowder Gals (4.46) 02/20/05
The Gunpowder Gals (4.59) 05/01/07

Hooked (4.15) 05/22/07

Old Europe: Sex and the Single Soldier (4.00) 03/09/05

The Boys from Betelgeuse (4.06) 02/28/05

(*) The Toilets Have Landed (4.50) 09/01/03

DavidShaw

Baked 'N' Shaked (4.07) 12/15/04

(*) Four Johns Johnson (4.56) 02/10/05

Hooked (4.38) 12/15/04

Old Europe: Sex & the Single Soldier (4.25) 11/20/04

The Beat Meet (4.83) 02/06/05

The Boys From Belteguese (4.00) 02/07/05

VictoriaJohn
From Rags To Bitches (4.44) 04/03/12
That Fucking Belt (4.50) 04/08/12


Huck Pilgrim
A Wicked Summer for Carnal Girls Ch. 03 (4.46) 06/04/14
American Girl (4.18) 06/18/14

 

[HandsInTheDark]

To call this unsurprising is an understatement. People randomly find stories and even more randomly vote on them. Their votes depend on their mood as much as it does writing. Changing titles can have a dramatic impact. Vote sweeping algorithms change. And from the titles, some of those stories are niche kinks that are going to have volatility in their scores anyway. Then there's score compression in the 4's and jealousy voting in the high 4's... the score compression is so bad that you're probably better off treating score data as logarithmic.

As best I can tell, anything below 4.5 is a random number; 3.2 and 4.2 both mean "awful".

Scores here aren't meaningful. There's simply too much noise in the data and too few samples.

 

[sr71plt]

Lit. won't knowingly let you double post a story here. That said, of course stories will get different rating responses in different categories, with different blurbs and tags, and posted at different times--because they obviously will then have a different set of readers. It doesn't really take any study to figure this one out.