Is there a one bomb bott?

[ElectricBlue]

I've written a handful of I/T stories. Discounting the one where I used 2P POV and highlighted the inherent wrongness of incest, my I/T scores would go up when the new story was published, but most of my other scores would drop. But after a prolonged period of no I/T, all my scores just generally go up slowly, even the I/T ones with thousands of votes ("Too Cold Not to Fuck" has nearly 3k votes, and has climbed from around 4.5 to 4.56 over the past six months or so).

My portfolio isn't affected by LW or I&T foibles. I think my scores are more balanced because of that.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

I have consistently received two 1-bombs on every submission I've made since I started publishing stories (2020), regardless of what category they were put in. I don't think it's a bot but people who, for whatever reason, like to 1-bomb new submissions. They usually occur on the day of submission but several times they were a few days late so that's why I don't think it's automated.

 

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

Yep, a whole lot of whining.These folks remind me of that author who harassed a reviewer for leaving a four star review. Not every Shakespeare play deserves a five star review! Are your skins so thin that anything less than five stars is a personal affront? Some of us baseball fans understand statistics. If you are batting .1000 and you strike out once, it is virtually impossible to get back to .1000 even if you never strike out for the rest of the season. Is there a one bot lurking? Possibly. On the other hand NONE of us is churning out perfect fiction. Traffic to the site has increased meaning more eyeballs and more votes. As a point of fact, scores tend to decrease with time for everybody.

Yeah we still get to salty about it though, Jesus. No one said we wrote Shakespeare or can't understand average, it's just annoying when it's clearly just a bunch of ones in less than a day

 

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

Well, indeed.

But I think you are missing the point. Unless you win a contest, the ONLY way to stay on the home page for a category (and thus get regular eyes on your work) is to have a story in the top twenty. So this is less about "oh no my scores have gone down" and more "damn, now I'm not in the top twenty I'm going to get fewer views".

That smarts whether the votes were legit or the work of a troll.

Maybe if you've never been in this position it's hard to sympathise and it comes across as whiny. Okay. I have been in this position so can see the point. Our stories are our babies, so we want them to do well.

And I would disagree scores HAVE to go down over time.

Well said

 

[Bazzle]

Curiously, my facts show that scores go up over time.

Mine tend to go down. I have a core of maybe 8 people who like my stories. The stories get to 8/5 then its downhill from there on in.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Mine tend to go down. I have a core of maybe 8 people who like my stories. The stories get to 8/5 then its downhill from there on in.

Hmm. Maybe someone is just taking the piss so your stories end up getting smoked?

 

[Bazzle]

Hmm. Maybe someone is just taking the piss so your stories end up getting smoked?

Also I do try to have a plot in the story somewhere

 

[StillStunned]

Mine tend to go down. I have a core of maybe 8 people who like my stories. The stories get to 8/5 then its downhill from there on in.

To be fair, if you start with only 5s, the only way is down.

 

[Wifetheif]

Curiously, my facts show that scores go up over time.

I have a few stories that gain and lose a red H with some regularity. To borrow a baseball analogy it is my batting average settling in. Somedays I'm a .300 hitter other days I'm under the Mendoza Line. It is the nature of the game and demonstrates how only a few votes can alter your average. Malice need not figure in the equation.

 

[Bamagan]

My observation has been that story ratings tend to rise slowly after the initial period of volatility while it's on the new list (or the active contest list). I believe that's because most of the people reading it after that point are ones who are actively searching for tags and keywords, or they're going through an author's back catalog because they liked something else enough to want more of the same/similar. In both cases, they're predisposed to liking the work they find and voting high.

There are a few situations that may have the opposite effect. As mentioned by others several times already, a story on a top list has a higher visibility and attracts all kinds of attention. Some of it likely is from highly partisan readers who don't like anything that displaces their own favorite stories and vote maliciously low because of it. Some of it likely from regular readers who gravitate to those lists with high expectations (perhaps unreasonably high) and feel like the story doesn't measure up. The same is probably true of any story with a Hot rating even if it shows up on the random story spinner. Since the ratio of 5s to 1s needed to maintain a Hot rating is 7:1, even a small number of such readers can cause a noticeable dip.

I have no data to support this idea, but I think some people may also be downvoting stories that show up on the 'Similar Stories' suggestion list. It's not uncommon on other sites for people to try training the content algorithms by overreacting to their suggestions, hoping that it will make them better or more personalized. I'm a little skeptical that Lit's algorithm is sufficiently sophisticated to respond to such stimuli, but from the user's perspective, it doesn't hurt to try one-bombing any suggestion that's even slightly off-target, at least initially. I don't think the suggestions are personalized, so anyone attempting to train them is probably accomplishing little other than annoying or distressing the handful of people who are invested in the scores of particular stories (not that I expect most users would care much, even if this was a fact and they were fully informed about it).

 

[NotWise]

Out of curiosity, I looked at the most popular list for Romance. I already knew my story there had taken a hit, but it hadn't occurred to me that it happened to other stories. The changes were so sweeping that I think that, rather than a 1-bomb bot, the site may have recalculated the averages with a different method.

More generally, even without a drop in scores, you can expect that your story on a top list will drift down the list over time because it's displaced by stories newer than it is. It's an inevitable process.

I decided, after my story was hit, that I'd wait for the sweeps for the Holiday contest before I considered doing anything else. Maybe I won't do anything even if the sweeps create no change. I don't see a lot of reason to moan about top scores going down. My goal is to write better new stories, and beat my own best.

 

[VallesMarineris]

Show me solid proof of a one bomb bot or conclusive evidence of a concerted score sabotage scheme and I’ll change my tune.

My latest series, A Nerd Girl's Story, has been getting consistently 1-bombed. I started monitoring the ratings of each chapter (starting with Ch2) when it was published so I could keep track and back-calculate the "hit". Here's what I saw:



Notes:

-- These results are not reverse engineered numbers. I saw each "hit" soon after it happened and could figure out how many stars I was given by noting the change in rating.

-- Chapter 9 has been out less than 16 hours. I typically get 5-10 5-star hits from my followers the first day or two (some readers really like my work). You can see that the 1-bomber has already found me.

-- Like @StillStunned, I too see that later chapters get higher ratings. But they get fewer hits, so that 1-bomber has a bigger effect.

@Wifetheif, this is conclusive evidence to me that that there's a "concerted score sabotage scheme". I can accept that someone, coming across one of my pieces, could hate it so much that that they give it one star. But it's simply unbelievable that a reader would keep viewing 9 chapters of an extended work (89K words) to express legitimate displeasure in my writing.

1-bomber, if you're reading this, note that you've been sloppy. You missed Chapter 5. But note also that I'll be watching.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

My latest series, A Nerd Girl's Story, has been getting consistently 1-bombed. I started monitoring the ratings of each chapter (starting with Ch2) when it was published so I could keep track and back-calculate the "hit". Here's what I saw:

View attachment 2482158

Notes:

-- These results are not reverse engineered numbers. I saw each "hit" soon after it happened and could figure out how many stars I was given by noting the change in rating.

-- Chapter 9 has been out less than 16 hours. I typically get 5-10 5-star hits from my followers the first day or two (some readers really like my work). You can see that the 1-bomber has already found me.

-- Like @StillStunned, I too see that later chapters get higher ratings. But they get fewer hits, so that 1-bomber has a bigger effect.

@Wifetheif, this is conclusive evidence to me that that there's a "concerted score sabotage scheme". I can accept that someone, coming across one of my pieces, could hate it so much that that they give it one star. But it's simply unbelievable that a reader would keep viewing 9 chapters of an extended work (89K words) to express legitimate displeasure in my writing.

1-bomber, if you're reading this, note that you've been sloppy. You missed Chapter 5. But note also that I'll be watching.

I think your math is skewed by your insistence that the mythical one bot exists. Not saying it doesn't but it doesn't take much to drop a score. a single 4 vote can do more damage than most people realize.
As an example, that 4.6 on chapter two could just as easily have been created by

• 0 votes of 3 points, 16 votes of 4 points, 24 votes of 5 points
• 1 vote of 3 points, 14 votes of 4 points, 25 votes of 5 points
• 2 votes of 3 points, 12 votes of 4 points, 26 votes of 5 points
• 3 votes of 3 points, 10 votes of 4 points, 27 votes of 5 points
• 4 votes of 3 points, 8 votes of 4 points, 28 votes of 5 points
• 5 votes of 3 points, 6 votes of 4 points, 29 votes of 5 points
• 6 votes of 3 points, 4 votes of 4 points, 30 votes of 5 points
• 7 votes of 3 points, 2 votes of 4 points, 31 votes of 5 points
• 8 votes of 3 points, 0 votes of 4 points, 32 votes of 5 points

For what it's worth, my skepticism is based on what I've seen on my own stories, the fact that sweeps have been done multiple times removing any spurious votes, and the lack of noticeable upward movement. this tells me that the unobomber(as I like to call it) either doesn't have a life and knows exactly when sweeps are done so they can go back and re-pollute the votes, or it's really just some fours and threes coming into the mix as more and more people read my stories. Last number I saw said over 4.5 million people drop by lit every month.

 

[VallesMarineris]

I think your math is skewed by your insistence that the mythical one bot exists. Not saying it doesn't but it doesn't take much to drop a score. a single 4 vote can do more damage than most people realize.
As an example, that 4.6 on chapter two could just as easily have been created by

• 0 votes of 3 points, 16 votes of 4 points, 24 votes of 5 points
• 1 vote of 3 points, 14 votes of 4 points, 25 votes of 5 points
• 2 votes of 3 points, 12 votes of 4 points, 26 votes of 5 points
• 3 votes of 3 points, 10 votes of 4 points, 27 votes of 5 points
• 4 votes of 3 points, 8 votes of 4 points, 28 votes of 5 points
• 5 votes of 3 points, 6 votes of 4 points, 29 votes of 5 points
• 6 votes of 3 points, 4 votes of 4 points, 30 votes of 5 points
• 7 votes of 3 points, 2 votes of 4 points, 31 votes of 5 points
• 8 votes of 3 points, 0 votes of 4 points, 32 votes of 5 points

For what it's worth, my skepticism is based on what I've seen on my own stories, the fact that sweeps have been done multiple times removing any spurious votes, and the lack of noticeable upward movement. this tells me that the unobomber(as I like to call it) either doesn't have a life and knows exactly when sweeps are done so they can go back and re-pollute the votes, or it's really just some fours and threes coming into the mix as more and more people read my stories. Last number I saw said over 4.5 million people drop by lit every month.

I get your argument, but you misunderstand my process. I didn't reverse engineer the "hits", as I called them in the spreadsheet, after the totals are in. I watched each hit happen. For example, I've been watching Ch9 since it published two days ago. Since the upload of the spreadsheet to this thread, I've seen two hits. One brought the score up to 4.20. So that was a 5-star. The next (and latest so far) was a 6th hit that has raised the score further to 4.33. Another 5-star! You get the idea. I'm watching each hit happen. If Ch9 progresses like the other chapters, more 5s will come in and the story will get to the ratings you see for the others. But I see these 1-stars happen, almost in real time.

So I'm confident in my data. If I wrote in the most popular categories I probably wouldn't be able to do this because the hits would be coming in too fast, but the views and ratings happen slowly enough in the MC category that I can follow the progression.

Regarding sweeps, I've read about them but this is not the first story series I've watched and traced, just the first I've published findings on. I've see uno-bombs, but I haven't seen any evidence in my profile of sweeps (though I haven't paid much attention to my older stories, so maybe there are sweeps, just not very often). So the uno-bomber doesn't need to be as sedulous as you think. And out of 4.5M visitors/month, there have to be at least a few who don't have a life and/or who get off on putting down other people's work.