Disappearing votes?

[chasten]

Yesterday at 11:00 a.m. my story had 1775 votes. Today at 11:00 a.m. it has 1656. The score hasn't changed, but ...

Are their vote-counting processes unreliable?

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I have nowhere seen an official site policy on this, but it seems common; you are not the first to notice it. Popular opinion is that Laurel, the site owner, is going back and trying to erase, shall we say, 'excessive' scoring. That mean that the trolls' votes get whittled away, but so do those of 'overenthusiastic' fans.

 

[KeithD]

For years, the site has had a program of sweeping votes it considers fraudulent--on a criteria it will not reveal so as not to help fraudulent voters circumvent the process. Users ask this question a couple of times a week here. Site vote sweeping is the answer.

 

[chasten]

I have nowhere seen an official site policy on this, but it seems common; you are not the first to notice it. Popular opinion is that Laurel, the site owner, is going back and trying to erase, shall we say, 'excessive' scoring. That mean that the trolls' votes get whittled away, but so do those of 'overenthusiastic' fans.

On what basis would she be making that decision? How would she distinguish a troll '1' from someone who truly hated the story, or a partisan '5' from someone who truly loved a story?

If a story is in a category that doesn't have a lot of turnover, it will sit visible for quite some time and, therefore, get a fair amount of traffic. Couple that with increasing follower counts and you get traffic even across categories.

 

[KeithD]

What I posted is the most you can get from others posting here. If you want to discuss it with site management, the sole submissions editor (and site owner), Laurel, can only be reached via the private message system (upper right of this page if you have messages turned on).

 

[SimonDoom]

On what basis would she be making that decision? How would she distinguish a troll '1' from someone who truly hated the story, or a partisan '5' from someone who truly loved a story?

If a story is in a category that doesn't have a lot of turnover, it will sit visible for quite some time and, therefore, get a fair amount of traffic. Couple that with increasing follower counts and you get traffic even across categories.

The Site Owner will not reveal how fraudulent votes are determined, for the reason given by KeithD: they don't want people to game the system, so they keep the sweep process somewhat mysterious.

 

[chasten]

What I posted is the most you can get from others posting here. If you want to discuss it with site management, the sole submissions editor (and site owner), Laurel, can only be reached via the private message system (upper right of this page if you have messages turned on).

I appreciate that you can do or say nothing. Discussing it with site management appears not to be an option as Laurel has declined to respond for a couple of days to requests to understand why they are pulling votes (hundreds at this point). Views have high, Likes are high, but apparently the votes aren't allowed to be high. Thanks anyway, guys. I know you have no info.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

Whatever the algorithm, it is deeply flawed. I have recently had stories that have had no ratings for months, and in some cases years, lose a lot of votes in a matter of days.

Others that have been one-bombed within minutes of publication still remain to be 'adjusted'.

The whole site these days seems to be automated with very little human intervention.

 

[lovecraft68]

I appreciate that you can do or say nothing. Discussing it with site management appears not to be an option as Laurel has declined to respond for a couple of days to requests to understand why they are pulling votes (hundreds at this point). Views have high, Likes are high, but apparently the votes aren't allowed to be high. Thanks anyway, guys. I know you have no info.

Whatever the algorithm, it is deeply flawed. I have recently had stories that have had no ratings for months, and in some cases years, lose a lot of votes in a matter of days.

Others that have been one-bombed within minutes of publication still remain to be 'adjusted'.

The whole site these days seems to be automated with very little human intervention.

The thing is Lits is the biggest site of its kind with the biggest audience and if you look at it in a business sense of how is the site run? Its success is the ultimate example of rewarding bad behavior, because if their success was measured in actual effort and desire to give a shit, they'd have gone under years ago.

So unless authors started getting fed up and leaving-and pulling their stories when they do-things will continue to run as is, no effort, no consistency, no fucks given.

Everyone has different motivations for being here and amounts of vested interest. If lit was my #1 focus as a writer I would have bailed a long time ago because personally I'd settle for less attention, but a professionally run site, over a lot of views and the crap that goes on here.

But for the last few years this has been more of a hang out to me than anything I take seriously so I stay on, but will never toadie up and defend the half ass nature of the place.

 

[LexxRuthless]

Over the past 24 hours, I am showing a net loss of 3151 votes on my 65 entries. 12 of my stories have also had their ratings drop, including .05 for my most recent submission. It normally isn't this extreme, but this has been happening every day for the past 9 months now.

Since we aren't privy to what each vote actually was, and votes are disappearing daily, all I can do is estimate how many votes my stories have lost since this started last July. For me, it's somewhere around 25,000 votes that have disappeared. Over 24,700 of those were 5-star votes. The process is making it much easier for down-voters to have a more substantial impact on everyone's scores, since they vote more often than legitimate readers.

 

[BarracudaSwordfish]

Looks like views are now up the creek as well.

I had a story published yesterday and it had 900 views in the first two hours. Since then it had had a further 200 views in a day.

At 900 it had 2 faves and 4 ratings.

Now it has 14 faves and 60 ratngs, so something is off somewhere.

Other stories published yesterday seem to have abnormally low views. I wonder if it is to do with the new story page roll-out ?

 

[LexxRuthless]

Just took another Excel "snapshot" 3 hours after the last one. I'm showing 51 views over that span, and -548 votes. Six of my stories had scores that dropped. None went up.

 

[TxRad]

Thank you for the reports.

Can you let me know a few specific stories (hopefully from different authors) where it looks like votes are disappearing?

We are aware of the read count issue and working on that.

Sorry for the rollout issues, we are working on a bunch of smaller reported bugs as well.

I found this in the Site News & Tech Support Forum.

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

My most voted story has lost about 10% of its votes in the past week and is now under 1,000 votes again. The score didn't change.

Regarding the view count, I'm halfway glad to hear there may be a glitch with it. My new story, published today after being in the works off and on for about nine months, has 97 views shown so far today versus the 800 to 1,000 I was hoping to see by this point. Having a one-bomb out the gate and a 2 for the most recent vote, it's been a very disappointing release for a story that took so long to research and write. There may be shorter stories on my ledger in the future...if I can write them.

 

[SimonDoom]

I monitor my stats fairly often and have noticed an unusually large deletion of votes over the last three days. What's also odd is that this time the loss of votes did not result in an uptick in my average story score. Quite the contrary, several stories' scores went down, and none went up. So my overall average score for all stories is lower than what it was before.

My latest story dropped from 701 votes to 562 votes. That seems weird. That's really dramatic. It's hard for me to imagine that 139 votes for that story were illegitimate. It wasn't a Loving Wives story. It wasn't the kind of story to draw a lot of trolls.

The score for that story dropped from 4.59 to 4.55. That, too, seems odd. Whatever the sweep is doing, it's not deleting 1-bombs. It's deleted more high scores than low scores.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I monitor my stats fairly often and have noticed an unusually large deletion of votes over the last three days. What's also odd is that this time the loss of votes did not result in an uptick in my average story score. Quite the contrary, several stories' scores went down, and none went up. So my overall average score for all stories is lower than what it was before.

My latest story dropped from 701 votes to 562 votes. That seems weird. That's really dramatic. It's hard for me to imagine that 139 votes for that story were illegitimate. It wasn't a Loving Wives story. It wasn't the kind of story to draw a lot of trolls.

The score for that story dropped from 4.59 to 4.55. That, too, seems odd. Whatever the sweep is doing, it's not deleting 1-bombs. It's deleted more high scores than low scores.

I’ve been seeing the same thing. Odd.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I’ve been seeing the same thing. Odd.

I'm not seeing much of this stuff in my story rankings. I haven't methodically tracked them for several years, but they look much the same as they always have.

I read about some of the high Vote and View counts folk report here, and my unresearched opinion is that category must have a lot to do with it. My numbers are nothing like those reported - I've got near on a million words published over six years and my highest Vote counts are in the 300s. I'm not sure I believe vote counts up in the tens of thousands unless that writer has been around a decade or more. Or there are penguins, being busy.

 

[KeithD]

I'm not seeing much of this stuff in my story rankings. I haven't methodically tracked them for several years, but they look much the same as they always have.

I read about some of the high Vote and View counts folk report here, and my unresearched opinion is that category must have a lot to do with it. My numbers are nothing like those reported - I've got near on a million words published over six years and my highest Vote counts are in the 300s. I'm not sure I believe vote counts up in the tens of thousands unless that writer has been around a decade or more. Or there are penguins, being busy.

Yeah, my votes aren't anything like that either, and I have way too many stories posted to keep track of either view or voting changes. I guess you can either follow a few stories like they are your babies or something or spend most of your time actually writing stories.

 

[lovecraft68]

A few months back when Lexxx started a thread about how he keeps losing votes, I did a couple of screenshots to capture the numbers on around half my stories. I waited a few days then went back and checked and saw what I would consider normal activity most had gone up a couple votes, I think one did lose 4 votes and the scores were about the same, otherwise I've paid no mind to what my stories do here these days.

I think the stories in the range of thousands of votes are a mixture of category, name recognition in said category, age matters in the sense that if a story has been here 10+ years its going to have high totals.

There's also a factor the envious and naysayers seem to never want to talk about and that's maybe the story in question is a very good story that had a big initial response and because its remained on top lists continues to get votes even when its a few years old.

Sometimes, the reality is...its a good story by a good writer.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Well, on checking, one of mine lost two votes three days ago, then two more yesterday night and then a full 86 more votes last night. Didn't change the score, so I guess more 1-bombs than 5s got deleted, but gads, wow and golly jeepers...

 

[Bramblethorn]

Whatever the algorithm, it is deeply flawed. I have recently had stories that have had no ratings for months, and in some cases years, lose a lot of votes in a matter of days.

Others that have been one-bombed within minutes of publication still remain to be 'adjusted'.

The whole site these days seems to be automated with very little human intervention.

That doesn't mean the algorithm is wrong. (Or rather, unduly wrong - any algorithm or human trying to do something like this is going to make mistakes sometimes.) Another interpretation would be that it's been updated and is now catching duplicate votes that were missed in previous sweeps.

 

[TxRad]

That doesn't mean the algorithm is wrong. (Or rather, unduly wrong - any algorithm or human trying to do something like this is going to make mistakes sometimes.) Another interpretation would be that it's been updated and is now catching duplicate votes that were missed in previous sweeps.

It could also mean that it is now catching up with people who have been gaming the system for years and years. That would mean a large number of votes that are being taken down slowly instead of all at once. Also a reason no one is explaining anything.

 

[SimonDoom]

That doesn't mean the algorithm is wrong. (Or rather, unduly wrong - any algorithm or human trying to do something like this is going to make mistakes sometimes.) Another interpretation would be that it's been updated and is now catching duplicate votes that were missed in previous sweeps.

I suspect you are correct and something like this is happening.

What's disconcerting for people is that the sweeps are unpredictable and sometimes result in weirdly large vote deletions. But that's not necessarily a bug. It could be a feature. It might be an essential feature for achieving the desired result without tipping off the gamers about how they can get around the system.

In any event, I see no cause for alarm. If votes are eliminated . . . so what? It's a problem if it results in a story that otherwise would qualify for a contest falling below the threshold. But I don't think that happens much.

 

[RejectReality]

I was expecting next to nothing out of mine that came out today, but it's tracking along with 4 more votes than it has views due to the new pages not incrementing views LOL

So I'm at least getting a giggle out of the outrageous per view ratio. 100%+ vote per view, 10% comments and favorites per view.

I really hope nobody released a lightning-in-a-bottle story in Incest or a similar high view category today, though. It would be a serious bummer not to get credit for the views on something that could potentially hit view lists and boost the long-term engagement.

The only thing I noticed losing votes was Silence is Goldwyn, and it lost about 100. If the score changed, it wasn't by much. Others look as if they probably lost some, but I haven't been looking closely enough to guess.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Some of my stories have jumped a little, some are down, most are more or less the same, but I don't get the high #'s of views and votes that some of you guys see. Looks like normal sweeps to me, but it sounds like being run across the whole site, and not focused on a single category or anything.