OMG One Bombs!

[RejectReality]

Votes considered to be illegitimate are removed by automated queries. The only publicly stated reason for a vote to be removed is multiple votes from the same IP/ID, but other criteria certainly exist.

What’s a sweep here

 

[LdyHoneybee]

I would not even set the numbers if somebody would just tell me what they liked or didn’t like. As someone who is flying blind as to the expectations of people on the site, I would like to know what works here and what doesn’t, and the numbers with no explanation really don’t do that. As i see from reading your all’s comments, there are all kinds of reasons for the numbers, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality or suitability of the writing. Looking at numbers is like staring into a fogged over crystal ball!

 

[NotWise]

What’s a sweep here?

A sweep is when the site runs an automated process that removes votes that the algorithm characterizes as "invalid." Sweeps happen on a fairly regular basis, with varying effect.

 

[NotWise]

Of those 10 changed scores, eight were downwards.

Yes, swings can be anticipated. They’re normal. And, yes, ‘not-Five’ votes have a greater impact, so to speak, than Fives. Gotcha. And randomness can do strange things, things which set our primitive pattern-recognition senses twitching incorrectly. All that is acknowledged,

On the other hand, when this sort of pattern becomes, shall we say, overly-frequent, one’s mind misquotes Auric Goldfinger: “Once is randomness, Mr Bond. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

If those scores were high, then a downward change is far more likely to show than an upward change, which is very difficult to achieve.

The pattern you're complaining about is the norm. I guess you can exercise a little fundamental paranoia and call it enemy action, but who's the enemy? Is it "them" again?

For what it's worth, I don't regard 100 votes as being a threshold for stability.

 

[lovecraft68]

No voters are manipulating the votes or vindictively down-voting the story. There are just different points of view.

Yes, and no. A lower than five vote can be a matter of opinion. That's what I tend to think on non contest stories and stories that have been around awhile and no longer show up on new lists, as well as not making any top lists.

For contest entries, stories on the front page of new story lists, and stories on top lists there are vindictive bombs from fans of other authors, authors themselves, the category trolls and personal ones. You came around-at least under your current name-right around the time of the cabin debacle and aftermath, and the months before that were proof of all the negative actions that go on here in both down and upvoting based on friendships and those you're not friends with.

Before them there was Scouries, and Boston Fiction Writer, both of whom had endless sock puppet accounts used to attack people's stories. I think at this point, there doesn't seem to be any type of cabal here or even one person with that many voting accounts which is why as much as people might complain about what goes on here now, people who have been here longer know its not as bad as it was, there will always be some people who do this but its a much smaller scale. I know of one for sure, but won't say the name, but its not hard to figure out based on track record and an obvious "when you point a finger...etc"

 

[TarnishedPenny]

What’s a sweep here?

The site periodically removes ‘irregular’ votes, both good and bad. Discussing the methodology is not encouraged as it might aid the gamers.

 

[Bramblethorn]

For what it's worth, I don't regard 100 votes as being a threshold for stability.

Yup. At 100 votes, a story could easily still be 0.15 points away from its long-term stable score: https://forum.literotica.com/threads/how-can-i-request-a-personal-sweep.1553976/page-2#post-94322314

There's a belief that high-scoring stories get bombed, and I expect that does happen. But there's also a thing called "regression to the mean". The highest scoring stories tend to have a combination of quality and luck going for them, and over time luck changes. So you can expect toplist stories to drop a bit, in the same kind of way that an athlete who just managed a world-record time is probably going to do a little worse next time.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Point taken, but let me give you an example, a series. Either half a dozen different readers each bombed one story in the series the same day (yes, me, today) or one person took his or her time. Further, the stories in question are, objectively, pretty good tales, well-rated by a lot of people. That somebody else comes along and finds them all dreadful, without any literary merit, to the point that a very low score is justified, well, that's... curious.

Is "objectively good" really possible here, though? Or do we just have "subjectively good for a high percentage of readers"?

From my feedback, I know there are certain things that my regular readers see as strengths in my stories, but I also know that some readers hate those same things. One reader's "takes time to make us care about the characters rather than rushing into the sex" is another's "slow and boring". Obviously I'd rather hear from the former, but neither of those readers is wrong or malicious in having that preference and voting on it.

(This is part of why voting analyses based on an expected normal distribution are unsound: it's common for ratings to be dominated by extreme scores at both ends with less in the middle.)

I do agree that when a single voter is going through one-starring a whole bunch of stories from the same author, that's more likely to be malice.

Not whining. It's not my site and I'm grateful for such opportunity I get. My point is that there is no rational reason to think that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or that is it not being manipulated.

I agree with that. But I also think that people tend to assume "manipulation" both when it's happening and when it's not.

 

[ElectricBlue]

On the other hand, when this sort of pattern becomes, shall we say, overly-frequent, one’s mind misquotes Auric Goldfinger: “Once is randomness, Mr Bond. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”

This is my view, too, and it's a classic project management rule of thumb.

Human activity (any activity, generally speaking, but especially human behaviour in high numbers) tends to follow fairly predictable patterns, one day pretty similar to the last, a different weekend cycle, sure, but any long term trend is generally a straight(ish) line, trending either up or down. But when something suddenly changes with a rapid jump up or a cliff drop down, it's pretty self evident that "something has happened."

And when it happens repeatedly, and downwards overall, I think it's pretty safe to say it's malicious, gone beyond random, that there's a conscious negativity involved. Some people, for whatever reason, seem to attract a higher percentage of fucktadary than others, for reasons that seem incomprehensible to me (some people and some reasons are pretty obvious, but some, like TP, I don't understand at all).

It is what it is, though, and we're not going to change human behaviour. But we can analyse it to whatever extent we think it's worth analysing, and make of it what we will. What intrigues me, though, is the high number of folk who keep detailed spreadsheets who then say scores don't matter - that seems contradictory to me.

I kept a score spreadsheet once, gave it up about eight years because it got too hard to maintain, and anyway, it told me what I already knew: people prefer well-written stories over bad ones. I'm savvy enough within my own content to know which of my work is better than the worst - but I'd never use my scores to compare my writing to someone else's.

If you consider scores as a kind of self contained judgement pool on your own writing, you're on safe(ish) ground, but to compare yourself to the next guy, that's when you're on quicksand.

 

[8letters]

My point is that there is no rational reason to think that the system is not vulnerable to manipulation or that is it not being manipulated.

I think there's lots of rational reasons to think the system isn't nearly as vulnerable as you think it is.

When I started posting here almost ten years ago, there was an author who posted occasionally named scouries. Someone (I think LC68) posted that scouries had sometime much earlier figured out how to artificially inflate his story stats. It's been a long time, so I can't remember if it was just views or views and rating. My recollection is that the recounter of the story said Literotica had to roll back a lot of their lists because of scouries' shenanigans. Here is a thread created by scouries that's had his posts deleted. scouries identifies himself as "Literotica's #1 Author".

Nothing like that has happened in the almost ten years I've been posting these to forums. The only thing close is that story ratings were depressed for several months after the story front-end was changed.

I don't know of any accusations that a story made it to the hall of fame because votes on the site were manipulated. I don't know of any accusations that someone won a contest because of votes on the site were manipulated.

 

[tenyari]

What makes you think they were 1-bombs? You can't really tell unless you're actually back-calculating the votes, and a lot of people seem to think that any down vote is a 1-bomb. With a high score and low vote total, anything below a 5* vote is damaging.

This is what I was trying to figure out.

My last story posted here was 2008 - so none of the votes I have are recent, to my knowledge. I see no way to determine what the individual votes were. I guess it shows up in activity meaning you'd need to 'write them down as they come in'?

As for 'down' votes, there's no real structure to the system - it's just pic some stars. So it really doesn't have any objective meaning.

There was a similar discussion on another site I'm on not long back and I put up a suggestion that, if they wanted the votes to have any sense of objectiveness, the voting would need to be broken up into a series of categories you could only vote yes/no on:

good spelling yes/no
good grammer yes/no
engaging plot yes/no
turned you on (if erotic - that site had non-erotic stories also) yes/no
well made characters yes/no

etc...

Put a pile of those together and make voters click a radio button choice on each. Add up all the yes responses for a score.

- That at least would mean people were "sort of" voting in a consistent pattern. But it's always going to be absurdly subjective.

But with so many people so attached to the scores they have, no pre-existing website is ever going to alter the method it uses by much, so... I just kind of ignore the scores when looking for stories to read. I focus on the tagging more - unfortunately my old 2002 era stories seem to have completely random tags on them. I'll probably re-submit them AFTER I have some new content (weird that I can't just edit things like that) - but I suspect the same problem effects a lot of older work.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It is what it is, though, and we're not going to change human behaviour. But we can analyse it to whatever extent we think it's worth analysing, and make of it what we will. What intrigues me, though, is the high number of folk who keep detailed spreadsheets who then say scores don't matter - that seems contradictory to me.

Sport doesn't matter but lots of people enjoy watching it.

For those of a certain mindset, there's a lot of joy to be found in studying a complicated system and figuring out how it works. That doesn't require being invested in the outcome.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Sport doesn't matter but lots of people enjoy watching it.

For those of a certain mindset, there's a lot of joy to be found in studying a complicated system and figuring out how it works. That doesn't require being invested in the outcome.

Fair comment, oh person who very much likes data. As do I, but without the attention to detail you've got. Mine is much more gut calibration based on a few intuitive rules of thumb, whereas your analysis is robustly empirical. For two people who think quite differently, it's interesting how we often arrive at the same result. Interesting things, brains .

 

[Comshaw]

This is what I was trying to figure out.

My last story posted here was 2008 - so none of the votes I have are recent, to my knowledge. I see no way to determine what the individual votes were. I guess it shows up in activity meaning you'd need to 'write them down as they come in'?

As for 'down' votes, there's no real structure to the system - it's just pic some stars. So it really doesn't have any objective meaning.

There was a similar discussion on another site I'm on not long back and I put up a suggestion that, if they wanted the votes to have any sense of objectiveness, the voting would need to be broken up into a series of categories you could only vote yes/no on:

good spelling yes/no
good grammer yes/no
engaging plot yes/no
turned you on (if erotic - that site had non-erotic stories also) yes/no
well made characters yes/no

etc...

Put a pile of those together and make voters click a radio button choice on each. Add up all the yes responses for a score.

- That at least would mean people were "sort of" voting in a consistent pattern. But it's always going to be absurdly subjective.

But with so many people so attached to the scores they have, no pre-existing website is ever going to alter the method it uses by much, so... I just kind of ignore the scores when looking for stories to read. I focus on the tagging more - unfortunately my old 2002 era stories seem to have completely random tags on them. I'll probably re-submit them AFTER I have some new content (weird that I can't just edit things like that) - but I suspect the same problem effects a lot of older work.

While I like the idea and it would be advantageous for the authors, it would never be adopted and would be unworkable if it were. The premise of your idea is the reader would need to click a button for each choice. You designated four above so let's use that. I took a look at my story list. Using the views and votes I found that the best vote percentage on any story was 4% and the least was .07%. That's using the simple five star rating now in effect, in essence they only have to click 1 button. If the effort require was increased 4 fold, I believe you'd see a corresponding fall in the number of people voting.

There is no workable way (that I can see) to force a reader to vote either. The site could require them to register to vote, but that would cause a fall in the traffic for the site and traffic through the site (which generates revenue) is the ultimate aim and over-riding consideration of the owners. For them it's a balancing act, do what is required to keep people coming here while appeasing the authors as much a possible because they are key to generating that traffic.

Anyway, just my take on it.

Comshaw

 

[lovecraft68]

I think there's lots of rational reasons to think the system isn't nearly as vulnerable as you think it is.

When I started posting here almost ten years ago, there was an author who posted occasionally named scouries. Someone (I think LC68) posted that scouries had sometime much earlier figured out how to artificially inflate his story stats. It's been a long time, so I can't remember if it was just views or views and rating. My recollection is that the recounter of the story said Literotica had to roll back a lot of their lists because of scouries' shenanigans. Here is a thread created by scouries that's had his posts deleted. scouries identifies himself as "Literotica's #1 Author".

Nothing like that has happened in the almost ten years I've been posting these to forums. The only thing close is that story ratings were depressed for several months after the story front-end was changed.

I don't know of any accusations that a story made it to the hall of fame because votes on the site were manipulated. I don't know of any accusations that someone won a contest because of votes on the site were manipulated.

TX Rad or Reject Reality were here for all of Scouries 'career' I was around for the last few years of it. He was manipulating views by having some way of repeatedly clicking on his stories, but also-this is not anything I have proof of personally which is why I mentioned the other two authors-had a legion of sock puppet accounts he used to vote up his stories and down vote the people on the forum who pissed him off. He was the #1 faved author here for a time, going back and forth with Selena Kitt who he drove off the site in a despicable manner along with Boston Fiction writer, another who's name is attached to big time stat manipulations.

It was said he would manipulate the top lists by using his alts/system to upload a ton of favs to all the incest authors on the fav author top list. At one point Heyall complimented Scouries on one of his threads and the next day HA gained 39 new favorites overnight without a new story out.

Now a couple people here still claim he screws with the fav author list, but TBH I find it hard to believe. At this point he hasn't been seen on the forums in several years, and hasn't posted a story since 2012. To think he is still coming here every day to and creating more and more fake accounts really seems to be a stretch.

There is a lot of truth to what he'd done in the past, but as always there's some embellishment as well.

I'll give you the best scouries rumor, and one that there is more proof of than you'd think, and that is that scouries was part of the site as in an alt of Manu. Its not as easy to shrug off as people would like it to be, but he was a built in boogey man for years anytime something happened on the lists or voting or any stat related issue. Interesting little theory, but if true an ugly one considering what scouries did to two female authors here, so I hope its not true. If it was ever proven to be the site behind that I would pull my stories and close my account because that's how bad what was done to them was.

But one way or another no proof and it makes interesting lit "lore"

 

[Morm]

Wow, never knew Literotica had its own MsScribe level history.

 

[dmallord]

As evidence that 1* votes don't automatically get swept, there are stories on this site which have long-lasting "perfect" 1.00 scores.

Some votes were 'swept' on June 27. I saw one story drop 2 votes and another story dropped 1 vote. I could figure out the one count drop in my spreadsheet, but could not figureout the loss of two votes in one of my stories. avg/views/votes. I've tried to break the 39 int 3s,4s, and 5s but get 4.385 as an average.That would round up to 4.39. Crazy.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Some votes were 'swept' on June 27. I saw one story drop 2 votes and another story dropped 1 vote. I could figure out the one count drop in my spreadsheet, but could not figureout the loss of two votes in one of my stories. View attachment 2158341 avg/views/votes. I've tried to break the 39 int 3s,4s, and 5s but get 4.385 as an average.That would round up to 4.39. Crazy.

What was 41 x previous score compared to 39 x 4.38 = 171 (rounded)? The difference should easily yield two whole number votes, so you will see what disappeared.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

Yes, I know this topic is in hundreds Aubrey thousands, of posts already, and, yes, I know that in the long run it doesn’t matter because the story is going along well already, but for God’s sake, these bombs are pissing me off. My latest story dropped on, I believe, Tuesday and was actually polling up 4.9 plus. Then it got one bombed, I believe twice, to something like 4.82 - still a very respectable score. It began to edge back up to the mid 4.80s and got hit twice in a row until it hit the high 4.70s. Still an excellent score but it almost seems like someone is trying to hit me specifically. Obviously I know it’s not the case, seeing the multiplicity of posts here about the issue. Obviously the score it has now is nothing to sneeze at either. And, obviously, as I mentioned in a board post just yesterday, if you know a story is good you shouldn’t lose your cool and certainly should remember that, while it is good to receive affirmation, votes are not the most important thing. However, this is senseless- it may not be a five star story but it is certainly not a one star story - and irritating as Hell.
Ok, done now. Sorry.

https://literotica.com/s/libragirl2003

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5430653&page=submissions

Seems whenever I have a story in a contest, it gets one bombed. On June 19, the morning 'Pure Temptation' was published it was getting great scores, 5.00, down to 4.90 then back up to 4.92. Then with only a few more votes, it dropped to 4.50. Slowly, it's climbing back up. But I agree, it's annoying to never really know how well a story is doing because of the one scores that don't reflect anything about the quality of a story, and are only used to knock it down for some strange convoluted reason.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

Also, it's VERY clear that there is a phenomenon in which a small but determined band of 1-bombers wait shortly after the publication of the story and drop their bombs. One can tell that is happening. I can. This phenomenon lets up after the first 12 hours. The first 12 hours is when the most gaming happens when it comes to voting.

I've noticed it, too. It's still annoying, no matter the reason.

 

[Trionyx]

I believe, with absolutely no proof, that most of a writer’s followers like the author, receive notifications of stories published, read the stories early on and are more inclined to vote higher than the general readership. As a result, in the first hours or first day or two, scores can be quite good and then drop/drift down as the general readers’ votes start coming in. Although one bombs can and do occur, much of the drop in scores is probably a natural phenomenon.

 

[8letters]

I believe, with absolutely no proof, that most of a writer’s followers like the author, receive notifications of stories published, read the stories early on and are more inclined to vote higher than the general readership. As a result, in the first hours or first day or two, scores can be quite good and then drop/drift down as the general readers’ votes start coming in. Although one bombs can and do occur, much of the drop in scores is probably a natural phenomenon.

I like the idea. It makes sense for stories with a low number of votes.

That being said, the reaction every story gets is unique. My stories typically start low and then quickly climb. For example, the last story I published started out with a rating like 4.35. After 24 hours, the rating was 4.7. Now, it's 4.8. But my stories are typically long, and I think many of the early voters don't read the whole thing. Another possibility is that my stories are very American, and I think a lot of early voters are British and don't find them as appealing as Americans. Without a lot of information that the site would have to provide (and it won't), I can only make wild guesses about why the rating on my stories change so much on the first day. My stories get enough votes that I'm confident that the rating they have is the rating they deserve.

 

[SimonDoom]

I believe, with absolutely no proof, that most of a writer’s followers like the author, receive notifications of stories published, read the stories early on and are more inclined to vote higher than the general readership. As a result, in the first hours or first day or two, scores can be quite good and then drop/drift down as the general readers’ votes start coming in. Although one bombs can and do occur, much of the drop in scores is probably a natural phenomenon.

But this is not quite what I see. When I post stories, what I see is that the score may be high for the first couple of hours, probably because the very early readership disproportionately includes readers who already have followed me or favorited my stories, but then after an initial high point the story's score almost always plunges, often quite steeply, and then after about 6 hours the score begins to rise, slowly but fairly steadily, and by the end of the first 24 hours, or in the case of lower-volume stories whenever the story reaches about 100 votes, the score usually is not that far off from where it's going to end up. This is a pattern that has held true for most of my stories over the last 5 years.

The "plunge" indicates that the story at that early stage is receiving scores that are well below the mean score for the story as a whole over time, which suggests to me that in the early phase of publication there are readers (or perhaps non-reading voters) who are motivated to downvote the story, because it's clear that their voting habits are out of sync with the voting habits of the average reader of my story.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

But this is not quite what I see. When I post stories, what I see is that the score may be high for the first couple of hours, probably because the very early readership disproportionately includes readers who already have followed me or favorited my stories, but then after an initial high point the story's score almost always plunges, often quite steeply, and then after about 6 hours the score begins to rise, slowly but fairly steadily, and by the end of the first 24 hours, or in the case of lower-volume stories whenever the story reaches about 100 votes, the score usually is not that far off from where it's going to end up. This is a pattern that has held true for most of my stories over the last 5 years.

The "plunge" indicates that the story at that early stage is receiving scores that are well below the mean score for the story as a whole over time, which suggests to me that in the early phase of publication there are readers (or perhaps non-reading voters) who are motivated to downvote the story, because it's clear that their voting habits are out of sync with the voting habits of the average reader of my story.

This is exactly what I have seen. Initially a story will do well, the scores are high for a few hours, then suddenly they plummet, before gradually rebounding. If I do the math, I can see it's one bombs dropping the score.

 

[SimonDoom]

This is exactly what I have seen. Initially a story will do well, the scores are high for a few hours, then suddenly they plummet, before gradually rebounding. If I do the math, I can see it's one bombs dropping the score.

I sometimes pay close enough attention to the first few hours of voting that I can tell when I'm getting a one bomb, because there are sufficiently few votes to do the math and pinpoint what the score is. So I'm very confident in saying that early 1-bombing is a real phenomenon. After that, it's harder to tell. I've been persuaded by some of the comments and reasoning I've seen here that it's much more speculative after the first, say, 12 hours, or after the first 100 votes.

So if it is true that there is at least some group of "readers" who lie in wait for new stories to give them 1-bombs, out of proportion to what the story is likely to get any other time, then why might that be?

1. They read the story through and are unusually critical and discriminating? This seems unlikely to me.
2. They bomb authors they don't like, without reading the stories through? Possible.
3. They bomb stories from categories they don't like, or that feature kinks or story lines they don't like, without reading the stories through? Seems very possible.
4. They're trying to hurt stories that might be in competition with authors or stories they like, without reading the stories through? Possible.

One thing I've noticed is that I do NOT get more negative comments during this time period. This suggests to me that the voters, or at least some of them, may not read the stories.

I admit there's a great deal of speculation involved.