Ratio between Authors and Non-Authors

[fantaseeboy]

The vast majority of the comments on my work seem to come from members without a single submission and mostly blank profile. I'm curious if anyone is aware of the ratio between members who have submitted at least one piece of work to members with no submissions at all.

 

[SimonDoom]

I have no hard stats but I think non-authors vastly outnumber authors, by many factors. I have not actually counted, but among my followers non authors outnumber authors by many times. My guess is at least 10 to 1, and maybe more.

 

[AlinaX]

I think also that authors are hesitant about leaving comments.

 

[jaF0]

I have no hard stats but I think non-authors vastly outnumber authors, by many factors. I have not actually counted, but among my followers non authors outnumber authors by many times. My guess is at least 10 to 1, and maybe more.

Which is probably true for any site with self published works.

 

[KeithD]

There is no way for any of us to know that statistic.

 

[SimonDoom]

There is no way for any of us to know that statistic.

That's not entirely true. You can scroll through your list of followers, and for each of them you can see how many works they've written. From that you can extrapolate at least a very rough idea of how many authors there are versus non-authors. It's only an approximation, but it's not meaningless.

I looked at the first 20 on my list of followers, and 2 were authors. The rest had no works to their name. So I was right that it's about 1 in 10.

My guess is that non-authors outnumber authors by more than that. I think AlinaX is right that authors are sometimes hesitant to leave comments, but I suspect they're more likely to leave comments than non-authors, because many non-authors read stories and don't even think about leaving a comment or voting on the story. Way back in the day, when I was a reader and not an author, I rarely thought about leaving input, and I rarely did. Now, as an author, I feel obliged to let an author know if I like their story.

 

[oggbashan]

There is no way for any of us to know that statistic.

There is, but it would take days of work.

In the list of members of Literotica, there is a note about how many works each one has submitted. At a rough guess, it is about 1,000 non-authors to anyone who has submitted anything.

 

[gunhilltrain]

I suppose we should be flattered that so many people come here to read our stuff. They seem to have an insatiable need for erotic writing. I've seen people with dozens, even hundreds perhaps, of favorite stories. I've made no attempt to count how many some of them have. I have only about thirty-six favorites myself.

 

[KeithD]

That's not entirely true. You can scroll through your list of followers, and for each of them you can see how many works they've written.

You can't determine either that four accounts authoring stories aren't really just one person (I write stories here under multiple accounts, some linked, some not) nor that accounts without a story file aren't people who are authors in other accounts.

This "gotta have statistics" fetish gets pretty silly and needy, I think.

 

[SimonDoom]

You can't determine either that four accounts authoring stories aren't really just one person (I write stories here under multiple accounts, some linked, some not) nor that accounts without a story file aren't people who are authors in other accounts.

This "gotta had statistics" fetish gets pretty silly and needy, I think.

I think the stats are fun and interesting, as long as one doesn't write just for stats. Some of us just like information. I don't dispute it can get silly, but there's nothing wrong with silly. Remember what Paul McCartney sang!

You are correct that no one really knows, but there's no reason to believe that non-authors would have multiple accounts, so it seems fair to say that if from the followers list the ratio is 1 author to 10 non authors, then that represents the highest likely ratio of authors to non-authors. I think that probably is true.

 

[mynameisben]

If writing were easy, everyone would do it. But the truth of the matter is that writing is a very, very difficult thing to do. There are an infinite number of ways to misspell a word, but only one way to spell it right. To choose the precise right words from a dictionary of over one million entries and string them together, one after the other, into coherent sentences? The odds against doing such a thing simply boggle the mind! And those are just the extreme rudiments. There are so many more layers to writing left to conquer: grammar, punctuation, characters, plot, sexuality, humor, nuance, minimizing verbosity, avoiding clichés, engaging the reader, and on and on. Lit authors do it all, and they do it all for Free. Not once, but for story after story, day after day after day.

Those of you who are on the majority side of that thousand-to-one ratio should take one minute of your lives to digest and appreciate just how lucky you are to be Lit members, where your erotic entertainment is always no-strings-attached free of charge. And maybe — just maybe — think twice before leaving an undeserved negative comment on a story or lobbing your next 1-bomb.


Ben

 

[jaF0]

I think stats can show whatever you want them to.

 

[SimonDoom]

I think stats can show whatever you want them to.

I'm not quite that cynical about them. I think stats are noisy. There's a high error rate and they're junk if your method of collecting them is flawed. But data is useful. Those who pay attention to data profit from doing so, and that's true for authors as much as anyone else.

 

[KeithD]

I think the stats are fun and interesting, as long as one doesn't write just for stats. Some of us just like information.

Yes, there are a whole lot of people who accept made-up shit as "information," supposedly thinking it means something. We've just had more than four years of that here in the States.

"Information" is a neutral word. It can be either useful or worthless, depending on what it's built on. Having "information" in hand that was built on falsity (the statistics question of this thread, for instance) maybe is calming pablum to you and others but it is totally worthless. It's a fake prop. Confident writers don't need fake props.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I have 39 followers so far, and 34 of them haven't published anything. 5 have at least one published work.

 

[rescatooor]

There are still plenty of authors who don't read here anything at all. Naturally there are also plenty of non-registered readers too...

 

[jaF0]

And there are plenty of readers who don't follow anyone.

As well as plenty who follow some authors but still read stories from others.

 

[jaF0]

In short ... this d0eZ no0t com4ute ... TILT!!!!!

 

[SimonDoom]

Yes, there are a whole lot of people who accept made-up shit as "information," supposedly thinking it means something. We've just had more than four years of that here in the States.

.

Woah now, cowboy. You get no disagreement from me about the insanity of the last four years. But that has nothing to do with what I wrote.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You are correct that no one really knows, but there's no reason to believe that non-authors would have multiple accounts, so it seems fair to say that if from the followers list the ratio is 1 author to 10 non authors, then that represents the highest likely ratio of authors to non-authors. I think that probably is true.

I generally start with the Pareto Principle in any data analysis, especially one that invokes human behaviour, as this one obviously does. I'd then skew it a fair bit, based on what I've seen, who responds to my stories, my gut feel - and doing the stats and counts from a twenty year data set, that's going to settle any noise or jitter overall.

I reckon the band of authors is somewhere in the 3% - 10% range. Like Simon, I doubt it would be much higher than one in ten. The number of writers with more than a dozen or stories? Maybe one in twenty, one in thirty.

8letters can crunch some numbers, I'm sure.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

My vote is with the ‘there’s no way of knowing’ crowd.

It’s a certainty that some writers have multiple accounts and there’s no firm reason to say that some readers (some of whom are writers) don’t, too. More to the point, think about the most wide-open stat, that being ‘reads’. That only indicates how many times the story has been opened - not read, just opened. How many of those are repeat ‘readers’, individuals going to the same story multiple times? It’s the same with comments. How many anonymous comments have been left? Call it a million for the purpose of discussion - does that mean one million readers each leaving one comment or one dude who’s left a million comments? Obviously, it’s likely somewhere in between, but I defy you to try to nail it down.

I agree with the observations that writers have more unnamed followers and commenters, but don’t think it proves much WRT the original question. All we have are hints and indications and suggestions. I wouldn’t bet a nickel on the odds.

Bottom line? Probably ‘a bunch’.

 

[SimonDoom]

Yes, there are a whole lot of people who accept made-up shit as "information," supposedly thinking it means something. We've just had more than four years of that here in the States.

"Information" is a neutral word. It can be either useful or worthless, depending on what it's built on. Having "information" in hand that was built on falsity (the statistics question of this thread, for instance) maybe is calming pablum to you and others but it is totally worthless. It's a fake prop. Confident writers don't need fake props.

I think you give insufficient credit to people like 8Letters who obviously have gone to considerable trouble to gather imperfect and messy data and present it for whatever it's worth. People can do with it what they want. I personally think it's admirable and interesting. You cannot even begin to compare what he is doing -- a sincere and intelligent attempt to interpret data -- with what the con artist of the last four years did. That's not right.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Bottom line? Probably ‘a bunch’.

That's a statistical definition, I'm sure. Like "a whole lot more" and "quite a few less".

 

[Bramblethorn]

I have no hard stats but I think non-authors vastly outnumber authors, by many factors. I have not actually counted, but among my followers non authors outnumber authors by many times. My guess is at least 10 to 1, and maybe more.

Looking at followers is going to skew things a bit. Authors tend to be socially connected - like here - and that probably extends to following patterns, so I'd expect the percentage of authors among our followers to be higher than the percentage among Literotica members as a whole. I think your "at least 10 to 1" is correct, though.

In fact, modulo the question of alt accounts, it's very easy to get a rough answer to that question. The site has a form that allows searching members, and very conveniently author/non-author status is one of the search options.

https://search.literotica.com/?type=member

There are a couple of complications: the search returns a max of ten thousand members, and you can't search on just author/non-author status. The form seems to require entering something in the "username contains" field, and if I enter a single letter e.g. "e" I only get names that contain "e" as a stand-alone e.g. "Wile E. Coyote" rather than everything with the letter "e" in it.

If I search on "bra", I get 471 authors who are Bradfords, brats, librarians, brassiere enthusiasts, and the like, and at least 10,000 members who aren't.

If I search on something a little more specific, for instance, "simo", I get a bunch of Simons and Simones. 77 when I filter to "authors", 1364 when I search on "non-authors", and when I search on both as a consistency check I get the expected 1441.

Searching on "prick" finds 156 members, 8 of whom are authors and 148 aren't. "pussy" gets 111 vs. 5393.

For most of those search terms, the ratio is about 1 author per 20 non-authors, though for "pussy" closer to 1 per 50 - I guess authors are less likely to be pussies.

If you wanted to be a bit more rigorous about it, you could harness 8letters' team of gerbils and skim through Literotica profiles (sequential URLs make that an easy thing to do) and just count members, non-members, and anything else of interest. If going through the full five-million-odd accounts seems like too much, a sampling approach would be easy enough, using the URL sequence to control for old vs. new accounts.

Sanity check on that ratio: from URL numbers, there are probably a couple of million accounts. (The URLs go up to five million and something, but many numbers are missing - probably deleted accounts.) The site has about 500k stories. Two million accounts at a 1:20 ratio would imply ~100k authors, so an average of 5 stories per author. That seems reasonable.

So, unless anybody wants to do the extra work of a more rigorous count, I'm happy with an estimate of 1 author per 20 non-author members (per vastly more non-member readers, one assumes).

 

[Bramblethorn]

There are still plenty of authors who don't read here anything at all. Naturally there are also plenty of non-registered readers too...

To be fair, there are also commenters who don't read the stories ;-)