Holy carp. I'm popular?

[Rob_Royale]

In the past few days, someone has one-bombed the stories down a few tenths. Of course, maybe they just don't like them.

Par for the course, sadly.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

In the past few days, someone has one-bombed the stories down a few tenths. Of course, maybe they just don't like them.

It might not necessarily have been a 1 bomb. One of my stories hit #14 on the all time list in Romance. Since then, every day at about the same time it received a pair of 2 votes until the score was low enough that it isn't on the list at all anymore. Then it stopped. None of my other stories were touched, so it seems unlikely that it was personal, they were just "protecting" the lists.
Odd behavior.

 

[RocketGrunt]

I was on the all time top ten of Lesbian for a whole week, before someone noticed and hammered my story from 4.86 to 4.80 over two days.

As I had about 250 votes at that point, it must have taken a sustained effort to achieve that level of suppression.

As an aside the much vaunted competition sweep didn’t delete a single one of those downvotes. I guess they were all totally genuine.

Troll veto is very powerful. The drop from 4.86 to 4.80 at 250 votes can be done with FOUR 1-star votes.
If one person has a desktop, a laptop, a phone, and a computer at work, they can hammer your rating down like that just by voting anonymously once from each device. If they don't do it all at once, it won't even get flagged as suspicious.

Since an upvote can't really be any different from a 5-star rating, and most votes on highly rated works are 5-star ratings by definition, the differences in average rating are simply driven by the number of downvotes. And you can send downvotes 4 at a time just by hitting the 1-star rating. If a work is at 4.9 and one person hits the 1-star for any reason, the rating will fall unless THIRTY NINE more people hit the 5-star rating to balance it out.

High ratings are normally a marker that a piece hasn't been looked at much yet. There are some pieces that have massive followings with thousands of votes, but MOST pieces that are over 4.9 just haven't been troll bombed YET. My pieces that have over a thousand ratings are at 4.65 and 4.76. It is what it is.

It's a bad system that gives way too much power to a small group of haters while at the same time promoting stories as "most popular of all time" for the perverse distinction of having attracted so little attention that no one has bothered to downvote them. The "all time" popular section for Sci-Fi/Fantasy right now is a block of late chapters in series with smallish fandoms that have 5 star averages, meaning that none of them have gotten a single downvote yet. And also none of them has gotten favorited more than four times. It's bogus and sad.

 

[FrancesScott]

If one person has a desktop, a laptop, a phone, and a computer at work, they can hammer your rating down like that just by voting anonymously once from each device. If they don't do it all at once, it won't even get flagged as suspicious.

Yes, I figured that out myself. It’s indefensible that bad actors can have such a disproportionate impact.

 

[RocketGrunt]

Yes, I figured that out myself. It’s indefensible that bad actors can have such a disproportionate impact.

I mean, that's just the inevitable result of the hugbox nature of our voting public. A majority of voters on Literotica give 5* ratings to everything they like, which means that there is no way for people to register that they like something more.

As long as people are giving out 5 stars to everything they enjoyed, it's just going to be very easy for anyone to bring the average down. If we lived in a world where almost everyone gave 3 star ratings then 4 star and 5 star ratings would be as powerful as 2 star and 1 star ratings. But we don't live in that world.

The indefensible part is actually basing the "popular" lists and "top" lists on those average ratings. The average rating of a story is almost completely at the mercy of a small number of haters. Having stories be presented to viewers based on such a vulnerable number is absolute madness. The popular lists should be about engagement metrics over time. Like, the most popular story could be number of views or five star ratings or number of views or five star ratings per month. You know, something that corresponded to how popular something actually was. Instead of what we have now which is just an indicator of how few people have come to trash something.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The popular lists should be about engagement metrics over time. Like, the most popular story could be number of views or five star ratings or number of views or five star ratings per month. You know, something that corresponded to how popular something actually was. Instead of what we have now which is just an indicator of how few people have come to trash something.

I see seven day lists, thirty day lists, the last year's list. They're time sensitive lists. If it's so much a bother, ignore the Top Lists completely, and remember, "popular" doesn't necessarily equate to "good".

 

[SmilingLez]

One of my prose, the Ode to Mickey Spillane challenge, Femme and the Fist, had top spot for all time in the poetry section for several weeks. NGL, it was an ego rush. I ended up removing voting so someone else could feel the thrill.

 

[DEFCOM5]

remember, "popular" doesn't necessarily equate to "good".

 

[TheWritingGroup]

The downvoting of "Pranked: Barbie" continues. I wonder why. (Really. I don't think I've done anything to anyone to justify personal anger.)

--Annie

 

[Kelliezgirl]

The downvoting of "Pranked: Barbie" continues. I wonder why. (Really. I don't think I've done anything to anyone to justify personal anger.)

--Annie

It's likely not personal, if it was they'd be down voting all your stories. It's just some perverse desire to protect the list.

 

[RocketGrunt]

The downvoting of "Pranked: Barbie" continues. I wonder why. (Really. I don't think I've done anything to anyone to justify personal anger.)

--Annie

Some of it is going to be reversion to the mean. Some number of your fans are going to give things a 4-star rating when they like it because they intuitively think that 4 out of 5 stars is a good rating. If that's more than 10 percent of your fandom (which it usually is), that'll drop your rating if it's sitting at 4.9.

Other than that, the toplist defenders do go after anything that gets into those windows other than whatever pieces they are defending. So yeah, it's probably not personal. Just a result of the fact that the site gives valuable real estate for collecting eyeballs to a number that can easily be gamed by a small number of trolls. Those trolls actually police all the "extra visibility areas" not just the toplists. Contests, recently popular tabs, anything like that. I don't think it's a lot of trolls, but it genuinely doesn't have to be. I calculated recently that it would take less than 20 troll votes to push the number one chapter on the Non-Human toplist out of the top Fifty.

It's actually exactly why I found the contests to provide negative value when I attempted to participate. The troll hammer hit early and hard, and the extra views for being in the contest turned out to be a lot less than the views I lost for having a low rating while on the new releases page. Even though the pruning eventually came and removed the troll votes, the lost engagement never recovered. It has its red H now, but engagement is much lower than it would have had if it had just been a normal new release that was not associated with a contest.

The reliance on "average rating" for basically anything is very bad, and it causes real problems. It turns the toplists, the popular lists, and the contests into travesties that I don't even try to engage with anymore. Those parts of the site don't work, and nothing can fix them as long as average rating is used in the calculation at all.