question about voting blocks.. real? imagined? I'm just asking..

[lovecraft68]

So what we're being told is

TX Rad's two stories in his sig being badly bombed after he had an exchange with several members of the group was a coincidence.

That my story-and another author's story-being bombed minutes after leaving comments on a group members story saying it was totally in the wrong category, was coincidence.

That my Summer story that maintained the same score within .01 or so from the day it came out-day one as I play no games(and suffer for it) was suddenly bombed down out of contention right after a couple of board comments-again about said group- was coincidence.

That the story that overtook mine(one of three last minute entries by the same author-must be amazing to finish 3 at the exact same time) had a huge surge in score despite the fact it was over 1k votes. Takes a lot of consecutive 5 votes to push a story up even .01 with that many votes and even a couple of fours can knock you back...

But that story just kept surging up, boy that is a lot of 5's and a week after it came out so past the 'honeymoon' time of the story. Coincidence.

I believe Laurel when she says she watched the sweeps closely and didn't see anything beyond the usual random suspicious vote.

But....first off....the sweeps can be cheated, any system can, its a fact. Second in a case like SCouries where it was one person doing a lot of bombing/high fiving its easy to spot....but when its a group spread out around the country, different IP's etc...not so easy to catch.

Coincidence the group has placed in four straight. Coincidence I called one of the nude day winners on day one and explained how it wold, I think I was even within 10 of the final vote total.

Coincidence an author that had not posted here in months, shows up in the start of the summer thread and starts asking questions about the contest as if he knew nothing of them and I know he was a member of the group that does nothing but talk about the contests, trying to slide in...then that's called out and he never posts again...coincidence.

Understand the person Laurel called out was pissed off as hell they did not place in winter 2014 contest because well, they should always place. Then the group is formed and they have won two since. Coincidence.

Just like the daily hate mail I've been getting through anon feedback since the outing of the group back after April Fool's contests...and showed off their handiwork by linking all their public comments....which are now posted anon...not like it stopped. But that one's fine, it doesn't affect anything here and I'm the type that haters make me smile, so no harm no foul there.

But to many coincidences for me, personally.

I would also-although I know Laurel couldn't reveal them because they went to her in confidence-second pilot in wanting to know about the above the fray people who complained of...attacks.

I know for a fact of one very well respected member who did complain...and it was about the group.

Now we have rules about calling a spade a spade and that rule will protect the people providing the trolling of stories and contests. I am sure all will now run back to the boards looking to bait people into saying something.

The Summer contest was low. Yes slightly over 70 stories, but 10 from one person 6 from another and three with three each. 33% of the stories from only a handful of authors.

After Nude day several people pm'd me saying they wouldn't enter again and didn't. I think a couple of more have had their fill after this one. A member of the group has placed in every one so far this year....back to coincidence again.

 

[TxRad]

I didn't ask for a sweep but it seems i got an across the story line one. Those two stories went up by .2 to .3 points. I said that both got a pair of 2 after that conversation.

Now the OP has his answer to the original question and everyone has the winning formula for contests. Let the games begin.

As a side note, 2% of my 211 stories that didn't have H's now do.

Let the bombing begin.

 

[lovecraft68]

I didn't ask for a sweep but it seems i got an across the story line one. Those two stories went up by .2 to .3 points. I said that both got a pair of 2 after that conversation.

Now the OP has his answer to the original question and everyone has the winning formula for contests. Let the games begin.

As a side note, 2% of my 211 stories that didn't have H's now do.

Let the bombing begin.

I have a LW story that after a year of 4.48/49 hit 4.50 after the last sweep

There's a bullseye for anyone interested.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Sounds like a lotto pool, where a group of people get together and by every single combination of numbers for that weeks lotto draw. They only do this when the jackpot is extremely high...over 100 million.

Of course they not only win the grand prize but all those lesser prizes down the tree. Yes they do win more than it costs to play. And the Lotto/State has to except electronic submission of the numbers.

Like whose going to fill out all those cards.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

I'm curious about one thing, on voting blocks. Are they groups of fellow authors (or suspected to be)? Is there proof of their existence? Are there former participants willing to 'fess up? I'm newish here, but it sounds unlikely, if it's groups of authors. How would they not turn on one another?

What I see as likely, in rough order of probability (just my opinion)

- bitter angry readers, not authors, who one bomb whatever ignites their bitterness (like for example, the stereotypical LW reader reading a story about a wife cheating)
- moderately tech savvy author, willing to cheat, but not quite sophisticated enough, so sweeps catch them
- highly tech savvy author, willing to take the time through advanced methods to do all the same things as less advanced cheaters, but to get away with it successfully
- voting blocks of fans of an author, including spouses, their mom (or moms computer at least), the authors alter ego on their work computer (some crossover to lower tech cheating included)
- and (to me, least likely) Authors working together as a voting block

I'm asking because (myself included now and then), I don't see anyone here getting along well enough with other authors where they would help a potential competitor? Also, remembering my experience just as a reader before I dabbled in writing, I didn't pay attention to author names at all. if a title hit my buttons, I read, and that was that.

Anyway, I'm really asking from a standpoint of curiosity, since to me, voting blocks sound unlikely within the context of multiple authors being involved (obviously, I do believe in them, but in cases where it's all actually one person, not multiple people)

Edited: "willing", not "rolling". Damn phone!

Are there voting blocks? I think the best answer comes from the site's owner:

I personally performed all the vote sweeps for this contest, . . . - I see no evidence of any sort of "block".

I hang out with a group of writing friends outside the hallowed halls of Literotica.com's forums. Some of us have worked together in the past (I did a tag-team story with one of them). Another person is my sometimes editor. We email each other, chat, some have met in real life, just like any group of friends with common interests might do.

It's not a secret group. Ten of us put together an anthology and published on Amazon together. Pretty easy to see who is who (check my signature line for a link if you'd like). Most of the group got together in a shared cabin during last year's National Novel Writing (http://nanowrimo.org/) camp.

So, there's that, a baker's dozen + 2 who love writing in general, enjoy erotica, and love talking shop.

Has the sniping, backbiting, flame wars, etc. in the AH become unbearable? For me it has. I've only been around for four years, so I don't feel qualified to suggest it's better or worse than ever. Still, I've seen threads hijacked and dissolve into off-topic sniping and ridiculing until I get so frustrated, I unsubscribed from an otherwise interesting discussion. Have I ever been guilty of jumping into the fray? While I try really hard to take the high road; yeah, I've failed at that a few times.

You ask how any group of authors could avoid turning on each other. For my friends and I, that's an easy answer - we're friends. We like writing, reading, the process of writing, all that nerdy stuff. We might beta read or edit for each other; because that's sort of what friends do for each other, isn't it? Hell, we were doing that sort of thing for each other before we NaNoMo (National Novel Month) together.

I can assure you there is one thing we are NOT. We are NOT a voting block.

We aren't even a reading block! I don't read everyone else's stories. And I know not everyone reads my drivel. Personally, I don't vote or comment on something unless I've read it. Suggesting I would do otherwise is a hit against my personal integrity that really pisses me off. Enough to complain? Nope. Enough to avoid the fray? Yep!

I do know of another writing group of diverse individuals ready to dispense advice, a much bigger group, a group where you already belong: Literotica.com's Author Hangout. I stumbled in here hoping to find a group of like-minded people working on a shared goal: writing better. I did.

I have writing friends outside of Literotica.com, too. I have writing friends who don't even know about Literotica.com.

Friends = voting block? I don't agree, but, um, okay.

My advice? The advice I'm trying to live: Participate kindly. Don't hesitate to PM someone. You never know, you just might bump into someone nice, too.

 

[sr71plt]

Wow, even more chummy than I ever thought. No wonder you guys were so organized in gang banging me. Happily we have new rules on that here now.

 

[redzinger]

People are cowards and hate to make independent assessments of merit. If you load low scores or high scores at the front end of a competition the mean score tends to the low or high end. No one ever introduces new products or books with bad reviews. What you start with guides the results. Its bizness as usual at LIT. Sweeps cleanse the bogus scores but not before the harm is done, and the dirty dogs know it.

Yep. Seems standard procedure for many stories - they get bombed out of the blocks. If you don't have the following to overcome this, you're not going to get the reads and the 'clean' votes as people won't read the low-scoring stories.

Is this just malicious, or is there any organisation behind it?



I would love to believe that there is no author/AH involvement in the downvoting.

However, whenever I've mentioned that I've posted a new story in here, an hour or so later, it's usually been bombed*.

That's not the best encouragement to post. Or enter contests at all.



*tbh, I don't have a massive following, so to take me out of contention/knock my score down isn't exactly difficult. But, to not post and state my honest opinion would be cowardly, and I fucking hate cowardice. Even when I don't want to get involved.

 

[Rozalin_0123]

I stand by my friend Buckyduckman's post. We are friends because we are writers, we are not writers because we are friends.

Everyone is free to believe what they wish. There are two sides to every story, and both sides are right here for all to see. But I would like to add that if anyone were to talk to a statistician, they would argue that correlation does not imply causation.

The sad part in all of this is the number of writers who have chosen to stop writing for contests, or stop writing entirely. They are the real casualties in all of this. I too have considered giving it up due to the stress here. It's not worth it, no matter how you look at it.

So I implore you, fellow writers who have decided to quit, don't give it up. Keep writing! Keep writing because you like to write!

 

[sr71plt]

Here they come.

 

[lovecraft68]

You know in real life if I am accused of doing something I didn't do, I'll give it one, "No, I didn't do that"

After that it doesn't matter who says I did or how often they say it, I ignore it. Why? Because I know I didn't do anything and end of the day that's all that matters.

So once again we have innocent people going out of their way to state once again how innocent they are, just friends....etc...

The baiting I mentioned. I can hear Bucky laughing while he typed his post. Laurel seems to have not seen through their games or would rather just let it ride-as scouries has for years-and yet they will still give the "wasn't us" game.

I suppose most people would say they feel bad for someone so sad that they need a few dollars or to be able to claim 'award winning" status on a free writing site so badly they resort to cheap games.

Personally I don't feel bad for that type, but do feel bad for the ones that get so disgusted when nothing is done about it, they choose to walk away.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

This conversation can't go anywhere without reams of hard data and a lot of analysis. Give me every vote on every story, with date and IP address (or surrogate tokens for the addresses, to maintain privacy), for a decade, and I'll give back the probability of rigging. But without that, I can't tell signal from noise.

I don't think the needed data is going to become available. So this conversation is endless and can go nowhere. I'd guess there's been rigging - but it's only effective enough to screw up contests, not enough to really pollute scores as a whole. So abandon the contests and it's all good.

 

[Laurel]

This conversation can't go anywhere without reams of hard data and a lot of analysis. Give me every vote on every story, with date and IP address (or surrogate tokens for the addresses, to maintain privacy), for a decade, and I'll give back the probability of rigging. But without that, I can't tell signal from noise.

I don't think the needed data is going to become available. So this conversation is endless and can go nowhere. I'd guess there's been rigging - but it's only effective enough to screw up contests, not enough to really pollute scores as a whole. So abandon the contests and it's all good.

I've seen the data, and I can tell you honestly: yep, users are constantly trying to commit vote fraud. All over the site (and on every other site on the Internet), every day, since we added voting on stories at the request of authors.

Fraud votes are a reality of the Internet. And the special contest stories are no more hit than any other stories on the site. In fact, they're a lot less hit than, say, the LW category.

Our fear when a voting option was added to stories was that some authors would obsess on the numbers rather than more substantial feedback like comments or direct contact with readers. This proved to be the case.

Votes are a good way to get a vague sense of how the readership feels about your story compared to other stories in the same category, on the same theme, or others that you've written. Other than that, it's not particularly useful. What is a 3.5 story? What makes it different from a 3.7 story? If your story was a 4.5 yesterday and a 3.9 today, does that mean it somehow became more poorly written overnight? If it went from 4.0 to 4.25, does that mean it's now 0.25 better than before?

You can obsess on vote numbers, worrying about what other people are doing or not doing, taking sides in drama conflicts. That will do nothing to improve your writing, and eventually sour you on the whole act. I've seen wonderfully gifted writers burn out this way.

OR you can focus on direct comments from the readers - public or private. Paying attention to substantive reader feedback, corresponding with those who appreciate your work, taking their suggestions into consideration (when you feel they improve your stories), and writing writing writing - that will lead you to be a better writer and, more importantly, be a happy, satisfied person. And you'll likely have some very cool conversations and maybe even find good friends.

It's a choice each of you has to make. Obviously, I think the second one is better.

 

[JKendallDane]

You can obsess on vote numbers, worrying about what other people are doing or not doing, taking sides in drama conflicts. That will do nothing to improve your writing, and eventually sour you on the whole act. I've seen wonderfully gifted writers burn out this way.

OR you can focus on direct comments from the readers - public or private. Paying attention to substantive reader feedback, corresponding with those who appreciate your work, taking their suggestions into consideration (when you feel they improve your stories), and writing writing writing - that will lead you to be a better writer and, more importantly, be a happy, satisfied person. And you'll likely have some very cool conversations and maybe even find good friends.

It's a choice each of you has to make. Obviously, I think the second one is better.

Anyone who enters the themed contests with primary goals of the meager monetary rewards, the coveted blue W, and/or the bragging rights of having won, placed or shown, isn't paying attention to what is most important.

EYEBALLS!

Yes, eyeballs. And not just eyeballs on your contest entry, but the synergistic effect of all those new readers discovering your other stories. New readers that favorite you so they can wander through your story file at their leisure. Readers that become new fans. Readers that "LIKE" your author Facebook page. Readers that open up communications with you via email. Readers that become eBook buyers.

I'll happily take my #20-whatever placing in the contest because when it comes down to brass tacks and what number is actually THE most important one, it isn't that final score, it's the number of views...followed closely by new author and story favs.

Perhaps we get far too tunnel-visioned during contests and caught up in silly conspiracy theories to pay attention to the real reason most authors enter them. Grabbing eyeballs!

http://www.animatedimages.org/data/media/35/animated-eye-image-0031.gif

.

 

[Laurel]

Perhaps we get far too tunnel-visioned during contests and caught up in silly conspiracy theories to pay attention to the real reason most authors enter them. Grabbing eyeballs!

http://www.animatedimages.org/data/media/35/animated-eye-image-0031.gif

.

Grabbing eyeballs! Sounds like a Halloween contest plot bunny!

http://www.freehalloweenimages.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Halloween-Bunny-3.jpg

 

[JKendallDane]

Grabbing eyeballs! Sounds like a Halloween contest plot bunny!

http://www.freehalloweenimages.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Halloween-Bunny-3.jpg

Here's a proper "thank you" for posting that plot bunny, Laurel. (so stole it! )

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/3c/52/16/3c5216caaddce7f3f5b24f5e87df3471.jpg




.

 

[TxRad]

That was interesting. Kind of weird but interesting.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I don't get why people would cheat. What's the reward? They know they cheated, so what's the true motivation? Are they that warped that they have to be first, win all the big events, lord it over those who lost?

The same problem exists in the online gaming communities all over the net. I just don't get why someone cheats.

For me the satisfaction comes from knowing I did my best.

I hope there is a special place in hell-if it exists-for cheaters.

 

[_Lynn_]

I don't get why people would cheat. What's the reward? They know they cheated, so what's the true motivation? Are they that warped that they have to be first, win all the big events, lord it over those who lost?

The same problem exists in the online gaming communities all over the net. I just don't get why someone cheats.

For me the satisfaction comes from knowing I did my best.

I hope there is a special place in hell-if it exists-for cheaters.

It's the same with NaNo. People finish their 50,000 words in a few hours.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

It's the same with NaNo. People finish their 50,000 words in a few hours.

Okay...so they type 16,667 words an hour? Who doesn't?

 

[_Lynn_]

Okay...so they type 16,667 words an hour? Who doesn't?

I know, right? And what do they win? Nothing more than anyone who finishes their 50,000 words in the last hours of the month.

 

[oggbashan]

I know, right? And what do they win? Nothing more than anyone who finishes their 50,000 words in the last hours of the month.

NaNoWriMo is only a challenge to yourself. If you complete it, the only person you impress is yourself.

Yes, it is easy to fool the system, but why? You are only fooling yourself.

I completed NaNoWriNo in 2003. I already knew I could write 50,000 words or more in a month. I made the challenge to myself a little harder:

I wanted to write, edit and POST on Literotica the whole 50,000 words before the end of NaNoWriMo. I had to allow time for the delay in posting. But I (thanks to Laurel ) did it.

The result is the 12 chapters of Flawed Red Silk.

I haven't bothered to attempt NaNoWriMo since then, but I have often exceeded 50,000 words in a month.

 

[Laurel]

That was interesting. Kind of weird but interesting.

As it this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM

I don't get why people would cheat.

Because they're assholes?

But seriously, I think there are a variety of reasons people attempt to multi-vote on Lit. Some honestly believe that they are being downvoted, so they upvote to "fix" things, and downvote those they believe are upvoting them. Others will multi-downvote because they think certain other stories don't "deserve" the ratings they have. And then there are others who want to see their names on the tops of lists and don't what shenaynay it takes to get there.

It's more complicated than you'd think at first glance, and I think sometimes even the most morally level of people can get sucked into doing stuff on the Internet that they would never do in the 'real' world.

For me the satisfaction comes from knowing I did my best.

I hope there is a special place in hell-if it exists-for cheaters.

There is - the hell of living in their own minds.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I don't get why people would cheat. What's the reward? They know they cheated, so what's the true motivation? Are they that warped that they have to be first, win all the big events, lord it over those who lost?

The same problem exists in the online gaming communities all over the net. I just don't get why someone cheats.

For me the satisfaction comes from knowing I did my best.

I hope there is a special place in hell-if it exists-for cheaters.

Youre hopelessly naïve. Ninety-five percent do it for the plastic trophy or ME TOO! banner. It all depends on what thrills you. The trophy or the sweeter peach.

 

[_Lynn_]

NaNoWriMo is only a challenge to yourself. If you complete it, the only person you impress is yourself.

Yes, it is easy to fool the system, but why? You are only fooling yourself.

I completed NaNoWriNo in 2003. I already knew I could write 50,000 words or more in a month. I made the challenge to myself a little harder:

I wanted to write, edit and POST on Literotica the whole 50,000 words before the end of NaNoWriMo. I had to allow time for the delay in posting. But I (thanks to Laurel ) did it.

The result is the 12 chapters of Flawed Red Silk.

I haven't bothered to attempt NaNoWriMo since then, but I have often exceeded 50,000 words in a month.

My first NaNo was in 2007, the year I began writing. I finished the challenge in five days. I wrote a non-fiction piece that was easy to transfer from my head to the computer. Someday, I might find a use for the thing.

 

[FantasyXY]

So just how would one go about building one of these "voting blocks" and how would they work?... Numerically speaking of course.