Solving the dreaded one-bomb problem

[Voboy]

Another thing (which I'm certainly not the first to point out here) is that every system can be gamed. Including whichever system you replace this one with. Loopholes will be exploited. Vulnerabilities will be found. Unintended consequences will ensue. EVERY "fix" to this "problem" will have, in turn, its own problems, and in five or six years' time there will be new people loudly clamoring for a fix to that new system.

Always. Unless, that is, anyone here is arrogant enough to believe they can think of and implement The Perfect Solution To Every Voting Problem, which (so far) has eluded every competitive internet ranking system for a couple of decades now.

So. In that sense, maybe it's better the devil you know than the one you don't.

 

[lovecraft68]

 

[ElectricBlue]

With my own 54 stories, I see very little long-term relationship between the score and the amount of attention the stories get.

That's where our data sets differ. I've got 120 chapters/stories over eight years, and my top ranked stories, whatever their age, attract new Views at a faster rate than my tail-end stories, which in some cases have barely moved in five years (but even so, my bottom ten stories have got fractionally higher scores than they did when first published).

Over that time, some of the higher rated stories have doubled or even tripled their Views and number of Votes, compared to their first three months out of the gate.

Which probably explains why we often differ on this topic - our datasets are showing two completely different trends. Mine shows a pretty clear correlation between score and activity, but keep in mind my stories are over many categories, whereas you have more single category traffic, I think.

 

[Voboy]

Excuse me, sir, maybe you can help me. I appear to have taken a wrong turn. I was looking for the authors' hangout forum, but accidentally arrived at a conference of accountants and analysts who feverishly discuss statistics and numbers.

Read the thread title. You knew what it was going to be about.

And yet, you chose to come here and post. Odd, that.

 

[lovecraft68]

I want to propose an AH drinking game

You take a shot every time a thread is started about

Scores
Underage
Story length
anything to do with copyright
What do readers like?

Good thing is we should all be blitzed in no time

 

[Bazzle]

Once you have written and published stories that are "marked" by numbers...

Excuse me, sir, maybe you can help me. I appear to have taken a wrong turn. I was looking for the authors' hangout forum, but accidentally arrived at a conference of accountants and analysts who feverishly discuss statistics and numbers.

...you start doing the stats. How many have clicked, commented, or starred. It's natural!

 

[ElectricBlue]

Excuse me, sir, maybe you can help me. I appear to have taken a wrong turn. I was looking for the authors' hangout forum, but accidentally arrived at a conference of accountants and analysts who feverishly discuss statistics and numbers.

You've not been here long enough to know this is a perennial topic, and folk can have fun with data just as much as they can with writing. It's called having an enquiring mind.

And if you're an alt, which I suspect that you might be, you already know that.

 

[ElectricBlue]

For me, the number of views mainly seems to be category-driven. Same with view/vote ratios.

Yep, definitely this. Different categories have quite different trends and habits - category denizens are insular folk, each with their own p peculiar habits.

 

[lovecraft68]

Once you have written and published stories that are "marked" by numbers...


...you start doing the stats. How many have clicked, commented, or starred. It's natural!

I think its very natural early on when its all new and exciting. I think as time moves on and you learn more about how it works, or often doesn't, the shine comes off some.

But even if you still enjoy it, there's a difference between liking to look at your page updates and doing the time consuming stat mining and spread sheets and sweating over every vote some here do. There's "This is cool" and there's obsession.

 

[SimonDoom]

Which probably explains why we often differ on this topic - our datasets are showing two completely different trends. Mine shows a pretty clear correlation between score and activity, but keep in mind my stories are over many categories, whereas you have more single category traffic, I think.

It suggests that we're all just like the blind men in the parable feeling different parts of the elephant, arguing over what the heck it is. I suspect there is much truth to this.

 

[ElectricBlue]

It suggests that we're all just like the blind men in the parable feeling different parts of the elephant, arguing over what the heck it is. I suspect there is much truth to this.

It's a camel

 

[RejectReality]

Mine is all over the place. Stories from Mature only that were out in 2019, but not in the last half of the year, sorted by recent score ( Jan 2023 )

 

[Unblemished]

This is obviously a pretty played out topic of discussion, where basically everything than can be said has been said and the site isn’t going to change anything anyway, but while we’re all throwing in our two cents:

Hypothetically, would this whole Red H thing work better if voting switched to being out of 10 rather than 5, with the H cutoff at like…maybe 7.5 or 8/10? There’s more granularity, then; instead of the current ‘anything but a 5 is damaging’ system, people could give ratings that aren’t literally perfect without dragging the average down from the threshold.

Won’t stop trolls, but then nothing will.

 

[lovecraft68]

This is obviously a pretty played out topic of discussion, where basically everything than can be said has been said and the site isn’t going to change anything anyway, but while we’re all throwing in our two cents:

Hypothetically, would this whole Red H thing work better if voting switched to being out of 10 rather than 5, with the H cutoff at like…maybe 7.5 or 8/10? There’s more granularity, then; instead of the current ‘anything but a 5 is damaging’ system, people could give ratings that aren’t literally perfect without dragging the average down from the threshold.

Won’t stop trolls, but then nothing will.

Off the top of my head the issue would be with a score of 10 and an H being 7.5 now people will say anything lower than a 7 is a 'bad vote" so 60% of the options are seen as low votes, and the trolls would now start dropping 5's and how can the site start sweeping things from 5 down? Especially big in the contests.

The thing is the perception of even a three as a bad vote. A three is described as average a 4 is "Liked it" but some people bitch about getting a four. Twice the voting range to me will cause twice the whining and twice the problems.

Two things are reality here. Your comment that nothing will stop trolls under any system, and that people can't seem to accept the system is imperfect and see it as such instead of acting like its some type of personal affront or most importantly, the worth of their story.

 

[astuffedshirt_perv]

Hypothetically, would this whole Red H thing work better if voting switched to being out of 10 rather than 5, with the H cutoff at like…maybe 7.5 or 8/10?

Train a Large Language Model like GPT on the whole corpus of Lit, then have it assess new stories with a 'predicted' score.

 

[Lifestyle66]

This is obviously a pretty played out topic of discussion, where basically everything than can be said has been said and the site isn’t going to change anything anyway, but while we’re all throwing in our two cents:

Hypothetically, would this whole Red H thing work better if voting switched to being out of 10 rather than 5, with the H cutoff at like…maybe 7.5 or 8/10? There’s more granularity, then; instead of the current ‘anything but a 5 is damaging’ system, people could give ratings that aren’t literally perfect without dragging the average down from the threshold.

Won’t stop trolls, but then nothing will.

It doesn't matter where the cutoff line is or how many numbers you add to the voting system.

The only issue with this is that a Red-H or lack thereof triggers some people into "Oh MY GOD! Someone hates me!"

They need to get over themselves and get real. The whole world doesn't revolve around egos about their FREE story posted here!

 

[SimonDoom]

This is obviously a pretty played out topic of discussion, where basically everything than can be said has been said and the site isn’t going to change anything anyway, but while we’re all throwing in our two cents:

Hypothetically, would this whole Red H thing work better if voting switched to being out of 10 rather than 5, with the H cutoff at like…maybe 7.5 or 8/10? There’s more granularity, then; instead of the current ‘anything but a 5 is damaging’ system, people could give ratings that aren’t literally perfect without dragging the average down from the threshold.

Won’t stop trolls, but then nothing will.

My version of your solution, which I discussed above, is to let readers vote in increments of .5, up to a maximum of 5. It would be basically the same as your 10-point system, but it would preserve the existing 5 point system, so it would be more familiar and would not require recalibrating the 500,000 + existing stories. Everything from the past could be kept exactly the same. But with this system one could give a story a score of 4.5, good enough for a red H, but less than perfect.

Won't stop trolls, and no, nothing will, but I think it would reduce gamesmanship and would encourage more voting.

 

[alohadave]

My version of your solution, which I discussed above, is to let readers vote in increments of .5, up to a maximum of 5. It would be basically the same as your 10-point system, but it would preserve the existing 5 point system, so it would be more familiar and would not require recalibrating the 500,000 + existing stories. Everything from the past could be kept exactly the same. But with this system one could give a story a score of 4.5, good enough for a red H, but less than perfect.

Won't stop trolls, and no, nothing will, but I think it would reduce gamesmanship and would encourage more voting.

It doesn't change anything but the granularity. You could go from 1-10 to 1-100, and all you are doing is making for finer scoring.

 

[lovecraft68]

Just don't dread the one-bomb problem and we'll all be fine.

Now you're just being a party pooper

 

[alohadave]

I just had a thought. I wonder how scoring would be affected if votes could be changed. Instead of a vote being locked in forever, you could change your vote later if you changed your mind about it.

 

[lovecraft68]

I just had a thought. I wonder how scoring would be affected if votes could be changed. Instead of a vote being locked in forever, you could change your vote later if you changed your mind about it.

So Dannydickwagger gives your story a five cause he wagged his dick over it. He gives the next one a five. Then he runs into a story you wrote that for whatever reason pisses him off. He goes back and changes his fives to ones.

Next

Big part of this isn't the system, its the people using it. Or do some here think Lit can change people? Like someone said, whatever you do here, the trolls will play it

 

[ElectricBlue]

I just had a thought. I wonder how scoring would be affected if votes could be changed. Instead of a vote being locked in forever, you could change your vote later if you changed your mind about it.

You can do this already, change a vote you've left on a story. But one vote's not going to affect anything much. Why would you bother?

I've often read a story and thought, this feels familiar, and get to the end to discover I've already voted. A strange kind of deja vu.

 

[SimonDoom]

If the voting system gets changed, it will cause a difference between the way the old stories were rated compared to how the new stories will get rated. It may no longer be possible to fairly compare the scores of old and new stories, and that would affect all kinds of lists and who-knows-what. Those consequences might be a good motivation for Lit to stick to what they're using now.

Just don't dread the one-bomb problem and we'll all be fine.

I suspect this is exactly why nothing is going to change on this issue, and we're shouting into the wind.

 

[SimonDoom]

It doesn't change anything but the granularity. You could go from 1-10 to 1-100, and all you are doing is making for finer scoring.

It DOES make one significant change. Under my system, you don't have to choose between giving the story a perfect score (5) or not hurting the story's chances of getting a red H/4.5. You can give it a 4.5 and feel good that you haven't hurt the story's chances while at the same time not having given it a perfect score. That option does not exist now. The current system, with its irrational emphasis on the red H, discourages many readers from giving scores less than a perfect score. That seems very silly to me. I think my system would result in somewhat less gamesmanship and strategic voting. How much? I have no idea. But I think it would be at least a slight improvement over what we have now.

 

[alohadave]

You can do this already, change a vote you've left on a story. But one vote's not going to affect anything much. Why would you bother?

I've often read a story and thought, this feels familiar, and get to the end to discover I've already voted. A strange kind of deja vu.

Since when? Every time I've voted, there was no way to change it.

Edit: so you can change it on the mobile site. I'll need to try it on the desktop site.