Author rating

[EmilyMiller]

As I posted, Lovecraft68 is entirely in control on whether this continues. It's all him.

You’re not the same person are you? Sorry, this place is conspiracy central. Apparently I have been a member here since 1066 and am playing you all for the fools that you are.

Em

 

[EmilyMiller]

We fry catfish in my home.

I’ve had catfish gumbo in New Brunswick, of all places.

Em

 

[lovecraft68]

Catfish is about the nicest thing that they call me.

Oh well.

Em

Back when I was the warehouse manager at my company there was an entire bathroom wall dedicated to me. I was promoted ten years ago, but its all still there. Not too long ago I was back down there to help out and a newer employee comments on it, and says "Man, that guy must have been a real piece of work."

I replied. "That I am."

I admit though that the nickname of Scourge they came up with was cool, but can't admit it.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I’ve had catfish gumbo in New Brunswick, of all places.

Em

My father used to cook Louisiana crawfish gumbo. Man, I getting hungry for seafood.

 

[lovecraft68]

You’re not the same person are you? Sorry, this place is conspiracy central. Apparently I have been a member here since 1066 and am playing you all for the fools that you are.

Em

I knew I recognized you!

 

[EmilyMiller]

I admit though that the nickname of Scourge they came up with was cool, but can't admit it.

I quite like a good whipping.

Em

 

[EmilyMiller]

My father used to cook Louisiana crawfish gumbo. Man, I getting hungry for seafood.

I looooooove. seafood!

Em

 

[Britva415]

hatey

Ahoy!

 

[EmilyMiller]

I knew I recognized you!

Drat! and I would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for you pesky kids and your dog.

Em

 

[lovecraft68]

I quite like a good whipping.

Em

So do I and doing the whipping.

Being a switch is the best of both worlds....getting hit with one is fun too.

 

[theWollstonecraftWoman]

My father used to cook Louisiana crawfish gumbo. Man, I getting hungry for seafood.

That's not Kosher, bad girl. Oh, wait, your not a jew that's me.

 

[EmilyMiller]

So do I and doing the whipping.

Being a switch is the best of both worlds....getting hit with one is fun too.

I know, but I get such grief for not being a “proper” sub.

Em

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I know, but I get such grief for not being a “proper” sub.

Em

A proper sub doesn't do as she's told; she doesn't need to be told. And she generally does what she wants, but sometimes what she thinks he or she wants, but no matter: it always works out in the end or the front or somewhere.

 

[Comshaw]

Anybody that has read my posts has heard me say I'm an observer, a people watcher. Someone who sits on the side lines and watches the goings-on. Well most times anyway. I do open my yap from time to time and regurgitate things I think are important. Whether they are or not, is a matter of opinion, but I always think so. Hell, someone has to huh? And who better than the one pontificating on what ever it is?

That said, the two personalities mentioned are fun to watch.

LC68 can be an abrasive asshole, but he makes no excuses nor does he claim to be something he is not. He gives you shit, you give it back and you go about your business. No whining, no trying to make it more than it is. A what you see is what you get type of thing. Granted some people can't handle that. And I understand.

KD can also be an abrasive asshole. But he tries to make out like he isn't. And when he's called on it, or get's his ass handed to him in an argument, he retreats to the "you're picking on me" defense. Those who have been here a while and have seen the interaction of the two mentioned parties knows the score. Weigh this and decide: someone who is 50% of an interaction between two parties, but claims they aren't responsible for any part of that interaction. Yeah, and monkeys are going to fly out of my butt any minute.

Can I denigrate either one of them for their prolific out put or ability as an author? Hell no! Both are way beyond me in that respect. However, because someone is great in one area does not translate to skill and ability in any other.

That's my observation of the two primaries. Don't expect this pissing contest to disappear any time soon. Just sigh, smile and know like that odd relative you have it's something to be tolerated or ignored if it scratches at your sensitive spots.

All I can say is pay close attention to what happens next. It ought to tell you volumes.

TA ya'll

Comshaw

 

[EmilyMiller]

A proper sub doesn't do as she's told; she doesn't need to be told. And she generally does what she wants, but sometimes what she thinks he or she wants, but no matter: it always works out in the end or the front or somewhere.

I have failed so many interviews. It’s sad really.

Em

 

[MelissaBaby]

 

[Bramblethorn]

It would be extremely hard to do. Let's look at Illustrated, I/T and Romance. When I pulled the statistics for those categories after a story had been on the site for a week, I got the following average ratings:
Illustrated - 3.36
Incest/Taboo - 4.34
Romance - 4.46

When I looked at just stand-alone stories:
Illustrated - 3.12
Incest/Taboo - 4.25
Romance - 4.33

When I look at the rating for the top story for those categories for the last twelve months, I find:
Illustrated - 4.67
Incest/Taboo - 4.86
Romance - 4.95

When I look at the rating for the #50 story for those categories for the last twelve months, I find:
Illustrated - 3.90
Incest/Taboo - 4.83
Romance - 4.87

So how are you going to normalize those three categories? How are you going to normalize stand-alone stories versus chapter stories?

Well, since you ask:

Step 0: decide what you want your normalised scores to look like. (e.g. do you want equal numbers of 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s? Do you want a bell-shaped distribution with 3 being the average? Do you want something close to the current distribution of scores on Literotica, for familiarity?) Pick whichever you like of those.

For the sake of example, I'll assume we decide to give scores from 1-5 and to have it so that there are as many stories in 1-2 as there are from 2-3, 3-4, and 4-5, and so on at finer levels, but the same approach can be applied for other scales.

Step 1: find the actual distribution of raw scores for each category: e.g. maybe in LW the bottom 50% of stories score 4.1 or lower, the bottom 80% score 4.4 or lower, 90% score 4.5 or lower, 99% score 4.6 or lower. (Numbers made up, I haven't counted.) You could do this reasonably well via random sample, but there are "only" about half a million stories on Literotica, so it wouldn't be impossible to pull all the scores.

Step 2: for each story, check the raw score against its category distribution, convert that to a percentile, then refer to the normalised distribution we chose in step 0 and convert the percentile back to a score. For instance, if an LW story has a raw score of 4.4 (putting it at the 80th percentile) then using the scale I mentioned above, its normalised score ends up at the 80th percentile of that 1-5 scale, which is a 4.2.

So far, this is just "grading on a curve", as done in many a high school or college class. It does make a few assumptions, some of which you've already identified:

• Assumes no systematic quality difference between categories (but what if the stories in Category X really are better written than those in Category Y, on average?)
• Ignores effects of story/series length on scores.
• Ignores possibility that rating behaviours change over time (maybe readers are softer than they used to be?)

But with a bit more work, we can shed those assumptions. For instance, say we find that Category X has an average score of 4.5 and Category Y has an average score of 4.1. How can we figure out whether this difference of 0.4 is a matter of "Category X gets better authors" or "Category Y has tougher voters"?

Well, we probably have a bunch of authors who've written in both categories. If we look at those authors and find their average scores for Category X are typically about 0.1 points higher than their scores in Y, then we can conclude that about 0.1 of that difference is due to tougher voting in Y, and the other 0.3 is due to higher author quality in X. We can then adjust scores accordingly, e.g. bump the Category X scores down 0.05 and Category Y up 0.05 to compensate for that voting difference.

(I wouldn't actually do it quite that way, because a simple additive adjustment produces some weirdness at the ends of the scales - e.g. if somebody does manage to get a 4.97 in Category Y, then we'd be adjusting it to an impossible 5.02. Instead, you'd probably apply something like a logit transform to make the results more sensible across the scale. But I don't want to drown people in detail here.)

Story/series length can be handled via similar tricks: pick variables like "number of previous chapters", "chapter length", "total length of all chapters up to this one", find which ones have good explanatory power for scores (both within a series and across different works by the same author) and the nature of that relationship. I'd expect something like "logit(score) increases by k per 1000 words before score point, up to maximum of K" would do reasonably. Age, similarly.

For bonus points, you can look at the number of votes contributing to each score and weight its importance in the model accordingly - a score of 4.9 from 500 votes means a lot more than 4.9 off 10 votes!

That might seem like a lot if you haven't worked with this kind of problem previously, but it's something that's been researched. Sports nerds do stuff like this when trying to answer questions like "who was the greatest batsman of all time?" - even though Don Bradman and Sachin Tendulkar never overlapped one another, so you can't compare directly, there are thousands of smaller overlaps that can be put together to get a better comparison.

Again, I'd note that I don't think it would be terribly useful to the site to actually do this, it's just interesting as a thought exercise.

Should the number of votes and favorites factor into this? Which is more impressive, having a 4.92 rating on 1142 votes and 61 favorites or having a 4.88 rating on 1299 votes and 106 favorites. I'd say the latter.

I was talking strictly about story scores, and votes only to the extent that more votes = less noise in the ratings. If you want to get into favourite counts, you need to consider views first - e.g. is 100 favourites off 1000 views more impressive than 10k favourites off a million views? One can keep on adding complications forever; I'm just saying that it's not particularly hard to do that sort of normalisation if one believes a universal ranking of Lit stories is a useful thing to have. Most of it would be a matter of finding people who've already tackled similar problems, and modifying their code.

 

[Bramblethorn]

A proper sub doesn't do as she's told; she doesn't need to be told. And she generally does what she wants, but sometimes what she thinks he or she wants, but no matter: it always works out in the end or the front or somewhere.

When I'm interviewing prospective subs I start by sending them off to the Rhine Research Center for an assessment of their telepathic abilities. If they can't even tell me which card I'm looking at, how on earth do they expect to be able to know what I want in the bedroom? Am I supposed to use language like some kind of peasant???

 

[ElectricBlue]

But I don't want to drown people in detail here.

EB looked at Bramble's long post, and thought, "Thank goodness they're not the lifeguard at the local swimming pool."

 

[Bramblethorn]

EB looked at Bramble's long post, and thought, "Thank goodness they're not the lifeguard at the local swimming pool."

It's a fair cop. All I can say is, you should see me in full infodump mode.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I have failed so many interviews. It’s sad really.

Em

The answer is "Swan."

 

[HectorBidon]

Again, I'd note that I don't think it would be terribly useful to the site to actually do this, it's just interesting as a thought exercise.

Are you kidding? It would be fantastic. To have a way to rank all the authors on the site! To be able to say that So-and-so is a 4.67 while Such-and-such doesn't even merit a red H! To have an efficient way to cut through the chaff and home in on the creme de la creme! To finally be able to answer, in an objective and definitive way, the question that has been the source of so much acrimony and consternation over the years: who is the greatest Lit author of all time, KD or LC68?

But why stop there? Couldn't we aggregate reviews from other smut sites as well to locate our LIT authorship among the greater pornographic pantheon?

And why stop there? Couldn't we use these same approaches to dive into the content of the stories themselves, allowing us to determine, once and for all, what it is, down to the sub-paragraphical level, that makes one story a sophomoric waste of time and another a compelling masterpiece? Wouldn't we then be able to extend our rating beyond erotica to encompass all of literature? Phillip Roth vs. William Shakespeare? Silkstockinglover vs. Sophocles? We'd have the numbers right there in our table.

And why stop there? Couldn't we throw all the other written material that is so widely available now online into the mix as well—the forum posts and facebook posts and email correspondence and tax returns? Wouldn't we then be able to extend our rating to everybody in the whole world, authors and non-authors alike?

Just think how that would streamline things. Every time you got on a bus or went in a bar or met anybody at all, you'd know exactly where you stood. There'd be no need for arguing any more: you'd just show each other your rating and winner take all. No need for speed dating, all it would take would be a single SQL inquiry.

I say we should get right on it.

(Just an idea. When you get all infodumpy, I find myself swept right along. )

 

[BobbyBrandt]

@BobbyBrandt : Regarding versatility as a metric of quality... What's better? The author who has a narrow field of interests and writes them very well or someone able to tackle a wide field of topics but might turn away parts of his readership when straying too far afield?

I understand the latter choice is great for feeling satisfied as a writer and being able to avoid boredom/burnout, but what is a writer without readers? My forays into other categories than SF/F have been met with disinterest and lukewarm scores. Heck, even straying too far away from my main series did that... Are my other offerings that much worse? Or is it a case of my readership not being interested in that one particular thing?

I mean, I can relate to that notion. If my favorite Death Metal band suddenly starts to play J-Pop, I'd stop buying their shit, no matter how kawaii they'd sound. I want guts, gargeling and drop-tuned guitar shreds, not happy songs about fucking class-president-san...

I know what you mean to an extent.

The VAST majority of the readers who follow me are loyal to my novels, which contain little to no sex, are typically over 75K words, and are full of action and adventure for them. Some will check out my "steamier" stories in other categories, but several have provided feedback that these "aren't their cup of tea". I still write enough of the stories that they favor to keep them loyal, but I won't restrict my creative endeavors for them.

That being the case, I know that I am also attracting followers from the stories in other categories, especially incest/taboo. The "favorites-to-view" ratio for my stories in other categories is generally comparable to my novels. If I compare the "votes-to-view" ratio between my highest-rated and most-viewed story to my lowest-rated story in a different category, there is only a four-tenths difference, so the lower rating apparently lies in the score that is voted, not the number of readers voting.

All things being almost equal, what would you attribute the lower ratings to other than the diversity of categories and the propensity of readers of the various categories to score all stories differently?

 

[AwkwardlySet]

There are some good ideas here. Once again, I'd say that scoring shouldn't be the same for short stories (hard to say when a short story becomes long story exactly), long stories and stories with chapters. The favorites especially would be a true pain to normalize against normal stories (as many readers favorite just the first chapter, yet there are those that favorite the first and then whichever chapter they liked the most etc.)
Either way, as complicated as it could get, math can be done. After such a long time there is enough data about readers' reading and voting habits, popularity of certain categories, and so on. It should be noted that even then, it wouldn't be a true measure of writer's or story quality, as readers are not really expert critics, nor are they unbiased. But it would be something more than what we have for sure. Once again, I will express my doubt about owner's willingness for something like that to be implemented. I actually think that Simon's idea has the best chance, as giving readers an option to customize their reading experience and set their Literotica screen however they like, would undoubtedly lead to more registered readers as opposed to anonymous ones. I am guessing more registered users would translate in more, or at least more easily tracked, traffic.

 

[SimonDoom]

Are you kidding? It would be fantastic. To have a way to rank all the authors on the site! To be able to say that So-and-so is a 4.67 while Such-and-such doesn't even merit a red H! To have an efficient way to cut through the chaff and home in on the creme de la creme! To finally be able to answer, in an objective and definitive way, the question that has been the source of so much acrimony and consternation over the years: who is the greatest Lit author of all time, KD or LC68?

But why stop there? Couldn't we aggregate reviews from other smut sites as well to locate our LIT authorship among the greater pornographic pantheon?

And why stop there? Couldn't we use these same approaches to dive into the content of the stories themselves, allowing us to determine, once and for all, what it is, down to the sub-paragraphical level, that makes one story a sophomoric waste of time and another a compelling masterpiece? Wouldn't we then be able to extend our rating beyond erotica to encompass all of literature? Phillip Roth vs. William Shakespeare? Silkstockinglover vs. Sophocles? We'd have the numbers right there in our table.

And why stop there? Couldn't we throw all the other written material that is so widely available now online into the mix as well—the forum posts and facebook posts and email correspondence and tax returns? Wouldn't we then be able to extend our rating to everybody in the whole world, authors and non-authors alike?

Just think how that would streamline things. Every time you got on a bus or went in a bar or met anybody at all, you'd know exactly where you stood. There'd be no need for arguing any more: you'd just show each other your rating and winner take all. No need for speed dating, all it would take would be a single SQL inquiry.

I say we should get right on it.

(Just an idea. When you get all infodumpy, I find myself swept right along. )

If only we could put Aldous Huxley in charge of the rating/classification system.