Sandbagging?

[JulietVerdana]

Someone who is concerned about competition is methodically going through other authors' submissions and dumping a low rating on them. The rating system does not work. It's too easily manipulated. I've brought this to Laurel's attention. I don't know if there is anything she can do about it but I wanted the people responsible for the obvious sandbagging to know that we are not that stupid.

 

[KillerMuffin]

Other than removing top lists and/or the vote feature, there's nothing to be done about it. Some of us have even received anonymous email that a one was voted because the story was rated higher. I've received email from someone who routinely votes mine down to keep his stories above mine.

It's one of those crappy things we put up with.

Don't worry, you'll get voted down for bitching about it, too. Why? Cause the people who do it are asses.

 

[cymbidia]

Darlin', welcome to the real world.

Do a Lit SEARCH (look at the top of this page) on the words "voting fraud" or "voting" and you may be completely amazed at what comes back to you.

We've hashed and rehashed and screamed and fought and bloodied each other over this subject many, many times before you poinrted it out here and now.

If you do the search, read what's been said before, read all the varied suggestions that so many different authors have offered, and if you find that you have something new to add to the debate, please do so. You'll definitely find a willing audience.

If you don't read everything on the subject ... no, that's too much to read. If you don't read what's been posted on this subject in the last six months in order to understand what we've all been through, then you'll have to just accept the simple fact that most of us are, at this time, unwilling to be outraged with you. There's been an incredible amount of hurt and pain over "voting fraud" here, and some of it is still healing. People have left Lit, others have withdrawn from posting in-plubic on the Boards. Many of us are exceeding careful of what we post - all to avoid drawing the notice and wrath of the infamous one-voter. However, i think i can speak for all when i say that no one wants another bloody, open brawl about voting fraud.

The "one voter" phenomenom is so well-known here, in fact, that it has even been memorialized in a poem:
Ode to a One Voter on a Rainy Sunday Night
by CRaZy
http://www.literotica.com/stories/showstory.php?id=13385

You have to accept that Laurel, et al, do the very best they can to contain voter fraud
- or -
you have to take your stories/poems and go away.

Sorry, darlin'.
We've all been there, done that with this issue.
I know it's heartbreaking and maddening to encounter it, but we've all been there. Really. And as much as this doesn't help you right now, the votes do tend to even out, eventually. Sometimes our stories/poems settle out in a place lower than we think they belong, but such is life. Use the experience as a catalyst to write better stories/poems. Lemons, lemonade; you know how it goes.

 

[Laurel]

It's a tough situation. Here are some comments I've made in the past about it:

One thing that is obvious, and has been since the Internet began, is that there is no perfect solution to this issue. For those of you that have been around a while, I'm sure you know that one of my favorite sites is the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). For years, they (along with zillions of other sites, including Rolling Stone and Amazon) have used a voting system very similar to the one we use today. These bigger companies with zillions of programmers, Harvard grad CEOs, and corporate think tanks never came up with a better solution than what we are using now. The fact that "everyone else is doing it" doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find a better solution. I'm only trying to illustrate the fact that this is a 6+ year-old problem which millions of people have attempted to improve upon without much luck at all.

In the case of IMDB, once they had millions of registered users they decided to institute a policy by which you must be registered and logged in to vote. This idea certainly has the potential reduce the amount of fraud, but by no means is it a solution. I could very easily register 50 users at IMDB today and 1-vote Fight Club to my heart's content. We had a "member votes" Top List, but the reality is that this site has less than 30,000 registered members of which perhaps 50% are active in any 30 day period. On an average day, more than 200,000 people visit the site, most of them coming to read the day's new stories. Because of the adult nature of the site, and because of the fact that they are here to read, not necessarily to interact, the vast majority of visitors seem to have no interest in registering as members of Literotica. This is certainly fine with us, but it does not lend itself to a situation like IMDB where only registered members would be allowed to vote. Maybe in the future if there were ever several hundred thousand active registered members, then this type of system would be effective.

As far as the idea of someone who cheats winning the prizes, I (perhaps naively) believe that over time things tend to balance themselves out. For example, one thing that is rarely discussed here is "up-voting" - the opposite of "down-voting". If your enemies are more likely to give you lower scores because of who you are, then it stands to reason that your friends are more likely to give you higher scores. While some on the board are concerned about authors voting up their own stories, others are concerned about authors who may "down-vote" stories by other writers to try to boost their own ranking. In the small picture, each of these actions would seem to compromise the integrity of the system, but if you step back and look at the big picture, you'll see 10 people "up-voting" each story, 10 people "down-voting" each story, and 1,000 people voting their honest opinion on each story.

Regardless of who wins any contest or prize, there will be hundreds of authors each month who are just as deserving but who did not happen to have the .0001 extra score to push them into the top spot. The same argument can be made for the Nobel Prize, the Oscars, the Pulitzer Prize, Miss Teen USA or any number of other respected awards. The fact that one person wins the contest and a hundred others don't does not mean that the winner's work is objectively superior. It simply means that the winner was chosen by his or her peers and/or fans to receive a prize as a representative of a large group of people who probably each deserve it just as much as him or her. It is just not possible to give a prize to everyone, and I don't think that means we shouldn't give one to anyone.

The Internet Movie Database is a site that I have used on a regular basis for years. I certainly don't rely on their scores as the word of god, but I do find them to be helpful in their context. The context is that of the Internet and specifically that of opinion - the opinion of human beings, all of whom are filled with emotion, all of whom are prone to mood swings, and all of whom have lived different lives and experienced different things. People are going to vote different ways for different reasons, I think we agree on that. Then, the big question becomes "What is a VALID vote and what is not?"

If I vote down a movie, or a story, after seeing only the very beginning of it, is that any more or less valid than someone who views the whole thing and then up votes it because they happen to like Julia Roberts, or Anal Sex? What about the person who down votes it because they had a bad day or because there were spelling errors? Some people may be voting on grammar, others on content, others just to be nice or mean. This simply means that the system is based on human beings, not robots. I believe, though, that given enough votes over enough time, you are going to get a fairly accurate, but certainly not perfect, idea of what a large group of people think of the piece of work they are voting on, whether that be a movie, a story, or a scientist working on a cure of AIDS (Nobel prize reference!)

If our litmus test is whether something has to be perfect to be useful, then I certainly wouldn't be very useful to anyone. Luckily for me, that's not the test. I don't believe that we need to prove that the system is 100% perfect for it to be useful to both authors and readers - frustration and all. Perfect, is itself a term so subjective that we would could probably never achieve it for more than one person at any time.

We have been working on a feature which will allow authors to turn on or off voting on each of their stories at any time. I'm hoping that this option, along with the re-introduction of "Times Read" stats, will be online in the next 30 days. We are also going to add two more top lists - Most Viewed and Most Voted On. If a reader decides to give you a 1-vote, that vote will only serve to move you up the two other lists.

Our programmer is also working on the Member Votes feature. Once enabled, you will be able to see what actual members voting think of your story, in addition to the general readership. Since the Members votes are stored in a database, there is absolutely no way that a member can vote twice on the same story. Of course, this does not mean that a member won't give you a 1 because they don't like you.


I know there are those of you who think we don't care about the voting, but that's simply not the case. The idea that because we haven't solved the problem means we don't care is more than a little unfair. We've struggled long and hard to make the voting suitable to everyone. We have limited time and limited money, but we are doing what we can with what we have. But no matter what we do (and I know I've said this before) we cannot determine voter intent. I think once the new top lists, Member Votes, and Times Read stats come into being, this will make a lot of you happier. But no matter what happens, there will be those who are unhappy with their story scores. We will continue to do what we can, and we encourage (as always) your constructive comments and suggestions!

 

[JulietVerdana]

Thanks everyone. I'm relatively new here and must confess I don't read old bulletin board posts. I know I should. So I was not aware then that everyone is already aware of this problem. Sorry for being so clueless. Duh.

Actually, I thought I was raising a great revelation to everyone. As long as everyone is already aware of what is happening, then it doesn't bother me nearly as much.

Because, my preference is definitely going to be to suspend voting on all my stories, period. As I said, I don't care about the prizes at all, and as long as the system is subject to manipulation it is not going to mean anything to me anyway. Not worth the aggravation.

I'm only writing erotic stories and posting them here to express my lesbian sex experiences and fantasies as someone "in the life", and I obviously can't do that in mainstream places without being crucified by the forces of the puritan witch-hunters.

So I'm grateful for Literotica as an avenue for my work, and as long as other people continue to enjoy and praise them and tell me so in feedback, anonymous or otherwise, that is more than enough for me. I'd rather not get aggravated to see my stories being sandbagged by the morons, so I will definitely opt to turn off voting on all my work at the first opportunity. That will be the end of the problem for me personally, period, as far as I'm concerned.

I will definitely continue to write and post my stories here because I enjoy doing so and I really love some of the wild confessional emails I get from men and women readers!

My last story, "Little Candy Doll" was inspired by an amazingly erotic email I received from a lesbian woman on the west coast. Oh, god, just reading it got me soaked! So I sat down and wrote that story for her in one long breathless session, which turned out to be probably my personal favorite erotic story so far.

I'll keep doing that and I don't care about the morons. Let them do all the phony voting they want to, it won't affect me at all.

Thanks to everyone again.

Juliet*

 

[ericlove]

voting

Hi, i read the stories, sometimes voting, sometimes not.
I rarely vote 1 since i'm unlikely to bother reading far enough in a story to care unless the story has some really major flaws. I cant imagine downvoting just to hurt someone. I sometimes send feedback, sometimes anonymous, sometimes signing my name. I find most authors reply to signed feedback, sometimes just a simple thank you often a personal appreciation. On rare occasions i'll point out anobvious spelling error since spellcheck is not perfect, but usually it is to tell an author how much i enjoyed a story, how much it turned me on, etc.