Vote Breakdown on Stories

[Bamagan]

I see there was an older thread about voting habits, which maybe I should comment on and revive, but for now I'll just place my thoughts here. As a reader, when I rated stories, I habitually defaulted to a four, because I was more or less taking the little text blurbs at face value. I would occasionally hand out fives and threes, in the latter case usually because I thought it was an interesting idea but clumsily executed. I can't recall ever leaving a one or a two, because I would never get to the end of stories that were either too poorly written or weren't holding my interest. I haven't done much rating since I started being a writer and realized how many take 4s as a rebuke (and how the 'hot' system kind of punishes stories that don't get mostly 5s). I can't see that changing, and no system is perfect, so I'm not advocating that anything needs to be done about it. Just thinking out loud, as it were.

 

[Bamagan]

Oh absolutely. All I can speak from is my own, personal and admittedly limited experience when it comes to MY stories, how they're rated, and the size of my particular audience on any given story.

Which is comparatively low next to many other authors around here.

Yeah, my own experience with my stories involves what appear to be some spikes, but I write pretty niche stuff so I don't expect to necessarily ever be able to separate the signal from noise. Certainly not with just the mean, and probably not even with the breakdowns like I was daydreaming of, but I'm clearly a person used to fantasizing about things I can't have!

 

[Bamagan]

https://www.literotica.com/s/how-to-analyze-your-scores

Thanks for the link, but the limitations of that kind of analysis was what prompted me to whine about my poor, coagulated data in the first place, haha!

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Small sample size mood swings are the blues personified!

You can do the math.

715 views (How many finished the story?) and 433 votes.

 

[Bamagan]

View attachment 2261734
You can do the math.

715 views (How many finished the story?) and 433 votes.

Yes, it's easier for the author to analyze their own stories. But as far as I know, there's no way for me to see how many votes a given story by someone else has received.

 

[Djmac1031]

Yes, it's easier for the author to analyze their own stories. But as far as I know, there's no way for me to see how many votes a given story by someone else has received.

Really in the end, what's the difference between a 4.5 story with 10,000 votes, 1,000 votes, 100 votes, or 10 votes?

Nothing, in my opinion. The rating tells me most readers liked it, nothing more.

It tells me nothing about which story is "better."

Only way to find that out is read and decide for one's self.

 

[NotWise]

To respond in reverse order:
It would be nice if they provided readers with the option to see the number and breakdown of votes, because as you mentioned, a small sample size does not lend itself to useful inferences, so a rating of 4.5 on a story with 10 votes is not necessarily a good gauge of quality. Probably it would not be of great value to many readers, who may not be statistically inclined or even prone to critical thinking. But putting it in a mouseover or something similar would be unobtrusive to the general reader and potentially valuable to some.

With a small number of votes, the distribution is worth even less than the mean.

I am not entirely prepared to accept the assurance that there are never or almost never spikes in the distributions, although they're probably a feature that get smoothed out over time, as you and @Djmac1031 have suggested. I assume that you're basing your statement on a careful analysis of your own scores, and possibly some affirmation from similarly inclined authors, but going back to small sample sizes, I'm not sure that your experience(s) as record-keeping author(s) is necessarily representative of all authors. I'm interested to know if the data for the general public bears out your experiences or not, if Literotica ever sees fit to make it available.

Watch the way your scores vary when you have a small number of votes. That's all the input you need to realize how little they mean.

The rating system is a known type of statistical process. The uncertainty in the score varies systematically with the number of votes.

I think you're hoping to get more out of the reader's votes then they actually put into it. As I said earlier, there's no agreed-upon standard for what the stars mean, and the readers' opinions vary widely. If you want something more meaningful, then post a request for feedback in the Story Feedback forum. You can post an open request, or you can post to one of the threads where you get a response from specific readers. AwkwardMD and Omenainen have one of those threads. SimonDoom started one of those threads, as well. There may be others.

 

[Bamagan]

With a small number of votes, the distribution is worth even less than the mean.



Watch the way your scores vary when you have a small number of votes. That's all the input you need to realize how little they mean.

The rating system is a known type of statistical process. The uncertainty in the score varies systematically with the number of votes.

I think you're hoping to get more out of the reader's votes then they actually put into it. As I said earlier, there's no agreed-upon standard for what the stars mean, and the readers' opinions vary widely. If you want something more meaningful, then post a request for feedback in the Story Feedback forum. You can post an open request, or you can post to one of the threads where you get a response from specific readers. AwkwardMD and Omenainen have one of those threads. SimonDoom started one of those threads, as well. There may be others.

Perhaps I am putting more thought into the way people vote than their actual votes, but that's just where my interest lies. And it's not about comments or feedback for me, either, just wondering how the community actually behaves, which is where distribution might allow certain inferences to be made, although yes, with ten or twenty votes you need a boulder of salt. And again, I don't pay much attention to my own scores, although I would be interested to know if they are polarized or not without having to do a lot of bookkeeping. The scale different people use for 1-5 might vary, but the top and bottom scores will necessarily be reasonably consistent across users.

 

[Bamagan]

Really in the end, what's the difference between a 4.5 story with 10,000 votes, 1,000 votes, 100 votes, or 10 votes?

Nothing, in my opinion. The rating tells me most readers liked it, nothing more.

It tells me nothing about which story is "better."

Only way to find that out is read and decide for one's self.

I think I mostly replied to this just above, but like I said earlier, I think I might personally benefit from seeing how many people hated a story when seeking out something I want to read. Possibly I would find it to be too chaotic or generate too many false positives to actually be helpful. Perhaps I'm just being subversive or rebellious, but when people try very hard to suppress something it tends to me make more curious about it, perversely curious one might even say!

 

[NotWise]

Perhaps I am putting more thought into the way people vote than their actual votes, but that's just where my interest lies. And it's not about comments or feedback for me, either, just wondering how the community actually behaves, which is where distribution might allow certain inferences to be made, although yes, with ten or twenty votes you need a boulder of salt. And again, I don't pay much attention to my own scores, although I would be interested to know if they are polarized or not without having to do a lot of bookkeeping. The scale different people use for 1-5 might vary, but the top and bottom scores will necessarily be reasonably consistent across users.

I sympathize. The best way I know of to understand how the community behaves is to write more and watch the results.

 

[Bamagan]

I sympathize. The best way I know of to understand how the community behaves is to write more and watch the results.

Advice I can agree with!
Full disclosure, for anyone who has seen Ghostbusters II, I'm basically Egon in the scene where he's running the psychological tests and says, "Let's see what happens when we take away the puppy."

 

[EmilyMiller]

Vote Breakdown on Stories​

We need bar charts. I love bar charts!

Em

 

[EmilyMiller]

I sympathize. The best way I know of to understand how the community behaves is to write more and watch the results…

…and be totally baffled by them.

Em

 

[Bamagan]

We need bar charts. I love bar charts!

Em

Also pies! Pies that look like bewbs and cock bars

 

[EmilyMiller]

Also pies! Pies that look like bewbs and cock bars

I don’t fully approve of pie charts. But, if they look like “bewbs”, maybe I can make an exception.

Em

 

[EmilyMiller]

https://xkcd.com/2031/
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/pie_charts.png

 

[Mr_Neb]

I wonder how difficult it would be to display a histogram. I would assume that the individual scores are retained somewhere so that the average can be recalculated when there are more ratings. (Unless just the total and the rate count are just kept.) It would be fun to see. It would be interesting to see if the distribution of ratings was not the expected "half-normal" distribution.

 

[Trionyx]

View attachment 2261734
You can do the math.

715 views (How many finished the story?) and 433 votes.

Something’s odd about this. Only 715 views yet 433 votes. That’s more than one vote for every two views. You must have an amazingly devoted following who will plow through 70,000+ words and vote at the end. Congrats, BTW.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

<snip>

I think that for every one of my stories, the most common vote is a five-star vote. The most commonly swept vote may also be a five-star vote, but that's hard to prove.

<snip>

I can definitely attest that I have had way more 5s swept than 1s.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Maybe I'm just being self-absorbed, but the low 3s or high 2s isn't necessarily a bad story. Other factors should be considered, such as the category and story content, comments, and number of those who add it to their favorites..

I'm currently reading a new Loving Wives series with four stories posted so far, and the first three are in the low 3s. IMO, it's a good series (with the occasional writing faults) of a couple venturing into the world of swingers. The first two stories had no extra-marital sex and were slammed by one commenter effectively saying it was boring. That was the character build-up the author seemed to think necessarily to head off critiques by those LW trolls who would say "Where's the love in this couple?

And in my own LW story last month "What Were You Thinking?" about the wife cheating, it's received over 70k views with over 1100 raters, averaging 3.29. It has 55 people adding it to their favorites and 82 comments (about evenly divided between those who loved the sharing, those who hate it, and those who objectively critiqued my writing). And I picked up about 25 new followers with it.

So, in Loving Wives category in particular, the extremes of the two sides (those who LOVE extra-marital sex versus those who HATE it) have the voting averaging around three. In my story, the average rating over 3 says more LOVED it than HATED it. So, I consider that a win.

 

[SimonDoom]

Yes, it's easier for the author to analyze their own stories. But as far as I know, there's no way for me to see how many votes a given story by someone else has received.

The toplists show this information. The vote number is contained in parentheses.

Also, you can be reasonably confident that the vote number falls within a certain range if you know the view number. It's usually between 200 views:1 vote and 50 views:1 vote.

Personally, I don't need more data at this site. I spend too much time noodling on the data that already exists!

 

[Bamagan]

The toplists show this information. The vote number is contained in parentheses.

Also, you can be reasonably confident that the vote number falls within a certain range if you know the view number. It's usually between 200 views:1 vote and 50 views:1 vote.

Personally, I don't need more data at this site. I spend too much time noodling on the data that already exists!

Well, to be honest, most of the stuff I like is not likely to find its way to the toplists. Maybe I'm just a porn hipster!

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Something’s odd about this. Only 715 views yet 433 votes. That’s more than one vote for every two views. You must have an amazingly devoted following who will plow through 70,000+ words and vote at the end. Congrats, BTW.

You're absolutely right.

If you take into account how many of the 715 readers who started the story likely dropped out before finishing it, the votes-to-view ratio is probably even higher. Eighteen extremely positive comments have also been received.

Now, compared to most of my other stories here, the low number of views is an anomaly as well. As discussed in other threads, the title of the story is only one factor in the low readership, along with its length and it containing no sex at all. On the positive side, this story has driven new readers to my other stories since it was published.

 

[MillieDynamite]

At one site, in the past, you could see the vote distribution. That ended when it was discovered there was a mathematical formula that pulled all the votes toward the center. The only votes not pulled are ones and tens when they are the sole votes. A single 9 can reduce three ten votes to an 8.7, which I would think would be mathematically impossible, but apparently not. After continuous complaints, the site admin removed the distribution scale from the votes page. A single 9 vote isn't a 9, either. So WTF?

It would be interesting if we could view the total number of votes by rating rather than just the mean.

 

[Bamagan]

At one site, in the past, you could see the vote distribution. That ended when it was discovered there was a mathematical formula that pulled all the votes toward the center. The only votes not pulled are ones and tens when they are the sole votes. A single 9 can reduce three ten votes to an 8.7, which I would think would be mathematically impossible, but apparently not. After continuous complaints, the site admin removed the distribution scale from the votes page. A single 9 vote isn't a 9, either. So WTF?

I know IMDB does something like that, where they weight votes toward the ends of the scales differently. Their defense is that a lot of people voting at the extremes are doing so with the intention of moving the average closer to where they think it should be rather than letting it actually represent the communal opinion. Many people confess to that behavior, for what's it worth. But if the movie has a seven when you think it should be lower and you vote a five, for example, less adjustment is needed than if you voted one. So they tend to treat scores at the extremes as if some fraction of them are bullshit but still legitimately positive or negative. It's not a great system, I suppose, but it's probably no worse than letting ballot stuffers run amok.