The Problem with Literotica

[AwkwardlySet]

Hey, your on-duty critic is here to entertain you with one more fun thread. I say fun even though the issue is quite serious. Well, for some, at least. We all know the incredible solidarity AH shows in these matters.

I was gonna post this in Em's thread about reporting delays, but then I thought this certainly deserves a dedicated thread. It was first meant as a reply to @iwatchus 's post in that thread:

I agree that it seems likely that the pendings are largely manual reviews that stopped happening in a timely manner.

I'll just paste the reply I wanted to make to his post:

It does seem logical, but that wouldn't explain the problem with long-pending stories that gets resolved by resubmitting.

So at the very least, there's a gargantuan queue that has built up for stories awaiting manual review, even if I'm not entirely sure Laurel still does those. But besides that annoyance, there's the black hole of pending that affects a number of stories, which apparently gets resolved instantly by resubmitting.

This leads me to believe that there's a serious glitch in the system that eats stories. The trouble with it is that we can NEVER be sure whether our stories actually need a manual review, OR we had the bad luck to be affected by the black hole for the second or third time after resubmitting. I have that very problem right now with my story.
We don't know the incidence of such cases and the probability of that glitch happening. We'd need to resubmit like ten times to be statistically sure that our stories are stuck because they actually need to be manually reviewed. And that's easily over a month of pointless waiting.

There's another, perhaps simpler explanation, simpler because it only requires one problem rather than two. That explanation would be that Laurel's method is consistently inconsistent, that it can flag a submitted story, but that the same and unaltered story could avoid the flag after resubmission, and thus misleading us about the nature of the problems that Lit has.

As you can see, the most FUNDAMENTAL problem of all is the same old lack of communication from Laurel and Manu. If we knew where the problem lies, we could act accordingly and avoid much of the frustration that comes with submitting a story. There would be far fewer problems and less waiting time for all. How hard is it to make one clarifying post?

Regardless of what the actual problem is, it's clear once again that Laurel simply doesn't care about the effect her process has on authors. This is a free site, sure, and many will say that they aren't paying for any service here, even though some of us would disagree about that.

But I'll repeat one more time: Paying or not paying, this is no damn way to treat people who come here in good faith to share their stories. Shame on you, @Laurel and @Manu.

 

[sirhugs]

bite the hand that feeds you much?
we might not get paid, but some of us get a lot of satisfaction here. In return, IMHO, we should show some loyalty.

 

[ChuckWolf]

Honestly, considering the volume of entries and limited manpower, I'm surprised the site works as well as it does.

My only concern, and it's a selfish one, is that Laurel & Manu have back up measures to keep the site running.

 

[Feathered2Orgasm]

I still get: "Can't open the page, too many redirects"
Quite frustrating when all I'm trying to do is navigate through the forum.

 

[StillStunned]

I still get: "Can't open the page, too many redirects"
Quite frustrating when all I'm trying to do is navigate through the forum.

I had some luck opening the site in Private Browsing (or Secret mode, or Incognito mode, or whatever).

 

[big_cane_sugar]

Is it really true that only two people personally read every single story submitted? That must be an overwhelming task. If true, I need to waste less of their time lol...

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Is it really true that only two people personally read every single story submitted? That must be an overwhelming task. If true, I need to waste less of their time lol...

That's almost certainly not true. It could be that only one or two people are in charge of approving our submissions, but that doesn't mean they actually read them. There are only so many hours in a day.
All of this is speculation, based on logic and experience.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

I think I've said before but I will repeat (or say for the first time if it was only in my head): What I think could resolve some of this would be having a volunteer community manager. Someone who can be in on the conversations, on what's going on behind the scenes, but who is NOT doing that work behind the scenes. That person could then be the one who responds to these sorts of situations, even if it is just to say that the powers that be are aware of the issue and are workign on it while still trying to keep as much running as possible.

I just picture someone trying to keep the ship running not having as much time to plug the leaks as they could, but plugging them as best they can and as many as they can to keep things afloat. Adding on the communication element would mean not doing something else, but it's possible the "company" for lack of a better word simply can't afford hiring someone (hence the need for a volunteer).

But getting someone to volunteer to do such a task would be hard - it would be a thankless and very time intensive position - there are always more questions and not everyone will like the answers, that's just the nature of the beast. How many of us could do that, and would do that? And of those of us who could/would, how many go on to be qualified to do it? It's a very narrow pool and even interviewing for it would mean stopping something unti you find someone. It's a downward spiral.

The only other solution I can think of is pressing pause. Announcing what would hopefully be a brief period of time when no one could submit anything new and clearing out the backlog. Then reaching out to those who have indicated they have a stuck submission for documentation of the problem and getting those resolved, squishing the bug that may have caused it in the process. Get the queue empty before opening things back up and debug whatever is causing this issue. This, of course, will flood the submission pool as soon as it is opened (because folks won't necessarily stop writing) but would also allow for fixing some of those holes a bit more thoroughly.

Other than communication, responding to posts on the forums, I wonder what other solutions folks can think of.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I think I've said before but I will repeat (or say for the first time if it was only in my head): What I think could resolve some of this would be having a volunteer community manager. Someone who can be in on the conversations, on what's going on behind the scenes, but who is NOT doing that work behind the scenes. That person could then be the one who responds to these sorts of situations, even if it is just to say that the powers that be are aware of the issue and are workign on it while still trying to keep as much running as possible.

I just picture someone trying to keep the ship running not having as much time to plug the leaks as they could, but plugging them as best they can and as many as they can to keep things afloat. Adding on the communication element would mean not doing something else, but it's possible the "company" for lack of a better word simply can't afford hiring someone (hence the need for a volunteer).

But getting someone to volunteer to do such a task would be hard - it would be a thankless and very time intensive position - there are always more questions and not everyone will like the answers, that's just the nature of the beast. How many of us could do that, and would do that? And of those of us who could/would, how many go on to be qualified to do it? It's a very narrow pool and even interviewing for it would mean stopping something unti you find someone. It's a downward spiral.

The only other solution I can think of is pressing pause. Announcing what would hopefully be a brief period of time when no one could submit anything new and clearing out the backlog. Then reaching out to those who have indicated they have a stuck submission for documentation of the problem and getting those resolved, squishing the bug that may have caused it in the process. Get the queue empty before opening things back up and debug whatever is causing this issue. This, of course, will flood the submission pool as soon as it is opened (because folks won't necessarily stop writing) but would also allow for fixing some of those holes a bit more thoroughly.

Other than communication, responding to posts on the forums, I wonder what other solutions folks can think of.

There are people already who act like Lit's spokespeople, so I think we've got volunteers covered. But that person/persons would at least need to have an actual channel of communication with Laurel for your idea to work. I don't think we need a formal person to feed us the same slop about how we imagine Lit works.

By the way, there's no universe in which one can claim that they don't have the time to put up a simple notification or a guide for some fundamental and very obvious problems Lit has. Such a notification/clarification would actually reduce their workload considerably.

 

[ronde]

Is it really true that only two people personally read every single story submitted? That must be an overwhelming task. If true, I need to waste less of their time lol...

I don't think for a second that any one person reads every single story from start to finish. As far as I know, the status of story review is the same as it's been since the site began. Laurel personally approves all stories and Manu takes care of the technical stuff.

The only change I've seen since my first story in 2001 is that Laurel now has some software that alerts her to possible deviations from the site rules. It appears to automatically generate a rejection which appears in your home page and also on the works page as a number in the "held back" category.

I have served as an administrator for a similar site for two years. It was a much smaller site as far as submissions, but I still did not have time to read each one. I did what I suspect Laurel does. I scanned the first line or two of each paragraph looking for key words or phrases that violated the site rules. Since over 100 stories a day get published, I do not see how she could do any more. Yes, she might err occasionally, but very few of us are perfect at everything we do.

Laurel will communicate if you play nice. I have had one story that seemed to be taking more than my normal lag time of 2-4 days. I sent a PM asking her to look at it if she had the time. The next day, that story was published. I have had one story that somehow got truncated between my submission and publication. A short PM asking Laurel to look at resulted in that story being re-published in full and a short not back from Laurel.

From what I've read on this forum, writing a PM accusing her of doing something wrong will guarantee you'll get no response. My guess is none of us would respond to such a PM either. We have better things to do than try to explain why something didn't go the way the author of the PM wanted.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Laurel will communicate if you play nice. I have had one story that seemed to be taking more than my normal lag time of 2-4 days. I sent a PM asking her to look at it if she had the time. The next day, that story was published. I have had one story that somehow got truncated between my submission and publication. A short PM asking Laurel to look at resulted in that story being re-published in full and a short not back from Laurel.

From what I've read on this forum, writing a PM accusing her of doing something wrong will guarantee you'll get no response. My guess is none of us would respond to such a PM either. We have better things to do than try to explain why something didn't go the way the author of the PM wanted.

Thank you for this typical AH response.

So, if Laurel isn't answering our PMs, that's because we aren't asking nicely, that's all. We are just rude people, the lot of us.
Even all those veteran authors, who are likely to criticize this thread, but who have also said numerous times that Laurel used to respond to them, but now rarely does, even they are clearly all rude.
I've never been rude in a PM to her, yet I've had no response from her for like a year and a half, at least. I guess I'm simply not in her fangroup.

This is just a blatant example of the attitude we've seen here too many times. It's people for whom Literotica is working as intended, convincing all the rest who are experiencing serious problems that it's their fault, that Lit is working just fine (because THEY aren't having problems, duh!), and that we are all just rude, blind, cheating with AI, can't tell if our stories are pending or in draft, and so on.

 

[MillieDynamite]

@AwkwardlySet, calm down. I'm sure @ronde wasn't intending to be a gigantic ass.

 

[cw5523729]

Thank you for this typical AH response.

Maybe this is the one you've been looking for:

The one person who could answer your question(s) doesn't care to

The one person approving stories approved over 100 today (I was too lazy to count exactly)

If 20 or 30 get lost in the mix somewhere, that sucks for you (assuming yours was one of them) but has zero effect on the readership that brings in the ad and/or sex toy sales revenue.

If those 20 or 30 people have to delete and resubmit to get through, then it inconveniences you but not Laurel.

Since it's physically impossible for 1 person to read every line in these stories, I'm sure that lots of automated tools are being used to weed stuff out. Do those tools have lots of false positives? No doubt. Would that make the 1 person doing the reading abandon that system and instead approve 5 stories per day instead of 100? Doubtful. And if 95% of the stories were getting buried, I'm also doubtful that would somehow make people MORE happy.

Could Laurel hire a bunch of people to do the work? Sure. Sadly, people cost money.

Could she outsource the work to volunteers? Sure. Sadly, volunteer labor is hit or miss and runs the risk of stuff getting approved that she wouldn't want. Given the list of absolute no-nos that Lit has, I'm sure that's a concern.

tl;dr - tough titty said the kitty

 

[Actingup]

The problem is governance, and communication is a sub-problem. Literotica is effectively a sole trader with no board, shareholders, corporate structure, succession planning, scalability, or engagement strategy. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a reality in the same way that going down to the corner shop to buy a newspaper and having a good or bad experience is a reality. The success of the business is dependent on the ability of the owners to run their business within the constraints of their structure.

Since the site has been around for decades and grown so much, it obviously has succeeded, with the support of many fans and much volunteer labour. Just as clearly, it can’t last forever. We don’t know if the Kodak moment of no return has already happened because we can’t see inside the back room of the shop, but there are enough red flags to make us worry.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Laurel will communicate if you play nice. I have had one story that seemed to be taking more than my normal lag time of 2-4 days. I sent a PM asking her to look at it if she had the time. The next day, that story was published. I have had one story that somehow got truncated between my submission and publication. A short PM asking Laurel to look at resulted in that story being re-published in full and a short not back from Laurel.

This is my experience, too.

From what I've read on this forum, writing a PM accusing her of doing something wrong will guarantee you'll get no response. My guess is none of us would respond to such a PM either. We have better things to do than try to explain why something didn't go the way the author of the PM wanted.

Agree this, too.

I suspect also, from observations over the years, that Laurel does browse the AH, and to assume that she doesn't is foolish.

But we're obviously fanboys, so any observation we make can't be right. Shrug.

 

[SamanthaBehgs]

There are people already who act like Lit's spokespeople, so I think we've got volunteers covered. But that person/persons would at least need to have an actual channel of communication with Laurel for your idea to work. I don't think we need a formal person to feed us the same slop about how we imagine Lit works.

That's a good point - the volunteers may be covered in a way I hadn't considered. BUT this system will only work the way I was imagining it if they are "official" and have an actual view into the back room, so to speak. Otherwise, what you have is imagining how it works instead of knowing how it works, and suggesting what could be going on instead of knowing what's actually going on. I think that's a big difference.

By the way, there's no universe in which one can claim that they don't have the time to put up a simple notification or a guide for some fundamental and very obvious problems Lit has. Such a notification/clarification would actually reduce their workload considerably.

This I disagree with. I've worked in that universe. I've been in jobs where just that very thing, a carefully crafted message intended to be understood by the masses and not misinterpreted in predictable ways, takes time and energy. Would having those sorts of messages reduce workload? Absolutey. But I disagree that they don't take time and energy away from other tasks.

The thing I don't know - are we actually in a situation where time and energy are maxed out. It feels like we are, but I have no way of knowing. I have no view into the "back room."

 

[MillieDynamite]

No, I don't think that's true. Your observations are your observations, and others have had experiences that don't conform to yours. Some of them have also made respectful requests, while others have made no request, and some have probably been less than polite. I haven't had but one story that took forever; it was eventually sent back with a tag indicating suspected AI assistance or something similar. I sent a message to Laural that I hadn't used AI and would have my editor eventually go through it to see what he could fix. She said she looked forward to the resubmission. I haven't bothered with a story that's making money for me; to fix it here seems unnecessary.

This is my experience, too.

Agree this, too.

I suspect also, from observations over the years, that Laurel does browse the AH, and to assume that she doesn't is foolish.

But we're obviously fanboys, so any observation we make can't be right. Shrug.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

This is my experience, too.

Agree this, too.

I suspect also, from observations over the years, that Laurel does browse the AH, and to assume that she doesn't is foolish.

But we're obviously fanboys, so any observation we make can't be right. Shrug.

Of course you are fanboys. But I'm not dismissing you for being one. There were things he was implying that needed a response.

Anyway, I think it would have been fair if you said "Laurel used to respond to polite PMs." We both know things have changed since the coming of AI and the increased load of stories and scrutiny.
So now, when she's all but unreachable privately, she should at least be forthcoming with forum notifications and guides. People are kept in the dark and are trying to figure things out by trial and error, and that's quite costly when done with stories that take months to be written.

 

[cw5523729]

I suspect also, from observations over the years, that Laurel does browse the AH, and to assume that she doesn't is foolish.

So this hypothetical list everyone keeps mentioning might have a lot of different names, and a very different purpose, than what many are assuming...?

 

[AwkwardlySet]

So this hypothetical list everyone keeps mentioning might have a lot of different names, and a very different purpose, than what many are assuming...?

Well, since there's nothing else to be said except speculation, I'd assume that there's a whitelist - a list of authors whose submissions barely get a glance before being approved. There should also be a "greylist", a list of authors who are yet to prove they are "trustworthy," and a blacklist - a list of authors who've already been "caught" breaking Literotica's guidelines.

And if she truly reads the forum, there's a high likelihood of a category beyond the blacklist, one named AwkwardlySet.

 

[SmilingLez]

Hey, your on-duty critic is here to entertain you with one more fun thread. I say fun even though the issue is quite serious. Well, for some, at least. We all know the incredible solidarity AH shows in these matters.

I was gonna post this in Em's thread about reporting delays, but then I thought this certainly deserves a dedicated thread. It was first meant as a reply to @iwatchus 's post in that thread:


I'll just paste the reply I wanted to make to his post:

It does seem logical, but that wouldn't explain the problem with long-pending stories that gets resolved by resubmitting.

So at the very least, there's a gargantuan queue that has built up for stories awaiting manual review, even if I'm not entirely sure Laurel still does those. But besides that annoyance, there's the black hole of pending that affects a number of stories, which apparently gets resolved instantly by resubmitting.

This leads me to believe that there's a serious glitch in the system that eats stories. The trouble with it is that we can NEVER be sure whether our stories actually need a manual review, OR we had the bad luck to be affected by the black hole for the second or third time after resubmitting. I have that very problem right now with my story.
We don't know the incidence of such cases and the probability of that glitch happening. We'd need to resubmit like ten times to be statistically sure that our stories are stuck because they actually need to be manually reviewed. And that's easily over a month of pointless waiting.

There's another, perhaps simpler explanation, simpler because it only requires one problem rather than two. That explanation would be that Laurel's method is consistently inconsistent, that it can flag a submitted story, but that the same and unaltered story could avoid the flag after resubmission, and thus misleading us about the nature of the problems that Lit has.

As you can see, the most FUNDAMENTAL problem of all is the same old lack of communication from Laurel and Manu. If we knew where the problem lies, we could act accordingly and avoid much of the frustration that comes with submitting a story. There would be far fewer problems and less waiting time for all. How hard is it to make one clarifying post?

Regardless of what the actual problem is, it's clear once again that Laurel simply doesn't care about the effect her process has on authors. This is a free site, sure, and many will say that they aren't paying for any service here, even though some of us would disagree about that.

But I'll repeat one more time: Paying or not paying, this is no damn way to treat people who come here in good faith to share their stories. Shame on you, @Laurel and @Manu.

There is 1 other possibility, it is a glitch that cannot be duplicated with consistency. Therefore Manu/Laurel really can't say with absolute certainty that the CMS is buggy. My non erotic story has been in pending purgatory now for 18 days

 

[ElectricBlue]

So this hypothetical list everyone keeps mentioning might have a lot of different names, and a very different purpose, than what many are assuming...?

I've always suspected she keeps her eyes on the pulse, but what she does with it, I don't know.

If I was the site administrator, I know what my response to the AHery would be.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to get the vibe, and who's going to say what. We're all extremely predictable, and it's easy to see who weighs in on what, and how frequently they do it. Even someone new, like yourself, gets a slot and a road speed. It doesn't take long. Welcome aboard, by the way .

 

[Kelliezgirl]

There is 1 other possibility, it is a glitch that cannot be duplicated with consistency. Therefore Manu/Laurel really can't say with absolute certainty that the CMS is buggy. My non erotic story has been in pending purgatory now for 18 days

This is my own pet theory. Whatever is causing stories to "glitch" is a multi-factor problem, so it's not as simple as saying, "all the stories submitted at Whatever time and 29 seconds glitch."
It would explain why resubmitting some times works and sometimes doesn't. How they resubmitted changed one of the factors and it cleared the glitch.

Obviously, like everyone else, I'm just speculating, but it's consistent with the data we have.

 

[cw5523729]

I've always suspected she keeps her eyes on the pulse, but what she does with it, I don't know.

If I was the site administrator, I know what my response to the AHery would be.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to get the vibe, and who's going to say what. We're all extremely predictable, and it's easy to see who weighs in on what, and how frequently they do it.

I, for one, think that @Laurel is DOING AN AMAZING AND DESERVES A PAT ON THE BACK! Keep up the great work!!

do you think she bought it?

Even someone new, like yourself, gets a slot and a road speed. It doesn't take long. Welcome aboard, by the way .

Thanks!

 

[AwkwardlySet]

There is 1 other possibility, it is a glitch that cannot be duplicated with consistency. Therefore Manu/Laurel really can't say with absolute certainty that the CMS is buggy. My non erotic story has been in pending purgatory now for 18 days

It's possible. But that's also something that could be circumvented, if not outright fixed. Imagine if we had confirmation from Laurel that there's a random, unpredictable glitch that can affect submissions. Imagine if she at least worked around the problem by sending us an automatic notification, something similar to what already exists - the rejection notifications.

Such a notification could simply let us know "Your story has been flagged for something and is awaiting human moderation." In the absence of approval or such a notification within, say, 24-48 hours, we would then know for sure that our story was affected by the glitch and that we should resubmit rather than wait three weeks before attempting it.