A wish ...

[Vintage_DM]

It seems to me that many of the hit and run derogatory comments that are posted are from 'anonymous.' These comments are like a paper airplane tossed out from the balcony. Do they add to the flow of comments on a story? Or are they a distraction? Should it be a requirement to post a comment or rate a story that the person be signed in? What are your thoughts?

 

[ElectricBlue]

I would never in a million years turn anon comments off. They're just as heartfelt and thoughtful as any comment I've received from an account holder.

You write in Romance and Mature, and your story list seems to be doing okay, so you should treat whatever it is they have to say as an annoyance. And there's no shame in deleting garbage comments.

 

[PrincessArianrhod]

Some of my nicest and most thoughtful feedback has come from anonymous comments. While I don't understand why the people who leave them don't want an account to attach to such positivity, it is their right. I wouldn't dream of cutting them off but then I thankfully haven't received any assassination attempts either. I imagine deleting poorly written or needlessly vitriolic comments is much easier if there's no name to stand behind them.

 

[Altissimus]

This question is asked from time to time. The general view is that if readers are forced to create accounts and sign in, overall it would be detrimental.

There's an option to turn off anon comments on your stories (I believe on a case-by-case basis). Personally I'll be leaving them on - I have 10 positive anon comments for every 1 dick.

I'd also add... leaving vitriolic comments can cause other people to comment in defence of you.

 

[lovecraft68]

If I ran this site I'd make it so you needed to have a handle to comment. My belief is the decent folks would create one, but we'd lose a lot of the bad element.

Most don't agree with me, and that's fine. Its not like its ever gong to happen anyway, and because of that we'd never know.

You can delete them like some do, or ignore them and leave the turds in the yard like I and others do.

Focus on the writing first and the good comments, the rest is noise

 

[PrincessArianrhod]

I'd also add... leaving vitriolic comments can cause other people to comment in defence of you.

That might give some intellectual gratification but I think allowing the comments to slide into a debate might have an overall net negative effect. Better to just delete anything that doesn't qualify as constructive in my opinion.

 

[Altissimus]

If I ran this site I'd make it so you needed to have a handle to comment. My belief is the decent folks would create one, but we'd lose a lot of the bad element.

Personally I agree.

Most don't agree with me, and that's fine.

Doesn't stop them being wrong...

Its not like its ever gong to happen anyway, and because of that we'd never know.

Well quite. And that effectively closes the discussion.

 

[Cagivagurl]

Just because thy don't sign in, doesn't mean they are not registered users of the site.
Most negative comments are from ANON... Because the user doesn't want to be identified...
That is their choice.
I like the idea of free expression, so I do not block Anon from commenting.
The only comments I delete are the ones aimed at other people.
I refuse to allow my story to become a battlefield of egos...
It is your call as the writer. You can block anon comments.
It is your call.

 

[alohadave]

Should it be a requirement to post a comment or rate a story that the person be signed in?

You can turn off anonymous comments on your stories if it bothers you.

It's really not that big of a deal, IMO. People leave anonymous comments for whatever reasons. The same way that we don't use our real names as usernames. Some people are going to leave shitty comments.

On the flip side, look at someone like Whackdoodle. Named account, but they leave nasty comments all the time.

 

[Djmac1031]

Aren't all comments "Anonymous" when you think about it?

Not like anyone's leaving their REAL names.

Ignore the trolls, take constructive criticism to heart, and carry on best you can.

 

[SimonDoom]

This topic comes up from time to time. The Site has made it clear that it will not require signing up with a handle to leave comments, because the number of commenters will dramatically decrease if it does.

I personally think it's a terrible idea, and I don't for a minute believe that all the decent commenters would sign up. First of all, over half of all commenters are anonymous, and most of them are perfectly decent and respectful. Knowing what we know about how people respond to inconvenience on the Internet, it's likely that most anonymous commenters, if forced to choose and reveal pseudonyms, would avoid commenting rather than signing up.

I don't see how it's a big deal. If you don't like a comment you can delete it.

 

[Fatdog25]

I started out as an anonymous reader so I have no issue with the concept.

Like many others, I tend to check the comments before reading as they serve as the ultimate tags. I know many of the regular commenters, so their positive or negative opinions can provide valuable insights.

As many other writers have pointed out, you are free to delete any comment you choose. Tilan's observation is precisely why I don’t. It's feedback, not only for me but other readers. I will let the readers decide if a particular commenter is full of shit or not.

I'll gladly put up with a few "this sucks" if I can get one person to say "except for [x], it wasn't as bad as so-and-so said it was". I'm after that [x]. I think deleting comments would discourage that.

Color me naive...there are writers who disagree with that, they have sound reasons for it, and that's their choice. Unless I'm being doxxed, it stays.

 

[mirafrida]

Anon comments don't bother me. If a comment is uninformed or abusive, well, I think that says a lot more about the commenter than about my story. Even that kind of crap gives me a better idea of the spectrum of different readers, and how to interpret the overall response to a story.

 

[Djmac1031]

There is one more type of comment that I enjoy deleting but feel remorseful about it afterward. It's those lengthy comments that take up half a page and contain 300 words or more; I delete them without even reading them. If someone wants to share stories, they should do it from their own account.

I know it's wrong, but damn, it's sadistically satisfying.

I got one guy that wrote a reply almost as long as my story once lol.

I left it, because whatever.

I think I've deleted maybe two comments since I started. I don't remember the exact content of them other than they were utter derogatory nonsense by someone who obviously didn't even read the story.

But generally I'll leave pretty much any comments up.

Some are good for a laugh if nothing else.

 

[MelissaBaby]

If I ran this site I'd make it so you needed to have a handle to comment. My belief is the decent folks would create one, but we'd lose a lot of the bad element.

Most don't agree with me, and that's fine. Its not like its ever gong to happen anyway, and because of that we'd never know.

You can delete them like some do, or ignore them and leave the turds in the yard like I and others do.

Focus on the writing first and the good comments, the rest is noise

The problem is, you may well be right, but if you're wrong, it would be disastrous. Since this is basically a solution looking for a problem, I can't see why it would be worth the risk.

 

[RejectReality]

The average person is lazy, and will walk away the moment the slightest barrier stands between them and something that isn't a priority. I think the current numbers speak to how the majority of visitors to Lit prioritize voting and commenting.

The average troll is probably a coward who would be discouraged from commenting if they had to be associated with a handle to do so. I think it's fairly safe to say that the average joes outnumber the average trolls by a significant margin. If not, the average score would be 3 or less, not in the low 4s. You already have the power to ban anonymous comments on your stories anyway.

An asshole will walk barefoot over broken glass and climb a wall covered in barbed wire to fuck with people. An asshole who hates you is worse.

What you end up with is a much smaller voting pool that gives tenacious assholes ( and obsessed fans, but I'll skip score inflation and the ramifications of that this time ) an outsized influence. You make it easier not harder for someone to fuck with you.

 

[bumpercars]

Banning anonymous comments and votes site-wide would hinder a hundred casual readers for every troll it inconvenienced. The site can survive trolls but it dies without casual readers.

 

[lovecraft68]

The average person is lazy, and will walk away the moment the slightest barrier stands between them and something that isn't a priority. I think the current numbers speak to how the majority of visitors to Lit prioritize voting and commenting.

The average troll is probably a coward who would be discouraged from commenting if they had to be associated with a handle to do so. I think it's fairly safe to say that the average joes outnumber the average trolls by a significant margin. If not, the average score would be 3 or less, not in the low 4s. You already have the power to ban anonymous comments on your stories anyway.

An asshole will walk barefoot over broken glass and climb a wall covered in barbed wire to fuck with people. An asshole who hates you is worse.

What you end up with is a much smaller voting pool that gives tenacious assholes ( and obsessed fans, but I'll skip score inflation and the ramifications of that this time ) an outsized influence. You make it easier not harder for someone to fuck with you.

You have as much proof of it not working, as I do of it working. We're dealing in opinions and theories.

But end of the day here is why the LW category-and let's face it, this is where much of the problem with anon asshats lies- Lit is free and allows anon comments. In the paid market cuck and hotwife stories sell well and aren't blasted with nasty reviews. On porn channels the same material is not blasted with hate, why? Because Porn hub and many other sites are now asking you verify your handle before you're allowed to comment.

You mentioned coward, I'll add cheapskate because they won't spend money to spew any hate. But my two examples prove the first, this site is over run with the worst common denominator because its a free path.

Now if you elimated anon comments across the board, people can still read, they can still vote, but they can't comment. The traffic that would be lost would be the ones who come here to spew nothing but hate. The decent sort will have a percentage that will bite the bullet and create a toss away e-mail address, and the ones that won't, will probably still vote.

There's also the option that seeing Lit has begun screening comments for spam, that they start screening period and not let the pure hate speech through, and here's an idea for you. The worst offenders are here just to do what they do. Any resistance will drive them off because despite what you think this type of person is not creating handle and risking anyone, especially a family member discovering what a nasty piece of work they really are.

But again, this is just batting around ideas with no proof...no, wait, there is proof, lit allowing anon is leading to an increasing problem with the trolls, or are you going to pretend you don't see the uptick in WTF threads here about LW and the comments?

End of the day you defend everything this site does-or mostly doesn't do-and think you know everything. Guess what? You don't, People can cling to their precious comments from the decent anon, or watch the site continue to devolve and be over run by incels and hate spewers and lose good authors, good readers, and good anon commentors because people on every level I just mentioned are getting weary of the toxic minefield the comments section is becoming.

So...you keep the bad and lose the good as lit becomes asstr 2.0

But what do I know, right?

 

[lovecraft68]

There is one more type of comment that I enjoy deleting but feel remorseful about it afterward. It's those lengthy comments that take up half a page and contain 300 words or more; I delete them without even reading them. If someone wants to share stories, they should do it from their own account.

I know it's wrong, but damn, it's sadistically satisfying.

Have you gotten any from Anublore? I have a couple from him that look like they're half a lit page. I leave them, but admit I don't even try to read them.

 

[alohadave]

The average troll is probably a coward who would be discouraged from commenting if they had to be associated with a handle to do so.

I doubt that. It takes a minute to register an account, then you can troll to your heart's content.

Having a named account does not stop someone from trolling. It's not tied to any real life persona. And if you look at Facebook, people are more than willing to be shitheads with their real name attached to awful comments.

It doesn't fix anything, and authors have the ability to remove comments they don't like. If the comments were not deletable, then the argument would hold more weight, IMO.

 

[RejectReality]

You have as much proof of it not working, as I do of it working. We're dealing in opinions and theories.

But end of the day here is why the LW category-and let's face it, this is where much of the problem with anon asshats lies- Lit is free and allows anon comments. In the paid market cuck and hotwife stories sell well and aren't blasted with nasty reviews. On porn channels the same material is not blasted with hate, why? Because Porn hub and many other sites are now asking you verify your handle before you're allowed to comment.

You mentioned coward, I'll add cheapskate because they won't spend money to spew any hate. But my two examples prove the first, this site is over run with the worst common denominator because its a free path.

Now if you elimated anon comments across the board, people can still read, they can still vote, but they can't comment. The traffic that would be lost would be the ones who come here to spew nothing but hate. The decent sort will have a percentage that will bite the bullet and create a toss away e-mail address, and the ones that won't, will probably still vote.

There's also the option that seeing Lit has begun screening comments for spam, that they start screening period and not let the pure hate speech through, and here's an idea for you. The worst offenders are here just to do what they do. Any resistance will drive them off because despite what you think this type of person is not creating handle and risking anyone, especially a family member discovering what a nasty piece of work they really are.

But again, this is just batting around ideas with no proof...no, wait, there is proof, lit allowing anon is leading to an increasing problem with the trolls, or are you going to pretend you don't see the uptick in WTF threads here about LW and the comments?

End of the day you defend everything this site does-or mostly doesn't do-and think you know everything. Guess what? You don't, People can cling to their precious comments from the decent anon, or watch the site continue to devolve and be over run by incels and hate spewers and lose good authors, good readers, and good anon commentors because people on every level I just mentioned are getting weary of the toxic minefield the comments section is becoming.

So...you keep the bad and lose the good as lit becomes asstr 2.0

But what do I know, right?

It's pretty simple. Lush had the same parameters with anons allowed to vote. ( although authors had the option to ban anonymous votes, and to require a comment to vote from anyone as well, which I never used. ) When they did away with it, vote totals fell off a cliff. People would not bother with signing up just to vote.

At first, trolls continued their normal patterns. With the suddenly reduced pool that was absent casual voters, their votes were dramatic outliers. The votes were removed, and users banned for repeat offenses.

They wised up.

Because casual voters no longer could be bothered, scores jumped almost as much as vote totals plummeted. Trolls recognized this and realized that as the scores inflated ever closer to only a perfect scores garnering a response, any vote lower than 5 could destroy a story. And that's what they did. It's hard to argue that your profile full of 1 votes is legitimate. Your profile full of 4 votes on the other hand...

Easier to cause the same damage, and almost impossible to police.

It reached a point of being completely unmanageable. They scrapped it for a like-only system and converted all votes to likes regardless of their value. There was a brief, blissful moment where you could hear the collective wails of anguish from down-voters whose hard work was instantly converted into a positive statistic. Then the problems with that system started becoming evident. ( But irrelevant to this discussion, so I'll digress )

I watched it happen in real time. I'm not speculating. I'm relating something that happened on another text erotica site, which was entirely predictable because it's the way people behave.

As far as comments go, authors have had the power to block anonymous comments and remove any comment they wish for as long as I've been here. Some undoubtedly don't know they can do it, but all it takes is a little research to discover it. A single post here will relay the information as well, as was done in this very thread.

Cue Captain Planet. The power is YOURS! With the delay in comment posting ( which is complained about bitterly and would only grow worse if another algorithm was inserted to search for hateful comments ) you can even remove them before they become public when luck is on your side. Maybe you should have the option to have all your comments queue and require approval before posting publicly. I'd support that.

The LW comment section has been a cesspit as long as I've been here as well. It's one of the very first things I learned about Lit upon venturing into the forum damn near 20 years ago now. It hasn't gotten any better or worse from what I've seen. Death threats. Calls for the author to off themselves. Comments as long as the story. Anti-woman diatribes. Yep. All there all the way back then. Everywhere else on the site, positive anon comments outnumber negative ones by a wide margin, as they always have.

Here's some wonderful nuggets from one of mine which are all more than a decade old.

Only wimos have ED, which is a NorthEastern liberal disease spread by so-called conservative talk show hosts. Anyone contracting ED should eat raw meat and watch John Wayne WAR movies (not that pinko cowboy shit) and then beat up some faries. Then if he could still not get it up, he should have beaten his wife up!! Yeah!

At the start of the story the heroine says she's not planning to have babies. This is a good choice because stupid people shouldn't breed.

DWornock was born mentally challenged, he suffers from cuckold level ten, his/her wife is a transgender hooker with a club foot.

Yea another stupied BITCH only concerned with her self and her pleasure never stoping to think or ever to ask if something was wrong. Jelouse of others when she was doing the same or worse. she got what she diserved.

And this is on a story where the husband walks away when he discovers the infidelity. The comments on RAAC and Cuckold stories have always been far worse.

I don't see where banning anonymous would do anybody any good.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Right now in another AH thread, we have a bunch of authors complaining about comments left by somebody who's not only logged in, but has shown up in that thread to discuss the rationale for their comments. In return that poster has been accused of trolling, being an alt, and 1-bombing another author's stories - the latter AFAICT based solely on post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.

I'm not arguing that all those comments were kind or correct*. I haven't read all the relevant stories to see those comments in context, nor seen comments that were deleted, so all I have is an unreliable first impression of "oof, that seems a bit harsh?" with a bit of "well I liked that author's stories!"

But AFAICT they were honest opinions, offered by somebody who was willing to be about as non-anonymous as most people get on here, and authors still imputed malicious motives to them. Banning anon isn't going to fix that, and it may deter people from giving honest feedback if owning one's opinion is going to be met with that kind of pushback.

*except for the good review they left on one of mine, which I obviously agree with ;-)

The average person is lazy, and will walk away the moment the slightest barrier stands between them and something that isn't a priority. I think the current numbers speak to how the majority of visitors to Lit prioritize voting and commenting.

Also, a lot of people are privacy-conscious. I tend to avoid creating accounts where I can, even on sites that I use all the time where having an account would be less work than going through the "anon user" pathways every time (e.g. Lit's captcha), because I'm not thrilled about the idea of leaving more info about myself than I have to.

Last year alone, Australia had something like three major data breaches with millions of people's personal info exposed, from sites with much bigger security budgets than Literotica. Every site where I create an account increases my exposure to that kind of risk. For a lot of people, doing that just for the sake of being able to comment on Lit stories would be a pretty poor tradeoff.

What you end up with is a much smaller voting pool that gives tenacious assholes ( and obsessed fans, but I'll skip score inflation and the ramifications of that this time ) an outsized influence. You make it easier not harder for someone to fuck with you.

This, and also, smaller voting pool means more random noise in scores which makes them less meaningful (and increases the risk of people jumping at shadows over "trolls" that are actually just random noise).

As a very rough rule of thumb, for stories near the borderline for an H, the random noise in a story score will be on the order of (number of votes)^(-0.5). At 100 votes, the score you see could easily be about +/- 0.10 from the "true" value on that story. If you wipe out 90% of those voters, the noise blows up to about +/- 0.32. Authors who get agitated about a drop of 0.05 in a story rating aren't going to enjoy that kind of volatility.

 

[Lifestyle66]

It seems to me that many of the hit and run derogatory comments that are posted are from 'anonymous.' These comments are like a paper airplane tossed out from the balcony. Do they add to the flow of comments on a story? Or are they a distraction? Should it be a requirement to post a comment or rate a story that the person be signed in? What are your thoughts?

I've come to understand that comments are left by sometimes just 1 out of every 100 views. If your story strikes a nerve with many people, the comments may be even 1:60 or 1:25 views. And there seem to always be a few good comments even though the majority might be bad.

So, appreciate that SOME people do like your story.

And comments are like assholes: everyone has one! Some just put their assholes out there to view!

 

[SimonDoom]

I know it's wrong, but damn, it's sadistically satisfying.

This is your personal motto, right?

 

[Stacnash]

Right now in another AH thread, we have a bunch of authors complaining about comments left by somebody who's not only logged in, but has shown up in that thread to discuss the rationale for their comments. In return that poster has been accused of trolling, being an alt, and 1-bombing another author's stories - the latter AFAICT based solely on post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.

I'm the commenter in question. My experience can be summarised like this.

I've read stories here for years and left the vast majority of my comments anonymously. In the instances where I offered constructive criticism, too many authors would push back with:

"What kind of coward leaves feedback anonymously? They're too afraid to sign up for an account."

When that happened again in June, I logged in to my account and tore the author to shreds. Eventually, they apologised and it was big of them to do so.

But now that I'm commenting under my profile, the goalposts keep moving. Gone is the talk of cowardice, replaced by:

"What stories have they written?"

"How many books have they sold?"

"What qualifications do they have as a reviewer?"

"How many followers do they have here?"

"They must be an idiot if they liked her but not him."

"What expertise do they have to critique my work?"

While there are outliers here who are mature and act with class, too many writers here have demonstrated that they'll always move the goalposts when criticised. I know that for a fact and I'm almost uniquely placed to tell you that.

It comes down to what kind of mentality you have as a creator. You all spend hours creating stories for readers like me to enjoy, and I appreciate that.

But when I invest my time to consume your content, why would any author acting in good faith dismiss extended feedback as if it were offered by the scum of the earth? By all means read it and delete it, as is your right, but to delude yourself into believing that you don't even have to read it is an affront.