I knew this would happen.

[JUDO]

Last night, I noticed that my first poem "I Want A Girl", had been gotten to a very dangerous place.

http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=17452

It had nine votes and was sitting at 4.44.

I knew that if it got one more positive vote that it would actually debut at the no.1 position in the Poetry top list with only 10 votes to protect it. "Oh, hell," I thought.

I almost wrote Laurel last night to ask her if there was any way to prevent a poem from being added with so few votes, but I didn't.

I really didn't think about it until last night, it had been cruising along like poems here do, garnering a vote here, a vote there over weeks and then WHAM!

Sure enough, some nice person gave it a 5 last night and this morning it apparently has debuted at the No. 1 position.

And I KNEW IT WOULD HAPPEN...

Only 10 votes and in the No. 1. spot, some jerkweed just one'd it.

It didn't deserve it, but because it was a defenseless little poem...

shit!

- Judo

 

[Guest]

sorry

The first time in my life I ever rated a poem and I caused someone pain.

I confess I gave it the fatal 10th 5.

After all the free verse that people submit here, I finally found someone who had a rhyming scheme and kept to it.

However, I just looked at the top list and it seems to have 10 votes and a 4.50 rating.

 

[JUDO]

Thank You.

I thank you for telling me that. Not your fault at all, it's the person who decides that lowering the crowd will be the way to raise themselves above it.

I got your email and obviously the 5.

This is the fourth time that a submission of mine has debuted high on a Top List without enough votes to defend itself and the fourth time that it has received ones.

In other words, if your material debutes high on a Top List with less than 50 votes, expect a one.

Thanks for voting. Thanks for even as an unregistered, telling me. But don't feel bad because you happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

And Yes, it's in the No. 1 spot today, but it won't even be on the list tomorrow.

- Judo

 

[Laurel]

Judo made an interesting suggestion to me in email, and I would like to hear some feedback on it. The suggestion was that we increase the number of votes required to appear in the Top Lists. If, for example, we increased the minimum number of votes from 10 to 25, then a single 1 vote would have less effect.

Conversely, this would mean that some stories and poems that are currently making it to the top of the Top Lists might never get that high in the first place.

I don't want to increase the number of required votes too much, but the concept of making some sort of increase definitely merits consideration. As far as the one votes themselves, I don't believe there is anything that can or necessarily should be done about them. People's opinions are subjective and volatile, and if Slaughterhouse-5, Othello, Catcher in the Rye, or War & Peace were to top the list, they would certainly see their share of low votes. Given enough time and votes, though, the most popular - if not the "best", because there is no objective "best" - material will tend to float to the surface. I've said this before, but it bears repeating: the voting here or anywhere on the Internet is simply a rough gauge of popularity, not an objective or definitive measure of the quality or artistry of any specific work.

We have been working on a feature which will allow authors to turn on or off voting on each of their stories at any time. I'm hoping that this option, along with the re-introduction of "Times Read" stats, will be online in the next 30 days.

So, to make a long story longer, let me know what you all think about the idea of increasing the minimum number of votes required to be included in the Top Lists. Thanks, as always, for the suggestion and for helping to make Lit a better place for all of us!

 

[Andra_Jenny]

It's Art

Art is disposable. Like cave paintings or the Mona Lisa. Too many hung up on the results of the creative process...

 

[vmystere]

Number of Votes for Top Ratings

Laurel,

I have thought about this a lot and I think the only equitable solution is to somehow eliminate those people who would denigrate other's work soley for their own twisted pleasure.

From my perspective the only stories that deserve a "1" are those where the words are misspelled, the English tortured, and the story completely indecipherable.

Most stories that I have read on your site are actually quite good. I have enjoyed a number of them and rated them that way. I just do not think it is fair for a few individuals to be able to wield so much power over the ratings system

I too have have been damned by faint praise and I don't much care for the experience. Still, it would be possible to have some sort of algorithm which would eliminate any "rating" that is not within the statistical boundaries established by the story. If a story is consistently get 4's and it suddenly receives a 1: this should be flagged.

If rating < ((total ratings/number) -2) then rating will be null

(Been a while since I was in a programming class.<G>)

At any rate, having more votes might be easier - but less fair.

VM

 

[WriterDom]

It's hard enough to get 10 votes in poetry to begin with. And even when they do get 10, over half don't get 15 more once on the top list. It's a little different with new stories since people tend to read and vote on them the first 2 days. I'd much rather see poetry in an open forum for discussion rather than submitted and voted on. But that's just me.

 

[RisiaSkye]

Judo,

I feel your pain. Three of my poems have experienced similar drops in recent weeks, and it's depressing. It takes months to get there, and them *WHAM*--a nice big fuck you in response. It's just...sad. It's hard enough to get people to read the poetry. Only the toplist poems really tend to get read, and bombed, it seems. Which means that someone or someones is/are scrolling through the list, just to hurt people.

Come on now, whoever you are, play nice. What's the deal?

Anyway, I'll go give you a read--and a *real* vote, for what it's worth.

Risia

 

[Sonia_de_Beaumanoir]

top list count

I think Laurel's idea about increasing the number of votes necessary to be on the toplist has merit. I really sympathize with JUDO's poem which went from top to bottom in 4 votes. Since this list is so small, it really doesn't take much to blast a submission from the top to the bottom, which happened in this case.

I did a little math on the Group Sex toplist, which as of this morning had a rating of 4.68 for the #1 story, and 4.48 for the last story on page 1. If we say that the goal would be to have a minimum vote count such that a single 1 vote would not knock the top story off of page 1, then in this case the count necessary to accomplish this is given by the formula:

n * 4.68 + 1 = (n + 1) * 4.49

Solving for n gives 19 votes.

Of course, the range of votes on page 1 will affect the count, and a determined saboteur will find a way to give multiple 1's if needed.

However, I am guessing that 20 is a good number for most categories with many submissions.

 

[Pokerman]

Would it be possible to do the voting like the Olympics? Drop the highest and lowest votes from each story?

A story with 20 votes and a 4.50 rating, dropping one '5' vote and one '1' vote would actually give it a 4.66 rating.

(4.50*20=90) (90-5-1=84, 84/18=4.6666666666)

 

[Mickie]

Just thought I'd toss my two cents in here. I agree with raising the number of votes to hit the top lists. It would take longer for stories to hit them, but it would level out the voting so make it more difficult for anyone to purposely drag it down. Plus, fewer authors would ride the roller coaster as their story hits very high then plummets dramatically with a single vote.

Really, the only way to beat the dropsies when it hits the top ten is to encourage more voting. The more votes, the more it levels off.

Messing with the numbers (ie -- subtracting some of the very low and very high votes) seems to me to negate the very reason for this site. Literotica allows people to have thier own thoughts, and gives them a place to express them. If you subtract someone's vote just because it doesn't fit the norm, then you're depriving them of a certain right of expression. Their reasons don't matter. They have the right to vote whatever they want, and the thought police don't exist yet, so we can't punish them for wrong-thinking.

Sometimes an author can only shrug and go on with the show.

Mickie

 

[cymbidia]

~groaning and calling myself stupid for even posting on THIS subject~

Okay. Well, well, well.
Here we are again, boys and girls, on THIS nasty subject.

THIS time, however, it's poetry we're talking about, primarily, and the stories are only shadowy figures on the outside of the discussion (at least in my mind).

Here are some facts, my facts, about the poetry category (and i have stuff posted in both places - poetry and stories):
1. It's sometimes *damned* hard to get 10 votes in the poetry category.
2. If the votes necessary to make it onto the TopList were raised to 25, well, that would exclude many of us from EVER making that list, quite frankly. It's easy enough to get that number (for some people) in any of the story categories but nigh unto impossible in Poetry. (And i've been shamelessly begging for Poetry readers/voters - for EVERYONE's poems, not just mine - on three Lit forums for a month!)
3. Far more useful on the Poetry side of things is a discussion format, perhaps a comments-leaving area something like what is in place at Amazon.

Laurel, please, please, don't make 25 the magic number for poems to move to the TopList. Most of us will never get that many readers for our poems. Raise the number for the stories, maybe, but please don't raise the limit for Poetry.

 

[CRaZy]

I'm with cym on this one. Kicking myself as well for entering the debate. It would help the stories if the number of votes needed to reach top lists was 20. The poetry is a special case. I too have noticed that as soon as a poem reaches 10 votes and hits the top 10 in the list, it plummets immediately. I personally don't mind, but given that some poets put their heart and soul into their work and wait so long for the magic 10 votes, it would be appropriate to have some other form of recognition for poetry. Story and Poetry Feedback is a single forum. Perhaps Poetry Feedback could have its own forum and discussion circle. Begs Laurel not to gain too many wrinkles trying to eliminate voting issues. If men with big, big guns and scrutineers galore are needed in most countries in the world to try and ensure fair elections for world leaders, there is only so much Laurel and Manu can do on a poor little erotic story site.