Percentile ranking

[AlexBailey]

How many of the readers/voters know anything about the rating structure?

I'd been reading, and anonymously rating and commenting on Lit stories for years before I ever checked out the forum. I think I found most of the stories through Google searches for 'story trans fetish' or some such set of key words. A link to tagged Lit stories would show in the results. Sometimes a link would open directly to the story, no site navigation necessary, just an option to rate and say a few words. I didn't log on or find the Author's Hangout until I became interested in writing.

Do you think as many as half of the readers/raters know anything about the details of how a story earns an H?

Observant browsers may notice the 4.5 correlation, but I doubt most would. My impression/assumptions upon coming across Lit was that it was huge. It seemed like a vast depository with millions of visitors... how could my rating effect anything that happens here? A comment seemed most likely to have any impact. I was impressed when I saw an author respond to a reader in the comments. I thought that was really cool, and was impressed by the direct access. I thought of that when I considered where I would want to post any works.

I think I gave nothing but 4 of 5s, maybe an occasional 3 for poor writers with a fun story. Otherwise; 'if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.'

I'd guess that stories entered in competitions would get the most site-involved voting. I wonder how that may influence the perspective of many posters on this thread.

 

[Son_of_Battles]

It's not that hard to calculate. I just did it for my one-and-only First Time story and found it just outside the fifth percentile -- consistent with the table in the OP.

One thing I really don't know is how ties are broken. There are quite a few stories with the same score. They may be ranked by votes (as in the top lists), but votes aren't shown, so I can't be sure.

You're probably right, though, that it would be a lot of computational ticks to do it for every story site-wide.

Wouldn't ties be trivial in a percentile ranking? If you are speaking for contest winners, it would be the same boat as it is now with the possibilities for a tie. As for standard ranking and placement, I could see percentiles only being listed to the first or second decimal (full values being hidden). Anything beyond that is just excessive. If Laural needed to be more specific, she could set it to show more decimal places for admins.

 

[SouthernCrossfire]

Having a couple of entries in the category, I just compared "Humor and Satire" to the listing in the original post. While it's a small category (less than 3,000 entries), its scores by percentile track very similarly to NC/Reluctance, except the 50th percentile is 0.04 lower and the 75th percentile drops to 3.85, a full 0.15 lower than the NC/R category.

It would be interesting to see a more representative scoring system used, but would reworking the scores of all of the existing stories and comparing them to future works initially graded on the new scale be possible or even fair? Depending on the final form of such a new system, as new works are added, the scores might creep up again, leaving older works penalized in comparison. For that reason, I probably wouldn't change anything if I were in charge.