ratings

[DeYaKen]

I think someone is dicking around with the votes on my story; it was up at 4.8 at one point, now it's 4.46. Yeah, I know it seems thin-skinned of me, but it's weird how, almost as soon as it goes up, it goes right back down again ...

Quite normal with a mean average system. The first few readers give you 4s and 5s. Then as more votes are cast people who don't like it, or don't like you, some 1s creep in and the average comes down. If you are saying that the change occurred with no or few votes cast then yes something is wrong.

 

[jdnunyer]

I tend to submit a bunch of chapters at once. Laurel will often approve all of them at once, but arrange it so that they post one day at a time. That means links will go active at 12:00 am, hours before appearing on the "new stories" page. I've been getting 1-bombs within 20 minutes of the links going active on these submissions for a long time now. Sure, it's not that hard to figure out that if you replace the "x" in the hyperlink from the previous chapter with "x+1" on the day after chapter x appeared, you might get somewhere...but this still shows a level of dedication to sabotaging another author's ratings that I find kind of remarkable.

I get what others have said about how ratings do convey some information, and I agree. The signal to noise ratio isn't great, but it ain't zero. Personally, though, I'm not sure I'd care much even if they were perfectly informative about the average reader's reaction. I was writing for myself for more than a year before I posted anything here, and would keep writing if I ever decided to leave Lit. If only one other person gets the slightest bit of enjoyment out of my stories, then I'd say it was worth having shared them. Happily, I've found that more than one other person does. Gravy.