Category Changes Happened

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Voting and commenting are two seperate things.

But they don't have to be. It's all in the same database, or linked databases.

ID comments, ID votes

Deleted comment, linked vote is also deleted.

 

[iwatchus]

But they don't have to be. It's all in the same database, or linked databases.

ID comments, ID votes

Deleted comment, linked vote is also deleted.

What if you delete one of two comments for someone who voted? Is the vote deleted or not?

 

[SimonDoom]

Alright, but that just ignores pretty much everything else I said about it.

LW is LW because that was an imperfect label for what became the ENM umbrella many years later. You're advocating for making the same mistake again, because a specific part of it is currently fairly popular.

And ultimately, I'm advocating for leaving it be. Its' imperfection has utility. Anything it would be changed to is going to be imperfect by some other metric, and there's no guarantee the utility it currently provides would be maintained, or if the radioactive waste therein would seep out elsewhere.

I don't claim to know this for certain, but I've followed these stories at literotica for over 20 years. I don't think that history is quite right. Ethical nonmonogamy suggests that the readers and stories in the category are broader than hot wives, and I don't think, for the most part, that's correct. The author emphasis, and reader interest, always have focused on and to this day focus on women having extramarital sex. for the most part neither authors nor readers are interested in men having sex outside marriage, although there are some swinger stories.

I assume that the site owners, after doing this for 25 years, have a pretty good sense of what the readers want, and i suspect they agree with you that it should stay the way it is.

 

[Bamagan]

I presume most readers pay little attention to comments on stories, since so few seem to comment at all, so the perception that the LW category is toxic is probably limited to authors who post there and a small fraction of commenting readers. This would seem to track with the suggestion or belief that 'cleaning it up' is not a high priority for the site.

That being said, the LW/ENM debate does raise a potentially pertinent question, though: Would readers have an easier time finding their preferred content if there were separate categories for, let's say, "Open Relationships" (comprised of hot wives, swinging, sharing, and related topics) and "Infidelity" (for cheating and revenge or justice, depending on your perspective). Reader convenience probably is something the site takes into consideration. There are stories that wind up in Group Sex and other places because the author is deliberately avoiding the negative feedback they would have to endure in LW. While we can't know for sure how trolls would react to the category being split, finding similar stories that have migrated to other categories to avoid them is not difficult. If the trolls haven't bothered to follow them to Group Sex (or wherever), many might be similarly disinclined to follow them to a new category... aside perhaps from the authors who have engaged in tit-for-tat or baiting, perhaps, and gained personal trolls as a result.

Still, even if there's a motivation for the site to split LW that happens to make authors happier as a bonus, the division of TG and CD was probably child's play in comparison. Low-hanging fruit, as I think I said.

 

[Britva415]

Given how much more this has gone back and forth since I weighted in, I feel like somebody ought to articulate the problem with this approach. Really, there's 2.

Problem 1 - Hot wife-ing, while popular, is a small and specific sub-group under ethical non-monogamy. It's also needlessly gendered. This would be like naming the BDSM category 'Femdom'. Sure, that's part of it, but why are we picking that one hyper-specific subgroup? Loving Wives itself is a perfect example of why this is a bad idea. The language around ENM didn't exist in the way it does now when LW was named LW. This isn't a complaint about that. But there's a reason the language developed significantly in the intervening decades. It's a lot more broad and varied than it seemed like at the time. And gendering the label most certainly had some role in attracting the mouth-frothing misogyny you see there now. Non-monogamy is not a gendered thing. There's no reason at all for the word wife or husband to be in the name of whatever you want to call the category.

Problem 2- as illustrated by the above explanation, these 'genre' lines are ever-moving, subjective and somewhat arbitrary. Good, bad, or indifferent, categories are a pillar of this site's design. They're imperfect but also very hard to change. For better or worse, LW is a bit of a nuclear waste storage facility on Lit at the moment. Those of us that care about writing ENM stories can just put them other places. And LW can keep their particular brand of radioactive misogyny safely contained where it is. There's some utility in the fact that they mostly just stay there, and that benefit is worth the relatively minor cost of an already badly named category being funcationally unusable outside of the hyper-specific thing that generally gets posted there.

and problem 3, no matter how perfect the category names are, the ENM category is going to remain a troll magnet which the "fidelity, my way" crowd are going to onebomb and flame. Giving them a "BTB" area isn't going to filter the stuff they hate away from their tender eyes.

 

[Britva415]

Would readers have an easier time finding their preferred content if there were separate categories for, let's say, "Open Relationships" (comprised of hot wives, swinging, sharing, and related topics) and "Infidelity" (for cheating and revenge or justice, depending on your perspective).

I think, "Absolutely."

The name and description of LW doesn't suggest that infidelity should even be in there, yet there it is. Simultaneously, the name and description of LW doesn't suggest open relationships or ENM at all, so that content is all over the place and not even concentrated into LW.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

When an author decides to remove an offensive comment, any associated vote should also removed and the author should have the option to block that commenter from commenting and voting on other stories.

Absolutely not. That is 100% censorship, based on the author's own definition of offensive.

It is also a way to manipulate the scores. Any comment that doesn't correlate to a 5, regardless of how politely and respectfully worded. "Loved it but not perfect, a strong 4!" gets deleted and the score goes up.

It is also redundant, since any comment that you don't like you already have the ban hammer with the delete button. You just have to do it manually. Don't be lazy.

It can also be abused by cliques to bully someone. Don't think it won't happen. It absolutely will.

So, that is preposterously stupid idea of monumental proportions.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Don't want to wipe Staccy off here, eh?

 

[Lotus_Kitty]

LW could be 'fixed' with effective comment moderation.

When an author decides to remove an offensive comment, any associated vote should also removed and the author should have the option to block that commenter from commenting and voting on other stories. Even if they comment as anonymous, the system knows who they are.

Once X number of authors remove a comment from that commenter, they could be blocked from commenting at all for some period of time.

That wouldn't involve any category or story changes and would help restore the category to what it should be.

Exactly this.

Why change category names to appease misogynists and other asshats instead of banning them?

The suggestions above would automate this process so it wouldn’t be a massive burden on mods.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Exactly this.

Why change category names to appease misogynists and other asshats instead of banning them?

The suggestions above would automate this process so it wouldn’t be a massive burden on mods.

(facepalm)

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Somebody spelled faceplant wrong.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Somebody spelled faceplant wrong.

<- Facepalm.

Faceplant is tripping over something and landing on your face. I don't think there's an emoji for that.(unless this counts )

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

Faceplant is tripping over something and landing on your face

Exactly.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

<- Facepalm.

Faceplant is tripping over something and landing on your face. I don't think there's an emoji for that.(unless this counts )

You missed it. Heels was trolling me.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

You missed it. Heels was trolling me.

Nope, I got it.

 

[Voboy]

The name and description of LW doesn't suggest that infidelity should even be in there, yet there it is. Simultaneously, the name and description of LW doesn't suggest open relationships or ENM at all, so that content is all over the place and not even concentrated into LW.

... not sure where you're getting that.

"Married extra-marital fun: swinging, sharing & more."

I'd say that cries out for stories about sexual relationships that are...

...extramarital, and therefore nonmonogamous. And open. And ENM. And cheaty.

The "& more" does a lot of heavy lifting there. But writers, myself included, tend not to bother abiding by that description because we've learned that trollish readers won't. We've also learned that other categories are perfectly happy to accept married extra-marital fun: swinging, sharing & more, on their own account. And with more balanced readership.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

... not sure where you're getting that.

"Married extra-marital fun: swinging, sharing & more."

He meant the title itself and he is 100% right. The fact that the description is incongruous to the title shows just how misleading that title is. Laurel made an error in choosing a euphemism instead of something direct, and an even more grave error with such a vague and inaccurate title as Loving Wives. That's okay, we can live and learn, but even worse, 20 years later she still hasn't learned and fixed the title!

Obviously by the description, she fully intends the category to be about extramarital stuff, and if she wants it to be so broad as to include anything extramarital, why not just call it ... I dunno ... Extramarital Sex ... ? I guess that that would make too much sense. (shrug)

When we are using categories to sort and find stories and the people searching for stories have sent half of their brain blood to their crotch, arty euphemisms are not good. We need to hit them over the head with exactly what the category is. Now personally I am all for arty stuff, but not in category names. This is so not the right place for euphemism and metaphor. Save that for the story content.

 

[yowser]

I've said this at least twice (promise that this is the last) that there is nothing wrong with the Loving Wives category (except maybe for the majority of the readership) that couldn't be alleviated with a simple name-change that would straighten everything out.

Hating Husbands.

 

[slowhandduke]

It's weird that they split T&CG but left Celebrities & Fan Fiction as a single category. Splitting that one would be a much more obvious, and also a much more needed change.

Indeed, if I could wave a magic wang I'd just straight-up rename the category to Fan Fiction and then stuff the celebrity stories into their topical categories (or just EC).

Getting away from the LW discussion, I think this point made by TheLobster is very valid, although I'd split it into two categories - 'Fan Fiction' and 'Celebrities', rather than shoving all the celeb stuff into a topical category.

To me, 'Fan Fiction' should be stuff based on existing fictional settings, while 'Celebrities' should be sex with real-world celebs. The two are different categories really. And I suspect they wouldn't be too hard to split - most fan fiction stories I've read seem to have at least one tag naming the fictional world, or else it is obvious from the title.

 

[Bamagan]

FanFic and Celebs seem like a justifiable conjoinment to me. Stories that focus on either are attempting to leverage existing public awareness, of an intellectual property or the public image of a real person, in hopes of co-opting the fans or followers of those entities. Plus there's a wide swath of overlap where movies and other visual media are concerned, the readers of which are probably picturing, say, Jenna Ortega or Sydney Sweeney, when the story is about one of the characters they portrayed. Not that stories about the actresses themselves are any less fictionalized, obviously.
It makes sense to me to keep such content together, to make it easier to find (or avoid). No need to comb the site's other categories looking for Euphoria smut or the latest ode to [popular woman]'s tits.