Here's a good idea about the red H

[oneagainst]

First, you should write the stories that make you proud to tell them. If you hit publish and it gives you that special warm glow, it's reward enough. Getting some nice comments from appreciative readers is a bonus, but really, if you're happy with the story and you've been true to yourself while constructing it, then that's all that counts.

Anyway.

What would be really neat is if the AUTHOR themselves got a red H based on the average rating of all their stories. That way, you could look at a story list and see the authors who are generally racking up the high ratings and are probably worth a read, regardless of what rating the actual story is. It gives authors who are doing consistently good work a way to stand out, which should help readers select stories more effectively too, given that the red H is the most objective measure of story quality, of course.

(Fire in the hole )

 

[Priscilla_June]

My Red H lust and its associated anxiety, has risen.

I was thinking about this today too (not that I support the idea) They’ve gotten the subtle suggestion going on all of us ahead of its announcement.

 

[Cagivagurl]

A red H, is not something I consider when searching for stories to read.
I have found time and again, that the red H means very little.
I look for stories that have been highly favoured.
The two, don't always align.
Votes can be targeted, I'm not sure about favourited?
Just my thoughts.

Cagivagurl.

 

[Euphony]

First, you should write the stories that make you proud to tell them. If you hit publish and it gives you that special warm glow, it's reward enough. Getting some nice comments from appreciative readers is a bonus, but really, if you're happy with the story and you've been true to yourself while constructing it, then that's all that counts.

Anyway.

What would be really neat is if the AUTHOR themselves got a red H based on the average rating of all their stories. That way, you could look at a story list and see the authors who are generally racking up the high ratings and are probably worth a read, regardless of what rating the actual story is. It gives authors who are doing consistently good work a way to stand out, which should help readers select stories more effectively too, given that the red H is the most objective measure of story quality, of course.

(Fire in the hole )

Understand the sentiment but the overarching system now is fraught enough, attaching an authorial "worth" based on current factors is even more troublesome.

Different categories simply average vote higher. We all know LW's issues and having an author punished for that being their muse's space rustles my feathers a bit (even if I can only hypothetical it) Even the choice of writing in chapters v. one long form self-contained tale can induce vote skew.

To say nothing of how my own experience has born out quality and score can be very divergent (so much so, I use score less and less as a qualifier) If you write in certain categories and meet certain tropes/expectations, a very paint by numbers story can do very well (thankfully, the tip top tiers seem to still are mostly populated by identifiable outlier excellence.)

I'm first to admit I don't have the answer (and maybe that invalidates my ability to speak on it) but it's feels very imperfect as is and attaching a more weighty metric to define an author's oeuvre worries me more than it excites me.

Hard to suggest a "metric" as what seemingly works best for me these days is exposure to an author on the AH and the sense I can get of what they are or what they are trying for (when they are really stretching out/pushing boundaries)

Those are the stories most likely to blow the top of my skull off these days.

The top list, high vote getters, popular lists, etc. don't work for me like they once did.

I'm willing to entertain it could all be just be me but my lens currently is the numerical voting system is not only imperfect (all are) but struggling to hold anything but the most basic value these days. It weeds out the grammatical, unreadable, low effort nightmares but offers little as a tool for any story comparison.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't agree an author red H would be useful.

Readers look for stories, first. They're not looking for authors with high average scores. They're looking for stories they want to read. That's the purpose of ratings--to help readers. I don't think this would help readers.

The other flaw of doing this is it discourages authors from taking risks. If you write 750 word stories, your average will get drawn down. If you write offbeat stories, there's a good chance your average score will be lower.

it would also discourage authors from writing stories in categories that tend to get lower scores. It would discourage authors from writing standalone stories as opposed to many-chaptered series, because the highest rated stories tend to be late chapters in long series.

I think the story red H is a dubious idea to begin with, but this would be even more dubious. It would add nothing meaningful to the ability of readers to choose stories, and it would tend to stifle creativity and risk-taking.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The other flaw of doing this is it discourages authors from taking risks. If you write 750 word stories, your average will get drawn down. If you write offbeat stories, there's a good chance your average score will be lower.

it would also discourage authors from writing stories in categories that tend to get lower scores. It would discourage authors from writing standalone stories as opposed to many-chaptered series, because the highest rated stories tend to be late chapters in long series.

I think the story red H is a dubious idea to begin with, but this would be even more dubious. It would add nothing meaningful to the ability of readers to choose stories, and it would tend to stifle creativity and risk-taking.

100% this.

I get a lot of red Hs and sometimes that feels like a disincentive to write more - what if the next one's not as good and I'm disappointing people? Every time I sit down to start a new story I have to remind myself that if it sucks, it sucks, and then I can write another story. If I felt like I was risking an authorly red H by starting a new story instead of sticking an unnecessary extra chapter onto something that's already finished, that would not be helpful to me.

 

[Trionyx]

Scenario one: Author A has one story with 10 votes for an average of 4.75. Author B has one story with 500 votes for an average of 4.75. Do both get red Hs? Is B better than A? Or has B merely been around years longer than A?
Scenario two: Author C publishes mainly in Romance where scores are generally higher. Author D publishes mainly in LW where scores are generally lower. Both have average scores around 4.55. Do both get red Hs when it’s easier to get to 4.55 in the one category?
Scenario three: An author has two stories, one at 4.4 with one hundred votes and one at 4.6 with ten votes. The average is 4.5 if you’re looking only at the 4.5 and 4.6 but TOTAL numerical vote average is 4.418. Should the total number of votes be considered or just the scores?

Long story short, your idea is fraught with potential problems and instituting it would be simply a colossal mess. If you want to get a bird’s eye view of an author’s skill (or vote gathering prowess), simply take a glance of his or her story listing page. If there is a sea of red Hs and a smattering of blue Ws, you can probably assume, on average, their writing is better than if there are few to no red Hs.

 

[oneagainst]

To actually be serious about this, and I feel like I just nerd-sniped myself here, it would be pretty simple to allow for category variations... you fit a bell curve to each category and then compare the author's works in that category against the bell curve and look for highest centile. Multicategory authors would require averaging centile scores across each. You would need a rule that authors need to have more than x stories to qualify in the first place, to avoid first-time authors fluking the system. To @Trionyx's point above, this then gives you a roll-up of the "glance over the story page" but actually better, since it's taking into account how well you did against your peers even in a low-average-scoring category.

 

[dmallord]

Folks ... don't go overthinking this. That's pie-in-the-sky thinking. The system is what it is. Let it be. Let a reader read. Don't 'color outside the lines.' Be satisfied they read your ... stuff.

 

[RejectReality]

To actually be serious about this, and I feel like I just nerd-sniped myself here, it would be pretty simple to allow for category variations... you fit a bell curve to each category and then compare the author's works in that category against the bell curve and look for highest centile. Multicategory authors would require averaging centile scores across each. You would need a rule that authors need to have more than x stories to qualify in the first place, to avoid first-time authors fluking the system. To @Trionyx's point above, this then gives you a roll-up of the "glance over the story page" but actually better, since it's taking into account how well you did against your peers even in a low-average-scoring category.

Simple or no, it would cause undue anxiety. The moment you throw in bell curves, means, yada yada yada, a lot of people's eyes glaze over because they don't understand it. What they don't understand, they fear/hate. All this would do is introduce yet another thread that pops up every couple of days with people asking, "How come I don't have an author H when *Authorname* does! I have a higher average score!"

There's very few places your author name appears that isn't attached to a story with a score listed anyway. People are automatically going to default to the more relevant statistic, and that author H would be little more than some costume jewelry with no real value. ( And something for those who don't get the math to spin conspiracy theories out of )

 

[HordHolm]

Honestly, I'd just like to see the arse end of the red H disappearing off into the distance, not looking back. Just leave the average rating and be done with it.

 

[Djmac1031]

Most of my stories have earned the Red H.

This is not a brag, merely a statement of fact.

Why?

I have no idea. I'm certainly not the best writer here.

But I don't approach writing a story with the idea in the back of my head: "what does this story need to earn me a Red H?"

Just write the stories. And try to make it the best story you can.

The Red H will come or it won't.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Readers look for stories, first. They're not looking for authors with high average scores. They're looking for stories they want to read. That's the purpose of ratings--to help readers. I don't think this would help readers.

I think you need to qualify this somewhat.

I know that as a reader here if I like a particular story, I will explore other stories that the same author has written, possibly even start following them. This brings up the current ability of readers to view which author has the most followers, and that is somewhat akin to them having a red H.

 

[ElectricBlue]

This brings up the current ability of readers to view which author has the most followers, and that is somewhat akin to them having a red H.

Except that criteria biases you towards the writers who have been here for the longest time, and have had more time to gather followers - which means little in terms of their story quality. Or writers in LW or Incest, but what about the rest of us?

Besides, Followers are deep in the noise as an indicator of anything. Votes per View hovers around 1 %, generally speaking, whereas Followers per View is down around 0.1%, which is a quantum less.

People seem to loath the Red H as an indicator for reasons I don't quite understand - I think it's a fair indicator in the absence of anything else.

 

[Biggalute]

On the few occasions when someone has asked what story of mine I'd recommend them to read to get a feel for my writing I've chosen ones that I enjoyed writing the most, rather than the ones that scored highest.
Not sure there's a need to change/replace the red H, it's not perfect, but it is what it is.

 

[oneagainst]

On the few occasions when someone has asked what story of mine I'd recommend them to read to get a feel for my writing I've chosen ones that I enjoyed writing the most, rather than the ones that scored highest.
Not sure there's a need to change/replace the red H, it's not perfect, but it is what it is.

...which would also be an interesting addition to Lit: ability of author to specify the stories they love the most from their catalogue and give new readers an entry point as opposed to whatever begins with an A in the list....

Most followers as the most available metric for whether an author is good or not just sucks... it rewards length of tenure above all else since it's self reinforcing. A mechanism based on ratings vs the cohort in the category is actually the opposite: attracting more views to a story that's not so strong will rate it down over time, which makes the metric self-balancing. You have to be objectively good to keep the rating every time someone reads the story and votes, as opposed to have simply joined lit in 2013.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

Folks ... don't go overthinking this. That's pie-in-the-sky thinking. The system is what it is. Let it be. Let a reader read. Don't 'color outside the lines.' Be satisfied they read your ... stuff.

i like this.

 

[Bramblethorn]

To actually be serious about this, and I feel like I just nerd-sniped myself here, it would be pretty simple to allow for category variations... you fit a bell curve to each category and then compare the author's works in that category against the bell curve and look for highest centile.

A bell curve (aka normal/Gaussian distribution) isn't the right tool for the job here. Scores on Literotica don't follow a normal distribution in any category; they can't.

A normal distribution is unbounded - the curve never quite drops to zero, no matter how far out you go towards positive or negative infinity. Literotica scores are bounded; they can never be below 1 or above 5.

There are many, many applications where you can get away with using a normal approximation to bounded data, because the bounds are so far away from the mean that the normal curve is "close enough" to zero. On Literotica that's not the case, and it's particularly a problem if you're using it for things like toplist stuff because the further you go towards the extremes, the poorer that approximation becomes.

For instance, picking one page out of the LW story lists: at the time of posting there were 124 stories with ratings (excluded a few with scoring turned off). The mean score for those stories was 3.88855, and the standard deviation was 0.45675. I'm going to take that as approximately representative; if you want the full data set you'll need to ask the guy who does story stats posts.

A perfect 5.0 would be about 2.43 SDs above the average. Under a bell-curve approximation, about 0.7% of stories would score higher than that. With about 42,000 stories in the category, a bell curve tells us the entire top-250 for that category should have scores higher than 5.0.

Obviously this is impossible. A bell curve just isn't a good fit for the actual shape of LW scores, and it's not even necessary for what you're trying to do here - you can just go straight to calculating quantiles for each category without needing to fit a bell curve along the way.

At that point we can start making statements like "this story scored in the top 1% of LW stories". But does that actually mean it's meaningfully "better" than another story that only made it to the top 2% of some other category?

Not necessarily. There are a bunch of other things that can affect that comparison, e.g.:

- Long stories tend to get inflated scores because of reader dropout. As things stand, that already makes it hard to know how, say, a 4.6 stand-alone story compares to a 4.8 Chapter Eleventy-One in the same category. In a quantile system this becomes even messier: if an author posts the exact same story in two different categories, and readers give it a 4.6 in both, but one category is serial-heavy and the other isn't, that story will end up with a worse quantile rating in the serial-heavy category because it's being compared to a lot of serials.
- Stories with small numbers of votes will have higher score variability (and less accurate quantiles) than those with lower numbers. This is a problem both for comparing older vs. newer stories, and for comparing low-readership vs. high-readership categories.
- It may be that some categories genuinely attract better writers, in which case "top 1% in LW" and "top 1% in EC" aren't necessarily equally impressive. This could be tested to some degree by looking at writers who post across multiple categories and seeing how they fare by category, but correcting for it would be messy.

I enjoy tinkering with this kind of thing and thinking of approaches that might be used to correct for all those issues. But they all end up being complex to the point where almost nobody understands them, and that probably ends up with even more complaints than we get about the current system.

Multicategory authors would require averaging centile scores across each.

Again, this risks discouraging writers from trying new things and taking chances. The way to maximise your centile ends up being to write the same story in the same category over and over.

 

[ElectricBlue]

...which would also be an interesting addition to Lit: ability of author to specify the stories they love the most from their catalogue and give new readers an entry point as opposed to whatever begins with an A in the list....

This is an excellent suggestion, to allow an author to curate their own catalogue, with suggested reading orders, and brief writer's notes.

 

[Lifestyle66]

The Red-H supposedly marks a "Hot" story, not a Hot author. It's that one story which is hot.

 

[oneagainst]

@Bramblethorn - maybe I've been trying to get my head around the HSC computation mechanism. I'm sure we could apply it to Lit rankings somehow. It's essentially a similar problem.

Unless you came up with the HSC? In which case....

 

[oneagainst]

This is an excellent suggestion, to allow an author to curate their own catalogue, with suggested reading orders, and brief writer's notes.

I'm doing this manually in my author page which is real clunky - it feels like the entire thing needs an overhaul, which at the end of the day should lift site traffic and increase $$$ - since better pages -> more relevant story choices -> higher dwell time. It'd be great to do a redesign.

 

[Bramblethorn]

@Bramblethorn - maybe I've been trying to get my head around the HSC computation mechanism. I'm sure we could apply it to Lit rankings somehow. It's essentially a similar problem.

Unless you came up with the HSC? In which case....

Ha, no! I know a little bit of it but not the details. I do know it has to deal with that same problem of having subjects (= categories) with different difficulty levels - you wouldn't treat the top 10% in 2-unit Maths as equivalent to the top 10% in 4-unit, for instance. I think they do something like looking at how the same students perform in different subjects and using that to calibrate for difficulty but I couldn't tell you exactly how.

OTOH there are some complications here that the HSC doesn't have - the single-vs.-chapter thing, for instance, or comparing stories of different ages.

If one wanted to over-engineer a system for comparing stories or authors, it might be worth looking at sports statistics. Nobody gets into stats nerdery like the sports statisticians do, and I know there's been some work done on trying to estimate comparative rankings for athletes who never played against one another - was Bradman a better batsman than Tendulkar, allowing for the different conditions they played under and different opponents they faced, that kind of thing.

 

[SimonDoom]

People seem to loath the Red H as an indicator for reasons I don't quite understand - I think it's a fair indicator in the absence of anything else.

I don't loathe the red H, but I don't think it adds anything meaningful or useful, and there's no question in my mind that it increases gamesmanship, and that it influences and incentivizes both authors and voters in wrong-headed ways.

1. A red H conveys no information beyond what the numerical score does. If your story has a 4.56, it has a 4.56. A red H, which is based on the story having a score of 4.5 or more, conveys no extra information. The score is sufficient.

2. In fact, it conveys a type of misinformation, to the extent that it gives the impression that a red H means the same thing regardless of factors like length, story category, story type, and whether it's a chapter or not -- all factors that have nothing to do with story quality.

3. The red H affects voter behavior in ways that make no sense and have nothing to do with quality. Many author/readers here in this forum admit they are reluctant to give scores of less than 5 because it could hurt the author's chances of getting a red H. That's nuts. Get rid of the red H, and scoring would be more sensible and, probably, accurate.

4. The red H disincentivizes authors from taking creative risks, from writing 750-word stories, and from writing in categories that tend to score more poorly. It's bad for story variety and creativity.

5. There's a great deal of angst in this forum about numerical scores, but much of that angst is the result of the red H. Take away the red H, and much of the angst goes away. Nobody would care any longer about whether their story has a 4.48 or a 4.52.

The ONLY reason to have a red H system, as I see it, is that the system has been around for a while and authors have grown accustomed to getting them as little merit badges. I don't think that's a worthy purpose, especially when it just increases the level of angst and anxiety about scoring, which it very plainly does based on the comments in this forum. As I've said before, I think the scoring system should be geared toward conveying helpful information to readers rather than rewarding authors.


All the reasons against the red H apply even more to a system of red Hs applicable to authors. I don't see how it would accomplish anything good or in any way encourage better or more creative stories, or convey information to readers that would truly be useful or meaningful.

 

[SimonDoom]

Again, this risks discouraging writers from trying new things and taking chances. The way to maximise your centile ends up being to write the same story in the same category over and over.

Yes, and to keep adding endless numbers of repetitive chapters to a long series, because you'll keep giving your small but fanatical story fan base exactly what it wants to keep reading.