Impact of Rule Change on Illustrated Stories

[SimonDoom]

Has anyone observed a change in the incidence or popularity of Illustrated stories since the rule change that now prohibits nude images at Literotica? For a while, Illustrated stories, on average, appeared to get the most views of any category of stories, even more than Incest stories. Some authors like Silkstockingslover and HeyAll were having a lot of success with them. But now that one cannot attach nude images with them, I would imagine their appeal has gone down. I don't follow the category closely enough to know. There have only been 11 stories published in that category in the last six months, and 6 of the last 7 are by the same author.

 

[Five_Inch_Heels]

'I'm just here for the articles'.

 

[iwatchus]

I had considered doing an illustrated version of my first story, if I could get my hand drawn pictures to that level. No longer in the plans.

 

[yowser]

An interesting question. From a brief (sample size < five) look, seems like all the nude photos have been binned, so I expect your idea is true.

I only have one illustrated tale (it was a bear to get that one approved and I gave up trying that category after a couple other rejections) but unlike all my other stories, it continues to gain exposure at a remarkably linear rate, ending up in my top three view ranking after four years out there. BUT, the (self-taken) photos don't involve nudity. If I had to guess, folks with 'soft-porn' images are the ones who will benefit going forward and get approved, and I suspect your notion of the category's popularity plummet will be accurate.

 

[silkstockingslover]

I get emails daily asking where the pics are.’’

While annoyed they would radically just just it down out of the blue. I’m more shocked they just went ahead edited the work and put a disclaimers-on their decision with an explanation.

How hard would it be to make a note that the choice was MADE strictly without input of the authors who wrote the story, edited like its the 1950s so I don’t have to tell a reader everyday lit deleted them, gave no respect to work that took hundreds of hours to make, but reading, I assume right wing agendas sacrificed without a fight.

I suggested this more at them to be added AT THE beginning of an illustrated story but they ignored me completely and couldn’t even if me a token courteous response.

So I’ll repeat Laurel and others put a Warning before an illustrated that has been destroyed of its creativity, hard work and freedom of speech being ignored so I and other authors stop getting daily complaints.

 

[nice90sguy]

My two most viewed stories are illustrated. I spent many months on those illustrations, and the stories look stupid now. I felt like replacing the images with chocolate-box pictures of kittens, Swiss chalets and soppy puppies, but I'm just too pissed off to bother.

Much as I'd love to rant against Laurel for doing this, I recall how much effort she put into working with me getting those two stories formatted how I wanted, and it's clear she's had to make a difficult decision. I'm guessing that the only other option she had would be to put in age-checking, which would have pissed off way more people.

 

[Bazzle]

My story on there has had half a dozen images removed.

I am not going to delete it. But it must have had an effect.

 

[NightPorter]

As much as I'm pissed off by the censorship, I don't actually blame the site. There seems to be a larger push for censorship of pornographic media across the internet. Lot of age verification popping up all over the place. Something I'm sure they don't want to deal with. The pendulum seems to be swinging again, the blasted thing. You know things are bad when they removed the naked lady off the home page.

 

[PennyThompson]

As much as I'm pissed off by the censorship, I don't actually blame the site. There seems to be a larger push for censorship of pornographic media across the internet. Lot of age verification popping up all over the place. Something I'm sure they don't want to deal with. The pendulum seems to be swinging again, the blasted thing. You know things are bad when they removed the naked lady off the home page.

Yep, and although I wish they were more transparent about the reasons, I can also understand why they want to maintain some plausible deniability. If the site just came out and said "We're making these changes in order to bypass any oncoming age verification requirements or pornography bans," it would only risk putting a target on their back.

It's probably in Lit's best interest to just quietly scrub any visual content that could conceivably be argued to be pornographic, give only vague reasons for it that are entirely unrelated to regulation or legislation, and focus strictly on non-visual erotica.

 

[Bazzle]

What is also interesting, is that I can't access audio stories either...

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I suggested this more at them to be added AT THE beginning of an illustrated story but they ignored me completely and couldn’t even if me a token courteous response.

So I’ll repeat Laurel and others put a Warning before an illustrated that has been destroyed of its creativity, hard work and freedom of speech being ignored so I and other authors stop getting daily complaints.

Your post is somewhat surprising, as I thought you, of all the authors here, would have an easy way of getting in contact with Laurel. But I guess not.

I understand your position, and I sympathize. What Lit's owners did was a poor decision, in my opinion, and its execution, riddled with lies as it was, even more so.
But as justified as your anger is, I don't think you'll find too much sympathy here, in AH. For most of its denizens, Laurel can do no wrong.
I truly hope this mistake gets rectified somehow.

 

[HeyAll]

Illustrated gets a lot of view largely because there are less posting and you can stay on the Hub for a long time. But yeah, a lot of people go for the pics.

One way you can tell is by looking at the view/vote ratio. If the pics/story is weak, sure it'll get a lot of views out of curiosity, but low votes and low score. A legit story will have high votes and a high score.

The rules seemed to have settled now. I had a new one posted today with pics (another story with pics was rejected months ago). I'll be posting more again

 

[iwatchus]

I understand your position, and I sympathize. What Lit's owners did was a poor decision, in my opinion, and its execution, riddled with lies as it was, even more so.
But as justified as your anger is, I don't think you'll find too much sympathy here, in AH. For most of its denizens, Laurel can do no wrong.
I truly hope this mistake gets rectified somehow.

As someone who you have directly accused about being blindly loyal, I am going to object somewhat here.

I firmly agree that they screwed up the rollout of that policy. Botched in big time. It does not surprise me; communication with the community is an area that I think they are consistently bad at. This was just a particularly egregious instance of that.

I do not except that their decision was poor. It was clearly unfortunate, but I do not know everything that went into that decision. Until they demonstrate maliciousness or other similar issue I will give anyone the benefit of the doubt on a complicated issue when I do not understand the factors. I never judge anyone's divorce, no matter what I have heard. My objection to your critiques of the site (and I think I am not alone in this) is that you seem to assume that you have all the relevant information and that your perspective is the only one that has any validity. Anything that disagrees with that perspective is fan fiction or something similar and easily dismissed so you never have to question your own beliefs. I may be wrong, but that is certainly what you present time and time again.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As someone who you have directly accused about being blindly loyal, I am going to object somewhat here.

I firmly agree that they screwed up the rollout of that policy. Botched in big time. It does not surprise me; communication with the community is an area that I think they are consistently bad at. This was just a particularly egregious instance of that.

I do not except that their decision was poor. It was clearly unfortunate, but I do not know everything that went into that decision. Until they demonstrate maliciousness or other similar issue I will give anyone the benefit of the doubt on a complicated issue when I do not understand the factors. I never judge anyone's divorce, no matter what I have heard. My objection to your critiques of the site (and I think I am not alone in this) is that you seem to assume that you have all the relevant information and that your perspective is the only one that has any validity. Anything that disagrees with that perspective is fan fiction or something similar and easily dismissed so you never have to question your own beliefs. I may be wrong, but that is certainly what you present time and time again.

There are a couple of important distinctions here.

First of all, I don't always criticize Literotica, nor is my opinion of the site negative in general. I praised some of their policies and decisions as well. The reason why I seem to criticize so often is because, with the exception of a few other people only, no one else does. Everybody else praises, with and against reason equally, and I seek to balance things out, as strange as that might seem to some people here.

Second, when I criticize, I always state concrete reasons, or admin posts, and point to specific policy changes, questionable actions, or lack of communication from the website. There is always a reason for my critique.

But what you said in that post that I named fan fiction is beyond absurd. You attributed superhero powers to Laurel and indulged in such wild speculation that no other name was suitable. I'll link it and bold the most remarkable parts of it.

The comparison with coding was absurd as well. With coding, it's easy to notice keywords and structures, especially due to indentations and the repeatable nature of such structures. And most programmers will use them in a similar way.

Fiction writing bears no resemblance to coding. Every writer will have their own style and create different sentence structures, paragraphs, dialogue, etc. It feels strange to even point this out.

My speculation is that they do not use an LLM AI checker. Despite the faith some people place in them, I think they are minimally more useful than throwing darts. As some of the disputes over whether a given passage is or is not AI according to the tools om one of these AI threads, maybe this one.

I suspect they do use some simple heuristic checker to flag suspicious writing that Laurel gives a more careful reading to. Because she is still making the ultimate choice, it is alright to have some false positives.

She has scan read something like a million stories by now. When she is in moderation mode, her head has to be in a place that none of us can fully understand. I was in a similar place (different universe) regularly back in my coding days. It's almost like you interact with that universe like you do with the everyday world. You process lots of things and filter them down before you are even consciously aware of them. You have an equivalent of peripheral vision, noticing things you aren't really paying attention to.

I can't imagine she can process the number of stories she does without getting into that zone. And how many stories she has processed, it would be surprising if she did not develop that relationship with the writing.

We do not know exactly how many stories she processes a day, but the stats for ho many are publishes is not hard; @NotWise seems to track it regularly. Recently, it has been reported that about 200 stories a day get published. That does not count any stories that were rejected. Or any edits that are submitted. We know both of those are non-zero. Are we talking 250 reviews a day or 400? I have no idea.

I assume that she recognized red flags (and I assume that the set of red flags continues to evolve) that raise alarm bells about the writing. Manu coded those up and tested them on subsets of stories until they thought they mostly worked. Anything that gets flagged presumably gets more careful attention from Laurel. This is basically the same process I assume for automated checks about age of characters. If something spends more than two or three days in pending without getting approved, it probably tripped some flag. It does not mean she will ultimately reject it. If it spends weeks waiting, it may mean she is torn about accepting it. Or she set it aside and forgot about it, which definitely seems to happen.

I have no inside information; unlike some here, I have never had a meaningful interaction with Laurel (or Manu) and certainly nothing about any of this. But I have built a bunch of software systems and this is how I would imagine it working. YMMV. But cut them some slack, folks. I think this is a labor of love for them. And they are certainly not out to screw any one of us invidually. I know it hurts to be told no. But that's life.

So, as everyone can see, you literally made a post that is 99% pure conjecture, where you attributed superpowers to Laurel and made absurd comparisons, all based on zero proof. You even admit to having no inside information or any other insightful PM interaction with Laurel and Manu. And you felt I had a go at you for calling it fan fiction.

I've nothing personal against you, I can assure you of that. I merely attacked what I saw as an absurd post that got likes from some of the other hardcore fans.

 

[dirk2024]

I don't understand why they keep it as an active category since the illustrations no longer exist. Does anyone even read them anymore?

There should have been some consideration to the authors who have Stories posted in there, to move them to other categories and then shut it down.

 

[iwatchus]

So, as everyone can see, you literally made a post that is 99% pure conjecture, where you attributed superpowers to Laurel and made absurd comparisons, all based on zero proof. You even admit to having no inside information or any other insightful PM interaction with Laurel and Manu. And you felt I had a go at you for calling it fan fiction.

I've nothing personal against you, I can assure you of that. I merely attacked what I saw as an absurd post that got likes from some of the other hardcore fans.

What you describe as a superpower is a well known phenomenon that people who engage in an activity deeply experience. There is nothing supernatural about it and I would be shocked if Laurel has not experienced given her deep involvement in this for over a quarter century. I have experienced that state (for other areas) and I know other people who have for a wide range of areas. It is real and should be expected of most people in Laurel's situation. That you cannot accept that as a realistic possibility is simply a limitation of the worldview you are willing to consider.

For the 99% conjecture, I admit it was speculation, but I have set up a number of similar systems and talked to people about many more and read about even more than that. I have taught graduate courses in setting up systems. I do not know for certain about many details and there are several big questions I could be wrong on. But I would be willing to place a wager that most of that is correct. Not because I am reckless, but because I know what I am talking about. But again, it disagrees with your limited world view so it must be wrong.

I have nothing against you in general, but your vendetta against this site is frustrating to listen to. Get out of your own head and take a step back. I think you will be surprised by what you see if you actually do. I know you will say the same thing to me. But you just called a well understood phenomenon and a reasonable speculation (listed as such) by an expert as fan fiction. I don't see where either pf your points even come close to defending that description.