Malicious voting

[EmilyMiller]

Have you been seeing clearly malicious down-voting? Is it just me, or is someone on a campaign against lots of us?

If someone doesn't like what I write, fine, but in the past couple of weeks, I'm getting what appears to be a campaign of 1-votes. The clearest is one chapter of a series of mine where it had a 4.9 average on 302 votes. In the past couple of weeks, it has kept dropping, now down to 4.83. And it's being done across everything I've written.

I had a smaller issue like this once before, reported it, and the admins fixed it. This time, I've reported it repeatedly, but so far no action. I guess they'll get around to it, but this is really frustrating. What's wrong with someone that they'd spend time doing something like this?

I made this simple mitigating proposal to the site a while back:

An Open Letter To Literotica About Ratings

It wouldn’t solve the problem of malicious voting, but it would make the trolls have to work harder.

—

The link is to my rather poorly-maintained blog on Wordpress, nothing scary. Well not that scary.

 

[NotWise]

It is the same in the First Time category. Same pattern.

And in Romance.

Adding: It's been going on in Romance since last fall. I can pinpoint when it started on my story. The pattern has been a series of low votes (usually 2*) until the story drops from the top list, then the voting stops. Votes are swept and the story goes back up. The pattern has cycled.

If your score is dropping because high votes are removed, then that's a different pattern.

 

[EmilyMiller]

It is the same in the First Time category. Same pattern.

And in E/V - though I think the relevant rating there is 4.80 - 4.81.

 

[iwatchus]

I was so happy with what the sweep did for much of my catalog last month. I am looking forward to another one next month. Right now every new story I post gets a 1 between 7:30 and 8:00 AM EST. I got a second one yesterday, but I suspect that was just the pissy anon who left me a nasty comment. As much as I didn't appreciate it, he is entitled to his opinion and I consider that to be a valid vote.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I'm starting to wonder why I even take the time to submit stories on here. If a story does well because the readers seem to enjoy it, then the site arbitrarily decides to drop the score whenever they want,

Yea, that's not happening. The admin here couldn't be bothered to fuck with people's scores. I'll debunk that conspiracy before it ever starts.

If it;s about scores for you - which it seems to be since you are considering quitting over scores - then just write a mom/son lap ride story. Pander to the biggest demograhic/kink on lit, pander the fuck out of it, right up the yin yang.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

At times I've been tempted to disable voting on my stories as a form of protest (and a big middle finger) to the ratings system around here. I once did it on a series I wrote. Disabled voting for all but the last chapter and asked people to leave a rating reflecting their opinion of the whole thing. It was a liberating experience. Might do it again soon. It'd be interesting to see a bunch of authors do it in protest. Maybe it would bring some change.