A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to this Forum...

[Dirt Man]

Okay, so I send in my first two stories, and then a third, and they are all promply moved to the sister site Extreme for violent rape, two of which didn't have any such thing in them. But I now understand the rules about certain topics, and what a story can, and can't contain in this forum. So just for tickles, and shit, I send in two more stories to see what happens, but these two I haven't edited in any way. I sit back, and watch as these two stories are at last published in this forum. And sure enough I start getting feed back and votes, unlike for my poetry submissions. LOL One e-mailer wants to know why I put the woman's measurements in the story without building her character, though that was part of the schtick, and the rest tell me how wonderful my stories are, and to keep them cuming, literally. LOL Each of those latest two stories is averaging above 4.0 in the votes catagory thus far, but may fall after some people read this, and start a voting blitz against them. (Say it ain't so, Joe!) And what I'm wondering is, Really? What is the big fuss about votes anyway? Cause for me, it's seeing how many thousands of people have viewed my work, and the actual feed back, not what a voting system might imply if it couldn't possibly be fucked with. LOL

As Always
I Am the
Dirt Man

 

[Dirt Man]

As expected, my stories were blitzed.

It took less than two hours after posting the above, but in that time both of my stories were blitzed. LOL In as much as there were already over 40 votes for each of them to go from a high 4 almost 5 rating down to a middle three is highly unlikely in view that I also received only positive feedback during that same period. LOL And yet the views keep piling up, so I'm not really bothered by these childish attempts to belittle the haphazard work that I did post. The insult will be on their heads after I start posting the good stuff. And now I feel completely justified in appraising other authors work as I deem fit.

As Always
I Am the
Dirt Man

 

[Xodus]

Authors and critics do seem to be much harder on stories than other readers, but I think that's to be expected. And, isn't that what we want?
I think the same thing probably happens to all of us. My story was at 15 votes with a rating of 4.86 when I posted in the Story Feedback forum that it was up. Since then it has steadily dropped to a 4.70 at 19 votes, then climbed back up to 4.73 with 26 votes.
Regular readers that read our stories and like them are probably all going to vote 4 to 5 when they vote. Many regular readers that do and don't like them don't bother to vote. Most authors and critics that read them probably vote, and vote as objectively as possible. I would think a story would have to be really awesome to an author or critic to give it a 5 vote.
LOL hope that made sense

 

[Xodus]

Ouch, maby I shouldn't have posted my story's ratings. You may be right.
Since I posted that my story was 4.73 at 26 votes, it has gone to 4.61 with 28 votes
There must be some jealous authors trying to kill others ratings

 

[Akito01]

I try not to pay too much attention to voting either, but even so, it does seem to work as a fairly effective barometer of a partiuclar stories quality. For example, my most recent story, posted just today, has been the most poorly recieved of all my work; hardly a surprise, given that it was written over the course of a few hours in a single evening. Contrasted to that, are works like The Captive or Child Of The Klein Bottle, which took a very long time, and much sweat and tears to work into the shape they are in now (still not perfect, of course). These stories all got, by my thinking and standards, pretty darn good ratings -even when those stories deal with some rather bizzarre or unconventional subject matter. That's another probable strike against Bait And Switch -a short and simple fuck story, and a rather cynical one at that, it doesn't have much of my usual imagination or flair. I still thought it was kind of hot though; I love the idea of exploitive sex.
I'm personally still chuffed to see how many hundreds, and indeed thousands, of views my material gets; even the stuff that didn't entirely work. I've yet to come across any other site with such intense readership -certainly not Writing.com, or the Yahoo forums. The level of expectation in terms of quality is also remarkably high here as well, which is another thing to consider when looking at one's marks. I've actually found a few really badly written stories that were still increadibly hot.