Score sabotage

[ElectricBlue]

Do you have any experiences of turning voting off?

Your story file will become a static, feedback free zone and you run the risk of being seen as frozen in time.

It can actually backfire, I think, because if you freeze your scores when they're high, some readers will feel that you're precious and no longer bother. This observation is based on a few authors I know who did freeze scores for various reasons (viscous troll campaigns being the main one) who then saw a significant drop in traffic across their catalogue.

 

[SimonDoom]

Do you have any experiences of turning voting off?

I don't understand why anyone would do this.

Yes, voting is a weird and unpredictable thing, and some people vote for spite and bad reasons.

So?

Many don't. Many readers vote in good faith and for good reasons and are trying to give you good feedback with their vote.

Why would anyone turn them off?

When you allow voting, you allow readers to give you feedback -- imperfect, but still valuable to some degree. I don't understand why an author would turn that off because of a few bad eggs.

Learn to have a thick skin and let the readers vote and comment. Buck up and keep writing.

 

[Enchantment_of_Nyx]

Don't micro-watch the movements up and down, is my advice .

It was my first story on Lit. There was no way I was not going to watch it like a vulture circling a dead man walking. I'm over it now, although still curious about the process. I check my home page at least once a day because I want to respond to feedback. I'd like to encourage people to be interactive with me about what they're thinking. I'm sure I'll do it less over time, but I'm not in any particular hurry to get jaded.

I think there's a tendency to assume that people who post questions about scoring are placing undue influence. I don't want to speak for Woody, but I think he just wanted to understand. That's certainly how I felt about it. The system is a mystery, so naturally people are going to want to know. It would be oddly incurious not to try to figure it out, wouldn't it?

 

[Woody110]

Thanks again for your responses. You’re challenging decisions I thought I’d reached and I like that.

EoN thank you, you’ve hit the nail on the head. I guess it’s difficult to raise an issue like this and not sound whiny. I’d just like to get a better idea of how this place works. I’m not upset by negative feedback at all and I wish more people would comment - good or bad, it’s all welcome. I’ll never switch the comments off. It’s the score system only I’m not convinced has much value.

 

[jsmiam]

... I had an experience that I'm not sure can be completely explained this way. My story had about 65 votes. (I'm not sure that's exact, but it's close.) The average score was 4.87. Two hours and four votes later, it was at 3.87...

Hmm, tough call. I'll agree with ElectricBlue, that what most likely happened was that (a) a sweep happened AND (b) within the same time frame, votes were flowing in still, including a cluster of one-bombs. And as sweeps sometimes do, fives can be swept as well as other numbers. So The sweep took away some 5 votes and at the same time, several one-bombs arrived too. Finally, being somehow of the "obviously cheating" variety of one-bombs, they got swept away rather quickly too sometime in the next few days.

Possibility two (the guessing starts) - Although there are no shortages of glitches at Lit, I don't think we've seen much malfunctioning within a single page against itself. (Unless you happened across a moment in time where the page was being worked on and an "oopsie" happened.) What is common though, there are a couple pages that refresh the numbers they present at different times, so going instantly from one to the other while the story is rapidly gathering votes does show different results. (I forget exactly which, it may be the author's profile page vs. the account console page.) And remember, I'm guessing here, big time, making a stretch. Perhaps you're remembering the numbers, but one number was from one page and the other was from the other page, at a moment where they were further out of synch than just the 2 hours.

Stuff like that is why I just avoid that whole "top list" thing. (does anyone believe me? Anyone?