The Dreaded 1* Vote

[0ra11yfix8ed]

Statistically speaking: what is the effect of the dreaded 1*? The answer is: not much!

As the author of more than one story on Literotica my reaction to that first 1* along with the obligatory demeaning comment was utter dismay. How could someone be so cruel?

I spent many hours on that first story and I was proud of my effort. I read and reread the story looking for errors. I used grammar check. I used spell check. I worked hard to tighten up the story and I concluded it with what I thought was a clever twist at the end.

What I learned was that the average Literotica reader doesn’t care about such things! The average Literotica reader is looking for a story that hits their personal hot button. Find that sweet spot and your story will earn a 5* and if you are lucky it will be favorited. If you are very lucky you will receive a comment or an email from a reader. On the other hand, some readers will be disgusted to the point of leaving an insulting comment and dissing you with the dreaded 1*. Why those readers are reading a story in a category they clearly do not care for is the topic of another discussion.

Without access to the data base it is impossible to intelligently discuss the voting patterns for typical stories. What we know is the mean vote. Another way to say that is average vote. The mean vote is the sum of the votes divided by the number of votes.

A more meaningful statistic would be the mode. The vote number that is most often represented in the data is the mode. Let’s say that a story gets exactly 100 votes and they are evenly distributed across all five possible choices. 20/1, 20/2, 20/3, 20/4, 20/5. The mean would be 3. The median (that vote that lies dead center in the sample) would also be 3. The mode would be meaningless because all five categories are equally represented.

We know that voting is not that evenly divided. The distribution is more likely to form a bell curve. 5/1, 15/2, 60/3, 15/4, 5/5. A simple bell curve demonstrates that some readers like the story a lot and some think it is horrible while most think it is just ok and could be better. In this case the vote most often recorded is 3. The mode is three. The mean and median are also 3 because the sum of the votes is the same.

What happens when a story is fairly well received? Let’s say the vote pattern is: 5/3, 5/2, 30/3, 60/4, 5/5. The mean is 3.62, the median is 4 and the mode is 4. Stories that have this pattern have more supporters than detractors. The low votes are balanced by they high votes and if the five lowest and five highest were disregarded the mean would only go up to 3.67!

What if a story is very well received and the pattern is 5/1, 0/2, 5/3, 25/4, 65/5! The mean (remember that is the average) is 4.45. The median and mode are both 5! If all the 1* votes in this example were 3* votes the mean would only rise by .1! Each 1* vote only drags down the rating by .02! So, statistically speaking the dreaded 1* has almost no affect on the vote score. Only in the case of a truly dreadful offering with loads of miss-spelled words, huge grammatical errors and a completely senseless plot would a story sink below the 2* level.



On a recent story, “Three for the Show,” the vote the first day averaged well below 3*. The current rating is above 4.5. Obviously the trolls who delight in insulting authors who make an effort to provide readers with an interesting story are in fact impotent! Their puny vote is in reality insignificant.

Furthermore, I believe that there may only be a very small number of trolls who often comment multiple times to give the appearance of a large number of voters when, in fact, there may only be one or two.

At the end of the day it is best to embrace them and take pride in provoking such vitriol!!!!! In their own way they are fans and while their opinions are not shared by the vast majority of voters at least they vote. The saddest fact of all is that very few readers bother to vote at all and even fewer are inspired to leave a comment!

I feel much better now.

 

[lovecraft68]

You have a good attitude about it and for the most part you're right, they mean nothing and the site more often than not will sweep some of them away for you.

The only damage I think they can do is with the readers that do only search stories by score and only want to read top list stories or stories with Red H's which is why so much gamesmanship goes on with scores with some people.

Truth is, the people that only read by score are losing out. I've read some great stories here that were in the high threes and a couple even lower.

But that's the effect-other than personally upsetting the author-that the bombers are looking for, trying to get people to not read a story or author they don't like.

 

[Kantarii]

A (1) vote really only has weight when there are fewer votes on the board for the story. If only two votes are cast ( one (1) & one (5) ) then the score would still be (3). So early on the (1) vote dropped the score 50%. That's micro analyzing shit too much.

I put more weight on the comments, which is fewer and further between than the voting.

I only use the (2,3,& 4) votes. Why? 1 & 5 are extremes. Is someone actually that horrible or great of a writer? Are children writing here? Is Stephen King writing here. The answer is "no".

I'm willing to bet less than 1% of the members here on this site are writer enthusiasts and consider themselves writers. The other 99% are various levels of skill based novice to seasoned writers with some grasp of "storytelling" sure grammar, spelling,and punctuation play a huge part, but that is only a small part of storytelling. What about character development, mood, plot, the flow of the story, the action/ drama/ suspense/ comical / and or historical factors?

I rarely vote, but when I do I keep the voting in the middle scope of (2,3,& 4) alas, most readers don't have my way of thinking after they have read a story. Slap a vote on it and move on.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

A (1) vote really only has weight when there are fewer votes on the board for the story. If only two votes are cast ( one (1) & one (5) ) then the score would still be (3). So early on the (1) vote dropped the score 50%. That's micro analyzing shit too much.

I put more weight on the comments, which is fewer and further between than the voting.

I only use the (2,3,& 4) votes. Why? 1 & 5 are extremes. Is someone actually that horrible or great of a writer? Are children writing here? Is Stephen King writing here. The answer is "no".

I'm willing to bet less than 1% of the members here on this site are writer enthusiasts and consider themselves writers. The other 99% are various levels of skill based novice to seasoned writers with some grasp of "storytelling" sure grammar, spelling,and punctuation play a huge part, but that is only a small part of storytelling. What about character development, mood, plot, the flow of the story, the action/ drama/ suspense/ comical / and or historical factors?

I rarely vote, but when I do I keep the voting in the middle scope of (2,3,& 4) alas, most readers don't have my way of thinking after they have read a story. Slap a vote on it and move on.

stroke don't need no character development or plot. it don't even need a story.

and that's what a lot of readers are here for.

 

[geronimo_appleby]

Statistically speaking: what is the effect of the dreaded 1*? The answer is: not much!

As the author of more than one story on Literotica my reaction to that first 1* along with the obligatory demeaning comment was utter dismay. How could someone be so cruel?

I spent many hours on that first story and I was proud of my effort. I read and reread the story looking for errors. I used grammar check. I used spell check. I worked hard to tighten up the story and I concluded it with what I thought was a clever twist at the end.

What I learned was that the average Literotica reader doesn’t care about such things! The average Literotica reader is looking for a story that hits their personal hot button. Find that sweet spot and your story will earn a 5* and if you are lucky it will be favorited. If you are very lucky you will receive a comment or an email from a reader. On the other hand, some readers will be disgusted to the point of leaving an insulting comment and dissing you with the dreaded 1*. Why those readers are reading a story in a category they clearly do not care for is the topic of another discussion.

Without access to the data base it is impossible to intelligently discuss the voting patterns for typical stories. What we know is the mean vote. Another way to say that is average vote. The mean vote is the sum of the votes divided by the number of votes.

A more meaningful statistic would be the mode. The vote number that is most often represented in the data is the mode. Let’s say that a story gets exactly 100 votes and they are evenly distributed across all five possible choices. 20/1, 20/2, 20/3, 20/4, 20/5. The mean would be 3. The median (that vote that lies dead center in the sample) would also be 3. The mode would be meaningless because all five categories are equally represented.

We know that voting is not that evenly divided. The distribution is more likely to form a bell curve. 5/1, 15/2, 60/3, 15/4, 5/5. A simple bell curve demonstrates that some readers like the story a lot and some think it is horrible while most think it is just ok and could be better. In this case the vote most often recorded is 3. The mode is three. The mean and median are also 3 because the sum of the votes is the same.

What happens when a story is fairly well received? Let’s say the vote pattern is: 5/3, 5/2, 30/3, 60/4, 5/5. The mean is 3.62, the median is 4 and the mode is 4. Stories that have this pattern have more supporters than detractors. The low votes are balanced by they high votes and if the five lowest and five highest were disregarded the mean would only go up to 3.67!

What if a story is very well received and the pattern is 5/1, 0/2, 5/3, 25/4, 65/5! The mean (remember that is the average) is 4.45. The median and mode are both 5! If all the 1* votes in this example were 3* votes the mean would only rise by .1! Each 1* vote only drags down the rating by .02! So, statistically speaking the dreaded 1* has almost no affect on the vote score. Only in the case of a truly dreadful offering with loads of miss-spelled words, huge grammatical errors and a completely senseless plot would a story sink below the 2* level.



On a recent story, “Three for the Show,” the vote the first day averaged well below 3*. The current rating is above 4.5. Obviously the trolls who delight in insulting authors who make an effort to provide readers with an interesting story are in fact impotent! Their puny vote is in reality insignificant.

Furthermore, I believe that there may only be a very small number of trolls who often comment multiple times to give the appearance of a large number of voters when, in fact, there may only be one or two.

At the end of the day it is best to embrace them and take pride in provoking such vitriol!!!!! In their own way they are fans and while their opinions are not shared by the vast majority of voters at least they vote. The saddest fact of all is that very few readers bother to vote at all and even fewer are inspired to leave a comment!

I feel much better now.

let the vitriol flow!

https://www.literotica.com/s/the-lw-troll

 

[lovecraft68]

let the vitriol flow!

https://www.literotica.com/s/the-lw-troll

I feel like I know this person of whom you speak

 

[NotWise]

Statistically speaking: what is the effect of the dreaded 1*? The answer is: not much!

I'm a nerd, so I do things like this.

The effect depends on how many votes you have and what the score is. If I have a new story up and my first 9 votes are 5* and the 10th vote is 1*, then that knocks the average down by 0.4. That can change the perception of possible readers.

There are a few other things you can say about voting. For any given combination of votes and average score there are generally quite a few permutations of votes that will get you the same result. If you regard each permutation as equally probably, then you can construct a likely distribution of the votes.

For instance, one of my stories has all of 23 votes (net after site sweeps, since like last December!) and a score of 3.83. There are 218 unique combinations of votes that could get that result, and they're distributed as:

1* 1.55
2* 2.25
3* 3.55
4* 6.96
5* 8.69.

The actual combination that comes closest to that distribution is

1* 2
2* 2
3* 3
4* 7
5* 9

The votes on this story came in so slowly that I have a pretty good understanding of the actual distribution. It is (at least approximately):

1* 3
2* 3
3* 0
4* 6
5* 11

I've tracked the voting on several stories now, and it is common for them to have a mode of 5* and a gap in the middle of the distribution, making them more extreme than the theoretical distribution.

Having a mode of 5* doesn't tell me much about the readers' response. I once had a story scoring near 3; the most common vote was 5*, the second most common vote was 1*. That was because I posted the story to the wrong category. The usual readers of that category were offended and bombed it. The general population liked it.

The gap in the middle of the distribution makes me believe that voters fall into two communities; the regular voters who give an honest response, and the haters. The haters (even if they comment) aren't usually telling you much about your story, and their motivation (except in the case above) might be hard to understand.

From what I've seen, if you have a score near three the votes are probably more-or-less symmetrically distributed, but you don't know whether you have a mode of 3* (it seems unlikely) or whether you have roughly equal high and low votes. If the score is much above 3* then the mode is probably 5*.

The way the permutations work out (with 30 votes), the mode shifts with the score. A score of 2.41 or less has a mode of 1; a score from 2.42 to 2.78 has mode of 2; a score from 2.79 to 3.21 has a model of 3; a score from 3.22 to 3.58 has a mode of 4 and a score of 3.59 or more has a mode of 5.

 

[Kantarii]

Is someone foolish to believe what they write will be accepted and appreciated by everyone that reads the story? I think not! The votes are gonna fall how they are gonna fall. If the voting bothers some people, then maybe they should post elsewhere or not post the stories at all. Simple answers for simple issues.

 

[coldwater1]

Depends how you look at it

Statistically speaking: what is the effect of the dreaded 1*? The answer is: not much!

(snip)

I feel much better now.

Here's another way to think of it that may have you not feeling so accepting of that 1* vote. The higher your current score is on a story, the more it takes to overcome a 1* vote.

If you have a story right on that red H line, and someone dumps a 1* on you, it takes 7 votes of 5* to get your score back to where you were.

Should you happen to be fortunate enough to have a story that is up at 4.90 it takes 39 votes of 5* to offset one 1* vote.

Looked at that way, that 1* vote can have long reaching effects on a high rated story.

That's why I have rolled my eyes when I have seen discussion on other threads about a 5* balancing a 1* vote, resulting in no net effect. Not true unless the story is only rated at a 3

 

[Hypoxia]

I used to be anal about scoring. My spreadsheets tracked views, votes, and scores for stories, series, categories, etc. Then I got one-bombed to shit and lost many Red-H's.

I re-evaluated my goals on LIT. Did I really want to collect brownie points? I noticed that most of my high-score stories had fewer views. My lowest-scored pieces had the most views and comments. Those stories had been read and had affected readers enough for them to respond. I punched button, for good or ill.

I decided that I cared less about scores than about eyeballs. I now try to write to grab the most eyeballs. The score I care most about is favorites. When dozens fave a new story, and a legacy story is faved every day or two, I am happy.

One-bombing clarified my intentions.

As is evident from above discussion, authors cannot really do much to affect voting. Write formulaic stuff that punches the right buttons in a low-views category and you'll get big votes -- from all the 250 people who bothered to read it. Something unorthodox might get low votes -- but be seen by 100,000+. Which do you prefer?

 

[sr71plt]

For a thread posing that scoring doesn't mean much, I'm seeing several posters who are putting a lot of effort into it.

 

[oggbashan]

The red H for 4.5 or higher has significance on the New Story lists.

Once a story is no longer 'New' a red H can help if a reader has searched for a tag.

But if a reader likes one or two of your stories, then I don't think it matters whether the other stories have a red H or not.

A 1 bomb only has impact because the bar for HOT is 4.5. IF the voting had a norm of 3.00 for an average competent story, then 1 votes wouldn't matter. But the reality is that the scale isn't equal. Any vote lower than a 4 impacts on whether a story retains its red H.

But I don't think every reader appreciates that. They could think that a 3 is an average story, a 4 for good or better than average, and a 5 is exceptionally good.

 

[NotWise]

Any vote lower than a 4 impacts on whether a story retains its red H

Any vote lower than a 5 can knock the score below 4.5.

 

[Kantarii]

The red H for 4.5 or higher has significance on the New Story lists.

Once a story is no longer 'New' a red H can help if a reader has searched for a tag.

But if a reader likes one or two of your stories, then I don't think it matters whether the other stories have a red H or not.

A 1 bomb only has impact because the bar for HOT is 4.5. IF the voting had a norm of 3.00 for an average competent story, then 1 votes wouldn't matter. But the reality is that the scale isn't equal. Any vote lower than a 4 impacts on whether a story retains its red H.

But I don't think every reader appreciates that. They could think that a 3 is an average story, a 4 for good or better than average, and a 5 is exceptionally good.

That is how I translate the scoring
1=dislike
2=so-so
3= good
4= very good
5= excellent

I don't consider the rating of a story at all until I read it. Like book reviews, why should someone else's opinion on the story affect how I feel about it? If that were the case, I'd own every bestselling book out there and share the same opinions about the stories.

 

[oggbashan]

That is how I translate the scoring
1=dislike
2=so-so
3= good
4= very good
5= excellent

I don't consider the rating of a story at all until I read it. Like book reviews, why should someone else's opinion on the story affect how I feel about it? If that were the case, I'd own every bestselling book out there and share the same opinions about the stories.

If you do, and everyone else thought like that too, then no story would get a red H.

Every vote you make, based on your version of the scale, damages a story's rating.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

The effect depends on how many votes you have and what the score is. If I have a new story up and my first 9 votes are 5* and the 10th vote is 1*, then that knocks the average down by 0.4. That can change the perception of possible readers.
...

As noted many times: 1 bombs don't matter in the long run because one bombers are rare and the arithmetic of averages dilutes them down to nothing in the end.

But that's the long run. The problem is that early one bombs make your score plummet just when it has the best chance of getting noticed - when it's on the new list. If a story capable of getting a 4.7 in honest voting is dragged down to 4.2, people skip it and it might never get enough votes to recover, or at least not for months or years. One bombs can make the long run MUCH longer.

There's also the autosuggestive quality of existing scores. If a story has a 3.9, people reading it go in expecting it's at best a 4.0 kind of story, and are less likely to assign a 5.

Scores don't matter unless you want your stories read.

I'm not too worried about this effect - I have my little circle of fans, and they're willing to read anything I post. The group grows slowly over time. I'm not asking for more, so it's all good. But if/when I do the sprint towards being a published author, I'd expect to be a lot more angry.

 

[NotWise]

That is how I translate the scoring
1=dislike
2=so-so
3= good
4= very good
5= excellent

That's pretty much how the site describes the scale and some people use it that way. I doubt that is very common, though. It asks the reader to subdivide their opinion too much.

A few months ago someone posted a cartoon from elsewhere on the web that described what a 5-point score system meant. I agreed with the cartoonist. It goes like this:

5* Liked it
4* Meh
3* Didn't like it
2* Didn't like it
1* Didn't like it

1* and 3* votes have the same content, but people will vote 1*, not so much as an opinion of the story, but for reasons unrelated to the story, to insult the author, to manipulate the score and so on.

I don't vote on a story unless I read the whole thing, and I don't finish stories that don't entertain me. As a result, I've never given a score below 4*.

 

[Kantarii]

That's pretty much how the site describes the scale and some people use it that way. I doubt that is very common, though.

5* Liked it
4* Meh
3* Didn't like it
2* Didn't like it
1* Didn't like it

*******************
Haha...... Kinda cracks me up. Maybe I should reinterpret the 5 star rating into my own factious terms

5-I boosted the author's ego.
4-the author's good, but I have read better.
3-really? the author bothered posting this?
2-I read some of it; I won't say I read all of it.
1-I didn't waste my time reading; I just voted.

 

[Carnal_Flower]

Same here. If I've finished and voted, you've almost always got a 5.

I don't vote on a story unless I read the whole thing, and I don't finish stories that don't entertain me. As a result, I've never given a score below 4*.

 

[sr71plt]

5* Liked it
4* Meh
3* Didn't like it
2* Didn't like it
1* Didn't like it

That's my impression of the voting system here, although I think a refinement could be:

2* I didn't read it; I'm just trolling it and don't want the number to be swept
1* I didn't read it; I'm trolling it as hard as I can.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

Same here. If I've finished and voted, you've almost always got a 5.

Meh, no. On the rare times I read, I'll give a 5, a 4 or a 2. I don't typically give 1s because if it's that bad I didn't finish, and I think I only gave a 3 once. My scale:

5 This really is excellent. Are you secretly me? I hope so. At the very least I want to be you when I grow up. (Lord of the Rings; the Matrix)

4 This isn't bad. I see flaws but I enjoyed it anyway, so you rock. (Guns of Navarone; Babylon 5, Firefly)

3 This.. meh. It's just not good. You had a good idea, but it somehow ended up dying a hideous death on page three. Why did you bother? Why did *I* bother? (50 shades; Independence Day)

2 Seriously, take some classes or something. You're clueless. Seriously clueless. I finished it only so I could vote and leave a pointed comment. Please don't do this again. You're an embarrassment. (Twilight; Farscape)

1 You're not simply stupid, you're confused and proud of it. You're so incompetent you think you're competent. If you knew how disturbingly awful you were you'd break your fingers so you could never write again. Have you looked into lobotomies? (Eye of Argon, Trump speeches; Manos)

 

[Sammael Bard]

I don't remember voting a 2 or 3 star. I've voted a 5*, a 4* and (yes, I admit) the notorious 1*. Most of the time, I never reach the end of a story, so I don't vote at all. If it doesn't interest me, I don't read.

5* and 4* have been for those stories which have been 'too good to be true' and 'very well done'.

1* for an extremely short piece of god-knows-what crap. I'm not a grammar nazi but if you're writing English, I expect people to not molest it like a dime store hooker. I can forgive people for creating characters with 30JJJ tits, monster chernobyl sized dicks and having a hymen right near the cervix. Really, I can. But the grammar, I can't.

Also, I like the non - consent /reluctance category, but downright rape, brutal murders and paedophilia is a strict no.

Thankfully, there aren't many stories like that. Most of what I've come across are the ones that Laurel has missed.

I think the entire notion of authors whining (too strong a word, but I can't think of an alternative) about something they cannot control is absurd. Once it is out there, you have no control over the score. So getting upset about it is... a waste of emotions (?)

Also, most readers aren't pro critics. A high vote can give you bragging rights on the forum playground, and even after that it isn't worth a damn.

So,

Stop. Worrying. About. The. Damn. Score.


(Note to self: Next time, I think I'll just copy - paste my response every time a thread like this crops up)

 

[Bramblethorn]

Without access to the data base it is impossible to intelligently discuss the voting patterns for typical stories. What we know is the mean vote. Another way to say that is average vote. The mean vote is the sum of the votes divided by the number of votes.

A more meaningful statistic would be the mode. The vote number that is most often represented in the data is the mode. Let’s say that a story gets exactly 100 votes and they are evenly distributed across all five possible choices. 20/1, 20/2, 20/3, 20/4, 20/5. The mean would be 3. The median (that vote that lies dead center in the sample) would also be 3. The mode would be meaningless because all five categories are equally represented.

Median and mode work well in many applications but they're not really suited to a 1-5 rating system, especially when ratings skew heavily towards 5s. They're just too lumpy; they can only deliver five possible ratings, and even within those you're not likely to see many 1s, 2s, or 3s.

Any story with a red 'H' has at least 50% 5s. Median and mode for that story will be 5.0, so they're useless for distinguishing between a "pretty good" story that got a 4.51 average and an outstanding one that got 4.90.

We know that voting is not that evenly divided. The distribution is more likely to form a bell curve.

Many statistical distributions do follow a bell curve (c.f. Central Limit Theorem) but that depends on certain conditions that aren't applicable here. If you watch averages as the votes come in, you can get a good idea of how people are voting (at least for the first ~ 100 votes) and in my experience, it doesn't resemble a bell curve.

 

[i_would]

I pretty much only ever vote 4-5, rarely 3, never lower.

The simple reason is that in case of those lower rated stories, I don't get further than one or two paragraphs in, and the scoring comes at the end of the story. Something that I just don't get to. So in the ends my votes work kinda like Facebook's "Like", a vote of approval.

For grammar/spelling issues: some stories I dropped because of that, or gave a lower score because of it (and added a comment). I don't mind the occasional spelling or grammar error - especially with all those homophones in English - but not one glaring error every sentence or two. That's getting distracting.

 

[astuffedshirt_perv]

As I noted in an earlier post , votes and therefore ratings can change dramatically for the exact same story posted at a different time, in a different category or with a different title. I have found 11 stories that were posted twice, and mean spread (between the lower score and the higher score) was 0.19. One way of interpreting this is your score is X.XX +- 0.19. See the my post for the details.