Rating system oddities?

[DelNovo]

For months now, I've been trying to figure out what seem to be a couple of oddities in the rating system for stories.

Rate counts seem to go down occasionally, though not by much. (For example, one day a story will have a count of 260 people having submitted ratings, and the next day it will have 258.)

Rate averages seem to change oddly. (Last night I went to sleep with my newest story having shown 4.57 / 37. This morning it showed 4.78 / 37. Naturally it should not have changed score when the total number of raters didn't change. That's far from the only example, but it's the newest. Sometimes average ratings go down in the same way.)

Have any of y'all experienced this before? Or other oddities? Does anyone know why this stuff happens?

 

[KeithD]

The site does occasional sweeps to delete votes it considers fraudulent (and it doesn't share its formula for that with the users). It's been happening for years. Seeing the rating change but not the number of votes doesn't mean the number of votes didn't change too. It means someone else voted after the sweep occurred but before you looked at the number.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The site runs "sweeps" on a regular basis, more frequently during contests, where bogus scoring - "one-bombs" "not so helpful high fives" - get stripped out of the scores. The site does not explain its criteria and discourages speculation how it all works (with a little bit of thought, you can figure it out), but it's effective.

What it does mean, is that your story's score means little until such time as the first sweeps go through (they go through the whole story file, regardless whether your story is in a contest or not) - you'll see a story settle into its eventual score after 20 - 30 days.

So yes, scores move up and down, creating what appear to be anomalies - that's just some votes being removed, and at the same time, more folk voting. A sweep went through In the last twelve hours, for example. My latest story's vote count is the same but the score jumped 0.2. If I did some maths I could figure out exactly what happened, but I no longer bother. It's part of the furniture, just a feature of the Lit scoring system.