Story score percentiles - LW versus the rest

[Actingup]

Righto... I fully recognise that this might descend into yet another thread of bashing LW. But I wanted to approach this differently. I wanted to start from the point of understanding how a LW rating really compares to a rating in other categories, since we already know that LW is infamously different. It is what it is, but what is it?

So this is what I did when I was a bit bored today. I searched the database for:
1) All stories in Loving Wives in the past 12 months, listed in order of score. After ignoring the non-scored stories at the end of the listing, there were 3421 stories
2) All stories in LW for all years (46029 scored stories)
3) All stories in all categories, past 12 months (60363 scored stories)
4) All stories in all categories for all years (676525 scored stories)

Just let me pause for a moment and acknowledge those incredible numbers. Over half a million stories on this site, written by a ton of people and then all approved and managed by a very, very small team! Incredible effort.

With those stories ranked by score, I then plotted percentiiles of the scores for those four searches. For example the 50th percentile (median) of the All Categories, All Time stories was the 338,662nd story on the ranked list, and had a score of 4.41. So that's the 50th percentile. The 99th percentile for the 2024 LW stories was the 3386 th story on the list, with a score of 4.61. In other words, only 1% of LW stories in the past year have a score of more than 4.61.

I'm happy to have this method challenged and improved on. Anyway, what it gave me was a table like this:



And then graphing that out gave me this:


So what does this all mean? Firstly, what jumps out the most is that the LW score population is so markedly different to the consolidated population. We knew that already of course, but if anybody was thinking of entering a competition and choosing LW.. good luck! But the other thing is that the last 12 months is just as different again in LW, but hardly different at all in the consolidated population. This might suggest that the scoring culture in LW has become more negative over time, or that the 1-bombing is ultra-aggressive in LW (and not in the general population otherwise), or both. We probably can't disentangle those things, and we won't want to get into the details of how 1-bombing is dealt with. But what we can take out of that is that if you're an author in LW and you're trying to compare how you went with the all-time greats... don't. If you've scored over 3.75, you're over the median for the past 12 months, and that's as good as having scored a 4.06 10 years ago, or a 4.5 in another category now.

There is not necessarily any 'right' or 'wrong' here in the scoring (particularly once the sweeps pick up the 1-bombers). You could simply argue that the categories can't be compared. If you see a 'Hot' tag on a LW story, that means it's in the top 5% of LW scores. If you see it in the other categories, you might be above the 60th percentile or thereabouts. In either case, there will be some hotness involved, but the LW author had to work harder for it.

Loving Wives authors, take heart. If you're staring at a score 3 or even below for your recent masterpiece, you can see that 70% of the other authors are right there with you. If you're smugly in the 4s... enjoy it, but don't expect it next time! Or of course, ignore the whole scoring thing and just have some fun, which is mostly what we're here for, right?

As I said, I'm very happy to have improvements to my method proposed. Although I'm probably not going to repeat the process as there was some manual labour involved!

 

[NotWise]

Interesting. Thanks.

My take on LW scores vs others is pretty simple.

Scoring on Lit is heavily biased toward the high side. On a 1-5 scale you could expect the median to be around 3, but it's much higher than 3. Lit readers are friendly. Don't complain about your readers.

Scoring in LW is not as biased. I don't think it's because the average reader there is more critical, but because they're friendly to some stories, but very unfriendly to others.

The change in distribution of LW stories might imply that the LW reading population used to be less divided than it is now.

 

[nice90sguy]

I want to give this thread a H rating; it's definitely in at least the 70th percentile of threads here.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Just by chance, yesterday I did my own analysis of my stories to determine a quantitative understanding of LW (via downloading the site's spreadsheet list from my Author's Page.)

I have 64 stories published over the last four years, and for the last almost two years they have mostly been in Loving Wives. That's 19 stories in Mature, Erotic Couplings, SciFi, and Romance, and 45 stories in Loving Wives.

Since my writing IS consistently rather shitty, I think this provides a good quantitative comparison to those other categories, for any single author considering going to LW.

My average ratings:
3.47 for just the 45 LW
3.70 for all 64 stories
4.24 for the 19 non-LW

We can see that my rating per story drops by about 0.77 when posting in LW, which drags down my overall average. So, why would I want to post in Loving Wives?

My 64 stories now have over 1.3 million views. My average VIEWS per story:
25,165 for just the 45 LW
20,402 for all 64 stories
9,113 for the 19 non-LW

By posting to Loving Wives, I average 14K more views per story! I reach a larger audience, even if some of them HATE it. But at least they read it (sort of)!

I'll take a few 1-bombs and hater comments ... for 14K views!


EDIT: I tend to write swinger and sharing stories, which I've noticed receive more hate and 1s than other burn-the-bitch stories. So, to add another analytical point: My latest sharing story is "His Vixen" which is at 3.87 with almost 19K views. And last year, I wrote two BTB stories (giving back to my faithful audience what they want) with "Break the Bitch, Drive Her Crazy" at 3.91 with almost the same 19K views. So we see that with two consistently shitty stories from the same author, BTB does tend to rate better in Loving Wives.

 

[MrPixel]

I find both of these analyses especially fascinating because my seat-of-the-pants impression has long been that LW carries a 0.5-1.0 point "penalty". And there it is in the numbers, ~0.75. Hmm.

A loose conjecture why LW 2024 is << LW all-time is that we live in meaner times, i.e., it's okay to hate.

 

[TheLobster]

Now we need OP to conduct a similar analysis on I/T so we can conclusively determine the magnitude of that fabled "incest bonus."

 

[Actingup]

Just by chance, yesterday I did my own analysis of my stories to determine a quantitative understanding of LW (via downloading the site's spreadsheet list from my Author's Page.)

I have 64 stories published over the last four years, and for the last almost two years they have mostly been in Loving Wives. That's 19 stories in Mature, Erotic Couplings, SciFi, and Romance, and 45 stories in Loving Wives.

Since my writing IS consistently rather shitty, I think this provides a good quantitative comparison to those other categories, for any single author considering going to LW.

My average ratings:
3.47 for just the 45 LW
3.70 for all 64 stories
4.24 for the 19 non-LW

We can see that my rating per story drops by about 0.77 when posting in LW, which drags down my overall average. So, why would I want to post in Loving Wives?

My 64 stories now have over 1.3 million views. My average VIEWS per story:
25,165 for just the 45 LW
20,402 for all 64 stories
9,113 for the 19 non-LW

By posting to Loving Wives, I average 14K more views per story! I reach a larger audience, even if some of them HATE it. But at least they read it (sort of)!

I'll take a few 1-bombs and hater comments ... for 14K views!


EDIT: I tend to write swinger and sharing stories, which I've noticed receive more hate and 1s than other burn-the-bitch stories. So, to add another analytical point: My latest sharing story is "His Vixen" which is at 3.87 with almost 19K views. And last year, I wrote two BTB stories (giving back to my faithful audience what they want) with "Break the Bitch, Drive Her Crazy" at 3.91 with almost the same 19K views. So we see that with two consistently shitty stories from the same author, BTB does tend to rate better in Loving Wives.

Yes, the engagement is a very strong argument for plunging in with the crocodiles. No pain, no gain.

 

[Actingup]

Now we need OP to conduct a similar analysis on I/T so we can conclusively determine the magnitude of that fabled "incest bonus."

I might need to work up to that one!

 

[Lifestyle66]

My next story for LW will post on or after 1 Feb for the Pink Orchid challenge: "Going Down Together", "Beware the wrath of a woman scorned".

It's both a Burn-The-Bastard and Reconcile-At-All-Costs to see how the LW audience reacts with the husband cheating and getting burned for it.

 

[Gamblnluck]

This might suggest that the scoring culture in LW has become more negative over time, or that the 1-bombing is ultra-aggressive in LW (and not in the general population otherwise), or both.

It could also mean the stories the past year are not as good or at least what the readers there want. (I think both.) I used to read a half dozen daily that I liked. Now I'd happy to find one or two.

 

[onehitwanda]

OP brought the maths - and the stats!

 

[MrPixel]

It could also mean the stories the past year are not as good...

Valid observation. The sense I get - a least from the AH chatter - is several authors who care about the quality of their submissions and quality of reader engagement avoid the category for the vitriol it engenders.

 

[SimonDoom]

Now we need OP to conduct a similar analysis on I/T so we can conclusively determine the magnitude of that fabled "incest bonus."

There is no I/T bonus in scores. The bonus is in views and favorites, not scores. Almost half my stories have been I/T stories and the scores are comparable to the scores for all my other stories (other than 750 word stories and Loving Wives stories, which do worse than average).

I've published three Loving Wives stories, with an average score of 4.01. The average for all my stories is 4.52. So that's a .51 gap, which is sizable, and I don't think it can be explained by the LW stories being worse in terms of literary or erotic quality. I think my style/quality is fairly consistent. One of my LW stories is a 750 word story, and ALL of my 750 word stories have significantly lower than average scores. The other two are "hot wife" stories, and it's clear that they were downvoted by the LW clique that is obsessively hostile to such stories. I can tell from the comments I received.

The striking thing about Actinup's chart (thanks for doing that, Actingup, by the way) is how ridiculously high the median score is. There's something obviously absurd about the fact that a story at the 60th percentile among all stories gets a red "H" to indicate that it has unusual merit. To me, it's evidence that the red H system should be abandoned or changed, but I don't expect that to happen.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Interesting stats.
LW is not my turf so I won't comment on it but the fact that half of all 2024 stories, and almost half of ALL stories on the website, have the red H is just plain ridiculous. If it weren't for the LW category, the percentile would have been around 60 % likely. So basically, an average Lit story has the red H. And I know from experience how bad the average story is.
This is sad as fuck.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I find both of these analyses especially fascinating because my seat-of-the-pants impression has long been that LW carries a 0.5-1.0 point "penalty". And there it is in the numbers, ~0.75. Hmm.

A loose conjecture why LW 2024 is << LW all-time is that we live in meaner times, i.e., it's okay to hate.

Maybe, but the "All stories 2024" is the highest (barely) of the four numbers. That kind of goes against the idea that it's purely about living in meaner times.

I think there's another possibility: the golden age of the BTB is over in there. That's not to say that there aren't BTBs anymore, or that they don't overall do pretty well, but there aren't as many being posted, and since there aren't being as many posted, the numbers go down correspondingly.

There's been a flood of cuck, sharing, swapping, etc. stories in there for the last year; I'm not complaining because, hey, that's what it says on the tin, right? But the tastes of people commenting and rating still haven't changed that much; marital dramas with the husband "winning" in some way (whether that's BTB, earned reconciliation, etc.) do best, with mild BTB/walking away doing (usually) best out of those.

However, there aren't as many of those in the category as there were two or three years ago. There's only so many ways to write about marital assets being divided up, revenge schemes, finding out how the wife cheated, etc., after all. Even at its height, it was never the most prevalent type in the category in terms of volume, but it's definitely not now. Three years ago, the first fifty stories of the "Last 30 Days" list would have been entirely/almost entirely martial drama, and then probably into the next page. Today, maybe half of them are, and several of the higher rated ones are NTR, cuckold, hotwife, etc., up past BTBs. The first "real" burn, not a walking away story, is barely in the top 20.

I think it might be in a similar situation where country music (oh, the irony) was in the mid- and late-90s. The old-timers had mostly faded away, "young country" had fallen out of fashion, "outlaw country" had kind of fizzled out before it even got going, etc. The industry was having a massive freak out, throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick. If you turned on a country station in, say, 1999, you might get k.d. lang, an out lesbian singing torch songs; followed by Mojo Nixon and the Toadliquors, a rockabilly/outlaw country/novelty song group; followed by Garth Brooks cosplaying as "Chris Gaines," an "Australian" rocker; followed by... you get the idea. Pretty much no one liked all of them, but they each had their own following. Eventually "bro country" came out on top in the mid-2000s, but that's... god, that's a whole 'nother, mostly awful story.

I think LW is going through a similar transformation, and I have no idea where it's going to end up. I'll also say this: it's spreading to other sites. On Lushstories, I've started to see comments on stories (not just mine, but other folks', too) that look a lot like a less violent version of the angry anons in LW, even among the folks with names like "sissy69" and "cuckboi4u." There seems to be a general shift in culture, or at least internet culture, about infidelity as a trope, especially when the cheater is dismissive of a faithful/loving spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend. Time will tell.

Oh, and as a bonus, my favorite bro country song:

One other note: in the last 30 days, there are exactly two stories with an H in LW, and I've seen a stretch in the last year where there were literally none.

 

[Voyeurkenneth]

Interesting analysis. I thought of NoTalentHack’s Loving Loving Wives essay while looking at these stats. 25 years of the site isn’t a lot, but in a world where presumably more people are open sexually to different ideas than they were then, why the division? More people getting divorced = greater appetite for BTB?

Can it ever flow back to the balanced times of earlier years?

(Edit: Nice, NTH above has weighed in)

 

[SimonDoom]

Oh, and as a bonus, my favorite bro country song:

One other note: in the last 30 days, there are exactly two stories with an H in LW, and I've seen a stretch in the last year where there were literally none.

I've seen that Bro Country video before and it's priceless. Looks like the Bro Country songwriters figured out AI before AI did.

I'm not a country music fan and I confess that's how much of it sounds to me.

 

[TheLobster]

The striking thing about Actinup's chart (thanks for doing that, Actingup, by the way) is how ridiculously high the median score is. There's something obviously absurd about the fact that a story at the 60th percentile among all stories gets a red "H" to indicate that it has unusual merit.

It's weird to argue with statistics but this number (more than 40% 'H') just feels off. Like, seriously off, and it's not difficult to get a sense how much.

Just go to Lit's search and click on one of the random suggestions below the text box. Scroll through the list of results; do you see almost every other story having Red H? Not even close. Where are all those masterpieces hiding?

 

[12oclocktales]

I think there is too much hand-wringing about getting 1-bombed in LW, since with average scores hovering around the mid-3 range, for every 1-bomb you would expect another 5 rating. Stories are more likely being 3-bombed, with quite a few 4s thrown in as well. Why other categories aren’t 3-bombed as much is a good question.

 

[NoTalentHack]

It's weird to argue with statistics but this number (more than 40% 'H') just feels off. Like, seriously off, and it's not difficult to get a sense how much.

Just go to Lit's search and click on one of the random suggestions below the text box. Scroll through the list of results; do you see almost every other story having Red H? Not even close. Where are all those masterpieces hiding?

This search returns all stories that include "a OR the" in the last year:

https://search.literotica.com/?query=a OR the&period=1 year&sort=date&page=1

it returns 60785 stories.

Modifying it so that it only includes stories with an H tag (which, to be clear, isn't the same as a 4.5+, as there's also a minimum number of ratings required:

https://search.literotica.com/?query=a OR the&period=1 year&popular=true&sort=date&page=1

returns 28719 stories, which is about 47% of stories.

So, yeah, it's probably accurate. Remember, with most categories, people are there looking for their particular kink/flavor/fetish. As long as it's decently written, they'll tend to rate favorably.

 

[Lifestyle66]

I think there is too much hand-wringing about getting 1-bombed in LW, since with average scores hovering around the mid-3 range, for every 1-bomb you would expect another 5 rating. Stories are more likely being 3-bombed, with quite a few 4s thrown in as well. Why other categories aren’t 3-bombed as much is a good question.

At first glance, I would agree with you.

But from personal experience, after watching a few of my own scores closely hour-by-hour, I saw that for almost every 5 which appeared, it would soon be followed by another 1.

Now that's not to say I saw a three and assumed this. I would see the NUMBER of ratings increase by one with the score going up indicating it was a 5. Then when checking again ten or fifteen minutes later, seeing just another single rating which decreased the average indicating it was a 1.

This is why I no longer care about the ratings, because when I was obsessing over them, I saw how there were those who tracked and maliciously downvoted stories. There are at least two other authors here in the AH who have found several of their older stories attacked with a series of 1-bombs within an hour after engaging someone in the AH with their posts. And the likely hood of several old stories by a single author ALL deserving a 1 within an hour of each other and having been actually read (supposedly by several people) is so low as to be impossible.

I recognize that many of the ratings of my stories were 2, 3, or 4. But when I was tracking them, the sheer volume of the 1s and 5s was amazing! Even the numbers changing from the "1-scraping" which the site Admins do makes a significant change to the average rating.

As far as the other categories, many are more focused with an audience going out of their looking for a particular subset of stories and applauding it when they find it there. They're less likely to HATE (with a 1) any story which belongs to that category.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I've always said that I estimate the average (mean) score on lit between 4.2 and 4.4 and that I estimate that my stories average scores (3.8ish) are probably no higher than 20th percentile. If the above calculations are correct, I'm almost dead on in my estimate for mean score and actually overestimating my own scores as they are more like 11th percentile.

This also further damns the Red H rating as it merely indicates that a story a bit above average is deemed hot, which really is a poor indicator of what might be considered top level.

I'm absolutely with Simon on his opinion that a Red H should be determined by percentile with categories calculated independently. What percentile should that be? 90th? 80th? 85th? 75th? That's open for debate. But as it is now, basically half of the stories submitted in 2024 qualified for Red H. That's just fucking stupid useless.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

My 64 stories now have over 1.3 million views. My average VIEWS per story:
25,165 for just the 45 LW
20,402 for all 64 stories
9,113 for the 19 non-LW

By posting to Loving Wives, I average 14K more views per story! I reach a larger audience, even if some of them HATE it. But at least they read it (sort of)!

Not only that, but let's say that 33% (picking an arbitrary number) HATE your LW story. That's roughly 8500 readers. That also means that about 17000 readers loved it, liked it or at least thought it was decent - 17k enjoyed it to some degree.

If 100% of the readers in the other categories loved your story there, it would be 9k readers enjoying it.

So even with a truckload of haters, your story will be enjoyed more in LW than in Romance, Mature or EC - almost TWICE more.

Now, so often we get a thread here in the AH from a new writer wondering where to post. "Should I put it in LW or Fetish or EC?" "Should I put in BDSM or Incest?" etc. And I always say, put it where it will get the most eyeballs (traffic), and invariably I get jumped on by a couple of 'experts' who say "NO, it will not be received well, your score will suffer in LW, EC is where it goes!" or "NO, don't put any cross-dressing in incest, your score will be bad!" or some shit.

Do you want to be read or do you just want a score? If a writer goes for significantly less eyeballs, he is only protecting the score.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Now we need OP to conduct a similar analysis on I/T so we can conclusively determine the magnitude of that fabled "incest bonus."

Anal probably scores the highest. In fact I think 8letters has already shown/proved that. It would make sense. Anyone who is squicked by anal just avoids the category, and there is really nothing major that may be included in an anal story that would polarize or otherwise put off the anal readership. Unlike the Incest crowd who do have certain no-nos that can hurt your score. Stick it in her poop chute, make sure she likes it, and collect your 5s.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

It could also mean the stories the past year are not as good or at least what the readers there want. (I think both.) I used to read a half dozen daily that I liked. Now I'd happy to find one or two.

Quality of writing/storytelling is the smallest factor determining score, so highly doubt that.