Weird figures?

[SimonDoom]

Well, a bot is an app designed to screw with websites or website users. It's software, not usually AI, but it can be, and it performs certain tasks, like opening up 10,000 browsers on a computer, and preventing you from stopping it, short of a hard reboot. They don't normally do anything good, like up your view count, unless they're doing something bad along with it, like downvoting you.

That's what was so weird, in this case. There was no change in the score. The vote numbers were normal. But the view numbers were totally out of whack.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I don't want to get that top list squealing going again, but the fact there is a definitive 'cap' number stories seem to be being held to makes me feel like its a system glitch, like a broken sweep that thinks it has to get to a certain number.

Considering everything else going wonky here its not that farfetched.

Occam agrees.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I've got nine stories above 4.84, not Top Listed though, not been affected.

My stats look much the same as last time I looked.

I should clarify. I do have one story at 4.87, but with fewer than 100 votes.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Hey, and so everyone knows, my figure isn't weird.

 

[anthrodisiac]

The only thing that was weird for me is that for the Valentine's Day sweep, one story lost 1 5 star — which is fine, I'm fairly certain it's because a friend of mine rated before she read it (which I asked her not to do ) — but the other lost 15 5 stars 30 minutes before the winners were announced (which the timing isn't all that surprising, given I know the sweeps don't all happen at the same time). I did the math to check if they were all 5s, and the average from the 32 votes to the 17 votes only makes sense if they were all 5s. I don't think somebody was trying to rig it in my favor (I hope not, that would feel awful if it were true...), because it's not like the second story had that much less engagement than the first: 1 less comment, 80% of the views, 1 less favorite, and significantly more listings (first story had 7 lists, second one had 25).

I know it's pretty normal for contest stories to have 1-bombs swept, and from the sound of it, sometimes quite a lot for contest entries and specific authors in general (which is shitty), but that was amost half of the votes on that story and dropped me out of contention since I slipped under the 25 vote threshold. It just seems like a very large amount, given the other one just had one removed.

Has anyone lost that many 5s on a story in one go before?

 

[MillieDynamite]

I've never had a sweep lower my scores. That really sucks.

The only thing that was weird for me is that for the Valentine's Day sweep, one story lost 1 5 star — which is fine, I'm fairly certain it's because a friend of mine rated before she read it (which I asked her not to do ) — but the other lost 15 5 stars 30 minutes before the winners were announced (which the timing isn't all that surprising, given I know the sweeps don't all happen at the same time). I did the math to check if they were all 5s, and the average from the 32 votes to the 17 votes only makes sense if they were all 5s. I don't think somebody was trying to rig it in my favor (I hope not, that would feel awful if it were true...), because it's not like the second story had that much less engagement than the first: 1 less comment, 80% of the views, 1 less favorite, and significantly more listings (first story had 7 lists, second one had 25).

I know it's pretty normal for contest stories to have 1-bombs swept, and from the sound of it, sometimes quite a lot for contest entries and specific authors in general (which is shitty), but that was amost half of the votes on that story and dropped me out of contention since I slipped under the 25 vote threshold. It just seems like a very large amount, given the other one just had one removed.

Has anyone lost that many 5s on a story in one go before?

 

[anthrodisiac]

I've never had a sweep lower my scores. That really sucks.

As writers, our job is to make people feel. Which means, on the plus side, when people give me 1s, they genuinely hate it

 

[Voboy]

I should clarify. I do have one story at 4.87, but with fewer than 100 votes.

I've still got a 4.85, also with under a hundred.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I should clarify. I do have one story at 4.87, but with fewer than 100 votes.

Yes, ditto.

 

[RejectReality]

If your score is going down after sweeps, your fans are engaged in the trolling and cheerleading. There's a reason something like this is part of the closing note of pretty much everything I post.

One vote per reader, and don't downvote other people to "help" me either. No stuffing the ballot box.

Most of them assume you want them to be cheeky little turds on your behalf unless explicitly told not to. When told not to, most of them stop. When they stop, the number of swept votes will plunge, and the score will go up instead of down.

If you think you don't have fans, or think they're too good for that sort of rotten behavior, you're wrong. LOL

 

[anthrodisiac]

If your score is going down after sweeps, your fans are engaged in the trolling and cheerleading. There's a reason something like this is part of the closing note of pretty much everything I post.

One vote per reader, and don't downvote other people to "help" me either. No stuffing the ballot box.

Most of them assume you want them to be cheeky little turds on your behalf unless explicitly told not to. When told not to, most of them stop. When they stop, the number of swept votes will plunge, and the score will go up instead of down.

If you think you don't have fans, or think they're too good for that sort of rotten behavior, you're wrong. LOL

I'm not sure about "most," otherwise I feel like my other stories would have massively inflated scores that would've been caught up in the sweep, but I take your point. I'm not discounting it as a possibility, but it's a massive discrepency between the two, and given other people have noticed strange rating behavior, I figured I might as well ask if anyone else has seen something like this. It could be a few different things, and rating monkeys could be one of them.

Out of curiosity, this sort of thing has happened to you before, where you had a bunch of 5s swept? Is that why you now add that disclaimer at the end?

 

[RejectReality]

I'm not sure about "most," otherwise I feel like my other stories would have massively inflated scores that would've been caught up in the sweep, but I take your point. I'm not discounting it as a possibility, but it's a massive discrepency between the two, and given other people have noticed strange rating behavior, I figured I might as well ask if anyone else has seen something like this. It could be a few different things, and rating monkeys could be one of them.

Out of curiosity, this sort of thing has happened to you before, where you had a bunch of 5s swept? Is that why you now add that disclaimer at the end?

I had two people in close proximity to each other admit they were either casting multiple votes on mine or "helping" me by dropping bombs on others. ( Keep in mind, I thought I'd written Lord of the Rings when I posted something that got 50 votes at the time, which was easily double what I averaged in the mid to late '00s ) I told them to stop immediately, and explained that they weren't really helping at all, because that sort of stuff gets caught, and then not only are their extra/trolling votes removed, their original 5s were going away as well. They were getting wholesale wiped for their shenanigans, and actually knocking my scores down from the loss of their original vote. Then I started tagging all my submissions, and saw the effect immediately.

I got lazy for a while with it many years ago, and started seeing the number of swept votes creep up and score increases creep down. Knuckled back down and the trend immediately reversed.

Keep in mind that contest sweeps are a whole different animal from any other type of sweep. They're more rigorous. Something that's not in a contest isn't going to see the same sort of scrutiny, and thus more shenanigans survive. It used to be that once a month or so ( or at least every few months ) the monthly contest sweeps, which are just as bone-cutting, would do this to all submissions from that month. They also built databases of bad actors and swept the entire story file. They haven't happened regularly in years.

Regardless of all the theories, that is why the top scores are slowly creeping downward on the toplists and the scores are homogenizing. The monthly sweeps were a bulwark that kept the trolling and cheerleading in check.