A Fix For Story Scoring

[Bramblethorn]

I know I'm going against my own advice here, but what the hell, here's my semi-serious Modest Proposal for fixing the scoring system.

Step 1: Manu and Laurel make the story data publicly available in a format that can be automatically queried to give story data: name, author, chaptering info, date published, category, length, view count, post-sweep vote counts by star number.

Step 2: Manu and Laurel give their blessing to anybody who wants to use this data to generate their own story rankings and host them on their own website.

Step 3: Everybody picks the ranking system they like best. If they don't like any of the existing systems, they make a better one.

 

[AlinaX]

Maybe we could have a new story category for such proposals.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Maybe we could have a new story category for such proposals.

I was thinking we should have some sort of rating system for story rating systems.

 

[lovecraft68]

Laurel and Manu.....are not going to do anything.

We've been promised that the endless chapter stories and authors won't be allowed in the annual awards-a very easy thing to do-and nothing.

Promised to have chapter stories removed from top lists-nothing...

Chapter stories will no longer qualify for the monthly awards...nothing

New bi sexual category-nothing.

Broken features pointed out, new features people would like to see....

The site still has dead links and sections not updated in years and tons of changes no ones asked for. That and comments and feedback are now big brothered under the claim of looking for spam when its looking for anything they don't like taking that control from the authors and taking comments and feedback days to show up.

See the pattern? Lit runs on the absolute minimum effort that can be put into it unless they are interested-the comment screening when they don't even screen stories-They only did the massive overhaul because the site was so antiquated they were falling in the google searches and younger people were running to the more modern/techy wattpad.

The best fix for scores is to get it though author's heads that they're meaningless, bad/good doesn't mean the story is bad good, trolls, cheerleaders organized groups bombing and 5'ing, people dropping a one because one little thing happened in a 10 page story they didn't like "he came on her tits? should have been her face. He didn't get her pregnant? Her husband..." One bomb!

So not caring and focusing on writing is the best fix.

 

[LexxRuthless]

I don't know if it's feasible, but I thought that a solution to many of the problems on this site would be individually-tailored Literotica. Whenever anyone scores a story at 3 or less, or reports a story for any reason, it would disappear from "their" Literotica forever. Any future log-in on their account, IP, computer, or physical location would no longer display that story or any reference to it.

Readers could also have the option to remove all stories with any tag or category they find offensive, and they could completely remove an author they don't like. For the reader, it would quickly pare down the site, leaving only stories they are interested in reading. For authors, it would reduce the incessant bombing of our stories, and it would severely curtail some of the negative, trollish comments. If someone hated your story and gave it a 1, it would disappear before they could add an insulting comment, or change their IP address to bomb it again.

I can only wonder what LW would look like after that...

 

[SimonDoom]

For a while, I've thought that the long-term goal for Literotica should be to enable every member to create a customizable home page. Members could customize their own new activity feeds, new story lists, story toplists, notifications, etc. What both Bramblethorn and Lexxx have proposed makes sense to me, or some variation on that. Make ALL story data available to all members and allow them to customize based on their own rankings of the data. The Site could set up default pages and default top lists but allow members to change them.

I'd like to see the story search capability expanded as well, so one can search stories by views, votes, and other data that one cannot currently search for.

 

[8letters]

I know I'm going against my own advice here, but what the hell, here's my semi-serious Modest Proposal for fixing the scoring system.

Step 1: Manu and Laurel make the story data publicly available in a format that can be automatically queried to give story data: name, author, chaptering info, date published, category, length, view count, post-sweep vote counts by star number.

Step 2: Manu and Laurel give their blessing to anybody who wants to use this data to generate their own story rankings and host them on their own website.

Step 3: Everybody picks the ranking system they like best. If they don't like any of the existing systems, they make a better one.

It's not that hard to suck down all the information on Literotica. Literally, a high school-level Java project (I know from personal experience). Once you do that, you could create a really helpful companion website. I thought about doing such a thing. What I'd want is to create a web page for each author that would show all of the comments they've received in reverse historical order - no need to click on each story and go to the last page of comments to see each new comment. You could do a more advance search function that would allow you to specify words in the story. You could do multiple story rankings. You could do a search function for your story comments and for the comments you've left.

But websites cost money. And it costs more money to not have your name associated with the website. And building the website would take quite a bit of skill, much more than getting the information off of Literotica. And it would have to be regularly maintained so that hackers can't use some found security flaw to hack the website. I don't see anyone making the effort.

 

[SamScribble]

It was early February. Christmas had come and gone. Hanukkah had come and gone. New Year's resolutions had been made and broken. The Lit authors were once again bored.

 

[SimonDoom]

I was thinking we should have some sort of rating system for story rating systems.

Metarotica.

 

[SamScribble]

That's rich, coming from you. Are you a planner or a pantser?

A pantser, Ruben. Through and through. Every paragraph I write surprises me.

 

[MColton84]

I can't imagine that Lit will be making any changes regardless of what the Authors think. Where it would be nice to have more visibility for stand alone stories, I don't think that it's worth the stress of fixing.

 

[Bramblethorn]

It's not that hard to suck down all the information on Literotica. Literally, a high school-level Java project (I know from personal experience).

It's not, but I was thinking bandwidth - if a bunch of people are doing it via crawlers and updating frequently it might create unwelcome load on the site. Providing a one-stop data set would mitigate that. (Also, one of the things I mentioned, the breakdown of votes by star number, isn't currently available to outsiders.)

I don't think it's likely to happen, for the reasons LC mentioned, which is why I tagged the idea as "semi-serious". My real point here was that everybody has their own idea of what the ideal scoring system looks like, so none of the solutions people float are ever going to make everybody happy, but individual customisability would help.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The best fix for scores is to get it though author's heads that they're meaningless, bad/good doesn't mean the story is bad good, trolls, cheerleaders organized groups bombing and 5'ing, people dropping a one because one little thing happened in a 10 page story they didn't like "he came on her tits? should have been her face. He didn't get her pregnant? Her husband..." One bomb!

So not caring and focusing on writing is the best fix.

There's caring and there's caring.

I agree that scores are not a very good guide to whether a reader is going to enjoy a story; I find category and author are much more important there (I'd add "tags" if this site supported them better).

But some people are just interested in numbers, and how they move around, and how to put them together to make new numbers, like kids playing with Lego. I met one guy who was interested in questions like "was Don Bradman a better batsman than Sachin Tendulkar?" and that was far more about the intellectual exercise of how one would answer that question, for two cricketers who played in very different eras against different opposition, than actually caring about which of them was better.

Some people are gonna noodle about this stuff, not because they expect it to change anything, but because noodling about this kind of stuff is fun if you're the kind of person who enjoys tinkering with systems. You don't need to tell us it's not going to happen, we already know

 

[8letters]

It's not, but I was thinking bandwidth - if a bunch of people are doing it via crawlers and updating frequently it might create unwelcome load on the site. Providing a one-stop data set would mitigate that. (Also, one of the things I mentioned, the breakdown of votes by star number, isn't currently available to outsiders.)

I don't think it's likely to happen, for the reasons LC mentioned, which is why I tagged the idea as "semi-serious". My real point here was that everybody has their own idea of what the ideal scoring system looks like, so none of the solutions people float are ever going to make everybody happy, but individual customisability would help.

In the years I've been on this site, I've never seen the breakdown of votes by star number ever discussed. Everything about voting (sweeps, how often ratings are updated, etc.) has been only discussed in the vaguest of terms. Any idea that's dependent on Manu and Lauren suddenly making that information public is very unrealistic.

 

[AvroAnson]

Metarotica.

Ah ... use of the algo-rythm method.

 

[SimonDoom]

Ah ... use of the algo-rythm method.

You and I are driving this thread straight into the bad pun toilet but at least no one can accuse us of taking this too seriously.

 

[Bramblethorn]

In the years I've been on this site, I've never seen the breakdown of votes by star number ever discussed.

http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1535044
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?p=88366852
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1465406
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?p=92948136#post92948136
https://literotica.com/beta/s/how-to-analyze-your-scores

Having that distribution is useful if you want to do something with score variances (is this a stand-out story or did it just get lucky with a few favourable votes?), if you want to remove outliers, or if you want to distinguish between "everybody was meh" and "some people loved it, some hated it".

 

[46n2]

I know I'm going against my own advice here, but what the hell, here's my semi-serious Modest Proposal for fixing the scoring system.

Step 1: Manu and Laurel make the story data publicly available in a format that can be automatically queried to give story data: name, author, chaptering info, date published, category, length, view count, post-sweep vote counts by star number.

Step 2: Manu and Laurel give their blessing to anybody who wants to use this data to generate their own story rankings and host them on their own website.

Step 3: Everybody picks the ranking system they like best. If they don't like any of the existing systems, they make a better one.

Those specific proposals are fucking horrendous. What?! Yikes, holy hell.

I would agree that some scoring issues might be looked at. And I'm a "new voice" here who's both benefit from and been ruined by 1-bombs in a prior life. None of my shitty was that bad and neither was my best. But in the end? It sort of shakes out. It's not a crappy system.

In any case, let Manu crunch numbers on it - I absolutely do NOT agree with your recommendations in this, mate. Holy hell.

 

[46n2]

See the pattern? Lit runs on the absolute minimum effort that can be put into it unless they are interested-the comment screening when they don't even screen stories-They only did the massive overhaul because the site was so antiquated they were falling in the google searches and younger people were running to the more modern/techy wattpad.

Fair. Of course.

On the other hand, what was out there when this became a place? Did not the both of them literally birth a lot of what's now become readily available beyond?

The ACLU was getting drummed down and disappeared their own boards. Yup, you heard that right - the ACLU shut down their own boards (1998, 99?). And then there was this. I know. Cuz that's how I got here. Then.

Place fucking erupted. You can't question the effort of the 2 of them while that was all happening. Bonfire, baby.

Did they profit? Oh, yeah - you betcha. But I do not personally think that the motivator. In fact, I would be truly surprised if it was.

Did I dislike a lot of what was done? Absolutely. You betcha. But it ain't MY fucking creation. I think it might say plenty that it's still here in some form. I like that it is. And I don't want them completely reformatting the only thing they've got left - which is the Rating System.

Encourage Manu to work on it. Maybe he will. Maybe he won't.

But why would you bother even doing that?

Cuz the possibility is here for you where it is not elsewhere, that's why.

-peace

 

[MColton84]

Those specific proposals are fucking horrendous. What?! Yikes, holy hell.

I would agree that some scoring issues might be looked at. And I'm a "new voice" here who's both benefit from and been ruined by 1-bombs in a prior life. None of my shitty was that bad and neither was my best. But in the end? It sort of shakes out. It's not a crappy system.

In any case, let Manu crunch numbers on it - I absolutely do NOT agree with your recommendations in this, mate. Holy hell.

Than disagree like an adult. Check your language, check your tone, and maybe some of the adults will be inclined to listen to your rambles.