Holy carp. I'm popular?

[TheWritingGroup]

One of the chapters of my novel Pranked: Barbie is on the Most Popular Non-Consent Stories list with a 4.92.

Wow. Color me surprised. No false modesty, I didn't even consider this my best work.

What I supremely don't get is that this is Part 3 of the story (out of 5). Part 4 currently sits at 4.9. (The series isn't published yet, so I can't link to it.)

Why is no one reading Part 5, and why is its rating so much lower? I don't know, and I'd like to.

That's the list I get by clicking the Reluctance tag and scrolling down. If I click on the More Popular Reluctance/NonConsent Stories link, I get a totally different list with a top score of 4.88 and including none of mine. ???? Is that how it's supposed to work?

Anyway: wow. Thanks, readers and raters.

--Annie

 

[StillStunned]

The "top list" has three options: the last 30 days, the last 12 months and all time. To get onto the all-time list you generally need 100 votes.

But congratulations! It's always nice to be on any of those lists. But bear in mind that if you get onto the all-time list you're story is likely to be bombed back to the Stone Age. People get very protective of their rankings there.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I'm at 13 votes for that story. I can't see it reaching 100. Thanks, @StillStunned.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Yikes. One of those stories has over 6,000 votes.

 

[StillStunned]

Don't forget that some stories have been around for years, if not decades. I get the impression that older stories got more views and more votes simply because there was less content.

 

[CalBishForNow]

Congratulations.

I'm not being very rigorous about this and am nowhere near the top of anything on this site so take this with as big a grain of salt as you want, but I figure that anything at that level of granularity is meaningless. The difference between 4 stars and 3 is big, or even 4.5 stars and 4. The difference between 4.86 stars and 4.85, or 399 favorites and only 390, or 260,000 views and 250,000, really doesn't seem to be.

That's not even getting into problems with contests, people trying to game the ratings one way or the other, or specific categories. I mostly write in LW, and that's infamous. I'm less familiar with Fetish but I gather that it has separate fandoms for each major fetish and I assume they're indifferent at best to each other. I've heard about sweeps to remove gratuitous one-star votes but I don't know how they work and I don't know if anyone else does either. Lots of stories could fit equally well into two or more categories but would get a noticeably different score in them. Looking at my list of stories, five have the red H for "Hot", but they're in the middle of a series and I have a hard time seeing what they have going for them that some others don't. (Some stories, I can see why there's a difference, but not others.)

So... congratulations, but don't lose any sleep over the difference between 4.9 and 4.92.

 

[Euphony]

Everybody go upvote part 5 like RIGHT NOW.



(ikik. Congrats. Keep up the good work.)

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Congratulations! Always nice to be appreciated!

 

[DEFCOM5]

I can only dream of a score that starts with 4.9x or even 4.8x

Congratulations!

 

[ChloeTzang]

One of the chapters of my novel Pranked: Barbie is on the Most Popular Non-Consent Stories list with a 4.92.

Wow. Color me surprised. No false modesty, I didn't even consider this my best work.

What I supremely don't get is that this is Part 3 of the story (out of 5). Part 4 currently sits at 4.9. (The series isn't published yet, so I can't link to it.)

Why is no one reading Part 5, and why is its rating so much lower? I don't know, and I'd like to.

That's the list I get by clicking the Reluctance tag and scrolling down. If I click on the More Popular Reluctance/NonConsent Stories link, I get a totally different list with a top score of 4.88 and including none of mine. ???? Is that how it's supposed to work?

Anyway: wow. Thanks, readers and raters.

--Annie

Bask in the glory now, while it lasts LOL

 

[TheWritingGroup]

So... congratulations, but don't lose any sleep over the difference between 4.9 and 4.92.

Yeah, but 4.42 and 4.92 is huge! (Kidding) And why is it literally getting less than half the readership? I should probably compare the tags, now that I think about it. Part 2 had Incest as a tag, for instance, but 5 does not.

--Annie

 

[TheWritingGroup]

I can only dream of a score that starts with 4.9x or even 4.8x

Congratulations!

Me two weeks ago!

 

[cw5523729]

Bask in the glory now, while it lasts LOL

Take a picture, it'll last longer

 

[AwkwardMD]

Shouldn't that be "We're popular" ? Catfish confirmed!

One of the chapters of my novel Pranked: Barbie is on the Most Popular Non-Consent Stories list with a 4.92.

Wow. Color me surprised. No false modesty, I didn't even consider this my best work.

What I supremely don't get is that this is Part 3 of the story (out of 5). Part 4 currently sits at 4.9. (The series isn't published yet, so I can't link to it.)

Why is no one reading Part 5, and why is its rating so much lower? I don't know, and I'd like to.

That's the list I get by clicking the Reluctance tag and scrolling down. If I click on the More Popular Reluctance/NonConsent Stories link, I get a totally different list with a top score of 4.88 and including none of mine. ???? Is that how it's supposed to work?

Anyway: wow. Thanks, readers and raters.

--Annie

There’s a bunch going on here, so bear with me

A series is likely to attract... a refined readership as it progresses. Most who bounced off the concept did so after chapter 1. Most of those who didn't bounced off after chapter 2. This leaves fewer views as the chapter count grows, but those views represent people who are, more and more, inclined to like and vote.

If you have a voting turn between chapters 4 and 5, that likely has more to do with a twist you pulled, or just the general unpredictability between audiences day to day, week to week, or month to month.

Also, story scores don't really stabilize until you get to 80 votes. Someone smarter than me did the math years ago, and I'm just regurgitating the tldr.

As for the HoF, what @StillStunned said applies to the traditional HoF. The new category pages have toplists on them (which is where you are), but those are new and adhere to much lower vote limitations. When you click through to see more, that's where the real top list lives. 100 votes for the Alll Time list, 50 for The Past 6 Months, and 30 for The Past 30 Days (IIRC).

 

[alohadave]

I can only dream of a score that starts with 4.9x or even 4.8x

Congratulations!

I've had plenty of those. For 10 minutes after they were uploaded.

 

[FrancesScott]

One of the chapters of my novel Pranked: Barbie is on the Most Popular Non-Consent Stories list with a 4.92.

I was on the all time top ten of Lesbian for a whole week, before someone noticed and hammered my story from 4.86 to 4.80 over two days.

As I had about 250 votes at that point, it must have taken a sustained effort to achieve that level of suppression.

As an aside the much vaunted competition sweep didn’t delete a single one of those downvotes. I guess they were all totally genuine.

 

[DEFCOM5]

I've had plenty of those. For 10 minutes after they were uploaded.

Lucky. I saw that number once. It had 3 vote. Now it is my lowest rate story at 4.17,
I should have screen shot it.

 

[CalBishForNow]

I've had plenty of those. For 10 minutes after they were uploaded.

Writing in LW is often the reverse. Scores start out below 2 and climb to above 3 as they fall off New.

 

[MillieDynamite]

To be a little bit of a contrarian, you're not necessarily popular; that story is. I really like that word, contrarian, but it isn't easy to work it into everyday conversations.

 

[DEFCOM5]

Writing in LW is often the reverse. Scores start out below 2 and climb to above 3 as they fall off New.

This is why I stay away from LW.

I have enough insecurity about the quality of my writing that I don't need to get depressed even more by such a low score.

 

[Actingup]

The "top list" has three options: the last 30 days, the last 12 months and all time. To get onto the all-time list you generally need 100 votes.

But congratulations! It's always nice to be on any of those lists. But bear in mind that if you get onto the all-time list you're story is likely to be bombed back to the Stone Age. People get very protective of their rankings there.

It may be time to archive those all time lists and start again. At the moment they mostly seem to function as barriers to entry for new authors.

 

[FrancesScott]

I've had plenty of those. For 10 minutes after they were uploaded.

I had a 5.0 after 24 votes on the same Lesbian story. Followed by a one of course.

 

[iwatchus]

To be a little bit of a contrarian, you're not necessarily popular; that story is. I really like that word, contrarian, but it isn't easy to work it into everyday conversations.

So if the story is bad, the author is unpopular. But if the story is good, the author may still be unpopular. Way to be supportive Millie!

 

[MillieDynamite]

No, popularity, or lack thereof, on a story doesn't necessarily translate to popularity or unpopularity of the writer. I made the post primarily so I could use the word contrarian. I thought I made that part clear; obviously, I did not!

So if the story is bad, the author is unpopular. But if the story is good, the author may still be unpopular. Way to be supportive Millie!

 

[iwatchus]

No, popularity, or lack thereof, on a story doesn't necessarily translate to popularity or unpopularity of the writer. I made the post primarily so I could use the word contrarian. I thought I made that part clear; obviously, I did not!

I was just teasing. I should have used an emoji on mine. Some commenters (not you) come close to saying that if you story gets a bad rating, it's a reflection on you (or more often on themselves personally). So if you combine those comments with yours, and add a properly negative world viewpoint, you get that we all just suck. I will always try to poke fun at that viewpoint, one that too many here really do take. We need to celebrate what's good here. And don't dwell too much on kvetching about what is not.