Story score percentiles - LW versus the rest

[AwkwardlySet]

Aaaand I just attracted a troll.

All of my stories were just hit by a downvote at the same time. Man, I would have been so pissed off a year or two ago, but being done with Lit more or less does have its advantages. Feel free to bomb me as much as you want.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

First of all, there's nothing personal thing about you, at all. This isn't personal at all.

If you had a story go from 4.94 to 4.00 in one day, when it had about 400 votes, that's an extreme situation. I've had some downvoting, but nothing like that. But I don't understand your numbers. My typical view:vote ratio is around 90:1. Even if you cut that in half, if you had 400 votes that should be at least 20,000 views. Apparently you withdrew and then resubmitted the stories starting in Dec. 2023, and chapter 1 currently has 13,500 views, and a score of 4.65. In the list you provided above, it had a score of 4.8. Your others averaged 4.93. That is an extraordinarily high score. The average for chapters 2-4 now is 4.75, with average views of around 5500. Based on my experience, that would translate to a maximum number of votes of around 100. That's low enough that there's still a reasonably high degree of natural variability.

Not all categories and types of stories get the same percentage of votes. Don't make conclusions based on your own stories and categories only. Just sayin.

 

[SimonDoom]

Not all categories and types of stories get the same percentage of votes. Don't make conclusions based on your own stories and categories only. Just sayin.

View attachment 2478159

Fair enough. I don't write in Sci Fi so I'm not familiar with its numbers. Those are different from what I see in other categories.

One of the problems with Sci Fi as a category is that it seems to have a lot of long series so it's much more likely to have chapters clogging up the toplists with outlandishly high scores.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Aaaand I just attracted a troll.

All of my stories were just hit by a downvote at the same time. Man, I would have been so pissed off a year or two ago, but being done with Lit more or less does have its advantages. Feel free to bomb me as much as you want.

Possibly because you keep wearing the tee-shirt you got from Target back to front. You've become your own self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Aaaand I just attracted a troll.

All of my stories were just hit by a downvote at the same time. Man, I would have been so pissed off a year or two ago, but being done with Lit more or less does have its advantages. Feel free to bomb me as much as you want.

Your stories are mostly scifi, with NONE in Loving Wives. But you're weighing in on a Loving Wives thread.

We should put a warning in the AH that when even discussing LW: "Here be dragons!"

 

[Duleigh]

Right. First of all, my stories weren't simply being downvoted, they were bombed, continuously. My scores would go from 4.94 to under 4.00 during one day, even if the 4.94 score was supported by about 400 votes at the time. Laurel would then reset the score, and the same thing would happen the next day, and the next day, and the next day.... and so on, until I decided to take the stories down. So don't tell me how everyone gets the same. That's pure bullshit. This was done by one person (and maybe their group of buddies), a group who thought they could rule this place and decide which author gets which score and who gets which position on the top lists. And I ended up being the target because I stood up to them, unlike most of the people here.

Putting all those events aside, please tell me something. I do see that maybe stories with and without anonymous voting wouldn't be in the same situation when it comes to contests and top lists. There are ways to solve that by, for example, not letting stories with anonymous voting off to participate in contests. Or something like that.

But there is one glaring inconsistency in your position. At first, you are making a big deal because of the fact that not all stories would be in the same situation for contests and top lists. That's fair. But near the end of your post, you claim that me losing my spots in the top lists and even falling completely off the list as a consequence of malicious voting, is not an injustice or an objective cause for complaint?

Is this a personal thing about me or something? How is it that it would be a big deal for all those authors and their stories competing unequally if I had my way, but it isn't a big deal for myself and similar authors who were pushed off top lists and maybe lost in contests as a result of voting manipulation in the present system? And don't tell me how everyone gets the same amount of trolling, now that's pure bullshit. if all authors suffer the same amount of bombing as I did, why are there so many 4.9+ stories in SF?

To prove my point, these were my stable scores before the bombings started. They were stable for months.


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Look at the dates. The bombing began at some point in August 2023.

They did the same to my series Enchantress. If you put a story at the top of the Scifi board they bomb the living shit out of it and there's nothing they will do about it. I mention possible solutions and all I hear from writers is "Oh no! We can't try something different! It would be different!"

 

[Duleigh]

Ah, you admit it for once.

Admit what? Are we implying something? Hmmmm?

 

[RejectReality]

They did the same to my series Enchantress. If you put a story at the top of the Scifi board they bomb the living shit out of it and there's nothing they will do about it. I mention possible solutions and all I hear from writers is "Oh no! We can't try something different! It would be different!"

Bombed down to what? You do understand that with a 5.0 and 35 votes, a single 1 knocks you down to 4.88, right? Two would be 4.78. Hell, two 4s would be 4.94. When your vote totals are that low, and your score is that high, it takes almost nothing to move them dramatically. I realize that's two years ago, but I'm assuming from the posting of the screenshot, that's when the score dropped. That's at least 18 days with a perfect 5 score, judging by the second chapter's release date. That's damn near a miracle.

 

[SimonDoom]

They did the same to my series Enchantress. If you put a story at the top of the Scifi board they bomb the living shit out of it and there's nothing they will do about it. I mention possible solutions and all I hear from writers is "Oh no! We can't try something different! It would be different!"

That's not what writers are saying, or at least not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that while it's shitty if you are facing malicious downvoting, it's not sufficient cause to eliminate unregistered voting or to allow you to disallow unregistered downvoting. It's not important enough. It's a risk we all face. If you have a solution that doesn't result in significantly reducing the overall amount of feedback, then come up with it. But if you don't, I don't see why your plight justifies completely changing the way the site screens who can vote.

Your story Enchantress, in the screen shot you gave us, had 35 votes and a perfect score of 5.0. Now, a year and 8 months after publication, it has a score of 4.86, over 14,600 views, 21 comments and 41 favorites. What is the problem, from the point of view of other authors, the site as a whole, or the readers, that needs correcting? You haven't identified it. You can't claim that people have "bombed the shit out of your story" when it went from 5.0 with 35 votes to 4.86. That sounds normal to me. I have NO stories with a score of 4.86. I've had stories of mine that have dropped more than that.

My response is, so what? OK, it's shitty behavior. But so what? As I have pointed out to both you and to AwkwardlySet, you are both doing very well in terms of high scores, nice comments, good feedback, plenty of views, so from my standpoint, what justification is there for the site to change things?

 

[ElectricBlue]

They did the same to my series Enchantress. If you put a story at the top of the Scifi board they bomb the living shit out of it and there's nothing they will do about it. I mention possible solutions and all I hear from writers is "Oh no! We can't try something different! It would be different!"

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?? The way you guys are going on, I thought you were talking about All Time top lists, or at least the last twelve months. But you're on about the last thirty days, with the next batch of stories coming at you a week or two later.

You stories hadn't had time to settle down yet. I can't see what the worry is, to be honest.

 

[Actingup]

So the reason that I started looking at percentiles was to help understand how my stories had gone in LW versus the rest. Apologies for talking about me, me and me here, but this is the answer for my own small crop of stories, all of which were published in the past 12 months. I'm more than happy with how the non-LW ones have been received, and I haven't bothered plotting them out in detail by category (which are Romance, Erotic Couplings, Group Sex). But looking at LW by percentile allows me to see that one of my stories objectively rated over the 99th percentile last year, even though its absolute score (4.64) is nothing special if it were judged by Romance standards. Another one scraped in just below the 60th percentile, despite having good grammar and a decent plot, and I know why - it's because I was deliberately provocative (the plot has two couples swapping and competing to see who could get knocked up first). And the bottom three - well, that's because it's a series and the first episode has a cuckold element. And I got a whacking, although I hope that the sweeps will help whenever they're run next. The top one (A Game of Snooker) managed to navigate through the pitfalls of the readership. It's got a burn the bastard(s) ending and an empowering theme, and it seemed to resonate. I can totally cop getting 30 percentile scores if there's a chance of a payoff at the other end.


Now, if I put the votes into the equation, things get more interesting. As others have said repeatedly, LW gets lots of eyes. If I add up the number of votes for the LW stories that I've done, 51% of my votes have come essentially from three stories (two stand alones and a multi-part story). So there's a really strong argument for submitting in a risky, harshly scoring category if you want people reading your work, because you just need one or two 'hits' to get the payoff. We all knew that I guess, but for me it's helpful to lay it out, and particularly to show that objectively that one 'hit' has outperformed the stories that I put into other categories.


All that said, I don't have any LW stories in the works! But I might dig these stats out if I need to remind myself to do some risk taking.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

See that is exactly what I am claiming too. I got targeted precisely because of my forum involvement and for calling out that cabal of commenters at the time. Before that, I suffered only regular downvoting, top-list sniping, etc, same as everyone else.
So it's not the same for everyone. It was the same for me as for everyone else for more than a year, until I stood up for something on the forum. Knowing your personality and the nature of your posts it's not hard to see that you set off trolls too, and since you have so few votes, it reflects in your scores more easily. I am pretty sure even that I said something along those lines as a comment on one of your stories. Also, some people likely suffer more trolling due to the kinks they write.
Not everyone gets the same amount of trolling and malicious voting so it's not the same for everyone in the present system. That's the bullshit I am trying to disprove here.

No you are deflecting.

You have no argument here if you are flat out ignoring the question: How does allowing writers to opt for registered votes only maintain a level playing field in top lists and Red Hs with stories that don't opt if opting protects the score? And likewise if opting does not protect the score, how does it keep opted stories from sliding down the toplists? These two premises flat out contradict each other.

If you want us to believe that you can have it both ways, that you can protect your score by opting out of unregistered votes and still play fair on the toplists and contests, then your little crusade is nothing but self-serving. You cannot fuck the rest of us in the ass and the mouth at the same time.

Ohh, but you are only opting out of unregistered because you are specifically targeted. Well then even the untargeted can opt out and improve their average score. It WILL be abused. Scores WILL go up, some more than others but feedback will go down.

You have NOT thought this through.

Your specific situation (and mine - I had my first story multi-bombed down from 4.6 to 1.8) are one-offs. It would be folly to build a system that caters to the one-offs.

And like Simon states (anything to avoid the phrase SImon Says : P) your scores are freaking great. You have plenty of Red Hs and a following. My scores stink and (practically) no one is reading me. Cry me me a bloody river. You're winning. Not that I see it as a competition but you certainly do since you care about the toplists so much. So you're really just a sore winner right now. You can talk to the hand, preferably your own right hand. : P

 

[Actingup]

(blathered on a lot about scores)

So, lots of sweeps have happened over the past few days as the Valentine's Day contest winds up, and as far as I can tell the sweeps have been sitewide. Most of my stories across categories had votes removed. For the older stories that resulted in minimal score movement (0-0.02 score), but for my three LW stories published in December, the movement was 0.18 - 0.26. That doesn't look all that large in absolute score terms, but in percentile terms it makes a more significant difference.

Three's the Charm Part 1 goes from about 30th percentile to about 43rd percentile
Three's the Charm Part 2 goes from about 46th percentile to about 62nd percentile
Three's the Charm Part 3 goes from about 45th percentile to about 61st percentile

If this was a standardised exam system, that's like being pushed back up a couple of grades after the bullies are done shitting all over the exam papers. Just a shame that it's necessary at all. And of course the intent (for those who have any intent) is to punish authors, and one of the impacts is to give stories less exposure during the important post-release period when everybody's competing for eyeballs*.

*Which reminds me of my favourite ever short story, "Liane the Wayfarer" by Jack Vance, which is an erotic horror story, and where eyeballs are very much on the menu - the full text is here and at 3900 words it's totally worth your time IMHO.

 

[ElectricBlue]

So, lots of sweeps have happened over the past few days as the Valentine's Day contest winds up, and as far as I can tell the sweeps have been sitewide.

Yes, site wide. My current 750 word story has the same number of votes, but jumped from 4:3something to 4:47, just in the last few hours.

 

[Lifestyle66]

Yes, site wide. My current 750 word story has the same number of votes, but jumped from 4:3something to 4:47, just in the last few hours.

That might be due to a sweep.

My latest story was posted on Feb 1st, and between Monday and today, it lost at least a dozen votes (from 270 to now 2.58 this morning). And the average rate jumped from 3.44 to now 3.55. (And that's not bad for my writing in Loving Wives.)

 

[WCSGarland]

I have a new theory on all the 1 scores in LW. They are being left by people who scroll through their phone with their left hand instead of right hand.

 

[Bramblethorn]

As I said, I'm very happy to have improvements to my method proposed. Although I'm probably not going to repeat the process as there was some manual labour involved!

I did a similar analysis a couple of years ago, though not in as much detail: https://forum.literotica.com/threads/friendliest-category.1592036/#post-97294863

One thing I did there which I'd recommend for this kind of analysis is tweaking the search terms to exclude multi-chapter stories. All else being equal, if I post a story with 20 10k-word chapters, the later chapters will score higher than a stand-alone 10k-word story, because readers aren't going to stick with the longer story unless they really love it, so only the ones who are really into it are likely to be voting on later chapters.

Meanwhile, categories like LW get a lot of one-shot stories, whereas some others like SF/F often get stories with many chapters. This creates a confounding effect when you try to compare the two; if you don't take story length into account, some of the "LW readers are tougher than SF/F readers" that one might see in the data is actually just "longer stories score higher and SF/F gets more long stories".

Removing multi-chapter stories gets closer to an apples-to-apples comparison. IIRC when I did this, LW was still a tough category, but the difference between LW and categories like SF/F wasn't as big as it looked without adjusting for length.

(It's not a perfect way of adjusting for this, since a 200k-word story posted as a single piece still benefits from that long-story effect, but I think it's better than nothing.)

 

[Actingup]

I did a similar analysis a couple of years ago, though not in as much detail: https://forum.literotica.com/threads/friendliest-category.1592036/#post-97294863

One thing I did there which I'd recommend for this kind of analysis is tweaking the search terms to exclude multi-chapter stories. All else being equal, if I post a story with 20 10k-word chapters, the later chapters will score higher than a stand-alone 10k-word story, because readers aren't going to stick with the longer story unless they really love it, so only the ones who are really into it are likely to be voting on later chapters.

Meanwhile, categories like LW get a lot of one-shot stories, whereas some others like SF/F often get stories with many chapters. This creates a confounding effect when you try to compare the two; if you don't take story length into account, some of the "LW readers are tougher than SF/F readers" that one might see in the data is actually just "longer stories score higher and SF/F gets more long stories".

Removing multi-chapter stories gets closer to an apples-to-apples comparison. IIRC when I did this, LW was still a tough category, but the difference between LW and categories like SF/F wasn't as big as it looked without adjusting for length.

(It's not a perfect way of adjusting for this, since a 200k-word story posted as a single piece still benefits from that long-story effect, but I think it's better than nothing.)

Yeah, fair comment - thanks. Without access to the stories database there are limits to what can easily done, of course, but it would be interesting to see.

Mind you, I know that some people in LW will have the tenacity to follow a multi-part story so that they can say ‘nup - still hate it’!