What gives with the tops lists

[Auden James]

Cool down

Since Manu/Laurel doesn't seem to have found the time to answer yet, I just want to state that they've reminded me of the testing mode of the algorithm for the "Top Lists". Laurel called the 1000 votes treshold for the incest category an "error".

Hence the case is not done and dusted yet.

Hopefully, in the end they'll find a satisfying solution.

 

[Owlwhisper]

.....

 

[sr71plt]

Sounds sort of like what was replaced.

 

[freshface]

Maybe I'm missing something, but how does total number of votes help me find otherwise overlooked good stories? If 400 people hate a story, is that story more worthy of prominence than if 50 people love it? I recognize that we need a system that keeps five friends and me from controlling the top lists, but there does tend to be a correlation between well written stories and higher scores.

 

[Owlwhisper]

.....

 

[sr71plt]

I'd argue with you, but since I had over 20 stories on the old 500 GM top list and none on the new all-time top GM list, that would hardly be in my best interests.

 

[freshface]

I agree, it does. I was largely satisfied with the lists as they were and think the changes have increased complexity without adding commensurate improvement.

I like the 30 day and twelve month lists, both because it's nice seeing how a new story is doing and because they tend to highlight new writers. The currently static all time list still needs some adjusting.

 

[Owlwhisper]

.....

 

[Owlwhisper]

.....

 

[freshface]

I'm probably not understanding your question, and I'm assuming it's meant for me. Sorry in advance if I get what you're asking wrong.

Stories are ranked in the lists by their vote averages. A story that was hated by 400 voters is not going to be on the list if the vote count minimum for that list is set realistically.

On the other hand, a story that was loved by 15 voters won't, either, unless the list minimum is 15. I agree that there's a positive correlation between story quality and average vote. And I expect that there's a positive correlation between story quality and number of votes. My suggestion was in part aimed at putting "lightly-loved" stories on the lists.

I took your last posting to advocate a top voted list, regardless of what the vote was. Hence a 3.0 story with 500 votes might make the list simply because it had 500 votes. Judging by your response, that's not what you were advocating.

Having read your analysis of Lit voting, I defer to your knowledge there. But I would argue that there is also a positive correlation between length of time posted and number of votes. I suspect that stories posted in the early days of the site received more votes simply because there were so few of them. If my story is any indication, most of the votes happen while it's on the new list. In the last year, it's picked up 10-15 new votes that have stuck. I'd be surprised if other stories like mine pick up substantially more votes after the first week without being featured in some way. If my supposition is correct, then the early stories will always have a vote total advantage over more recent works and the new works won't close the gap because new stories don't receive as many votes as they used to.

I agree that there needs to be a balance found between number of votes and scores. I've gathered from the forums that appearing at the top of the top list used to be a really good way to attract low votes. On the other hand, I don't see any story moving any time soon with the new system, simply because it's that much harder to attract votes now.

As a writer, my story is in no danger of being affected by any of this. As a reader, I appreciate anything that helps me find better reads in the sea of stories here.

 

[oggbashan]

My last submission, not a contest entry, has been posted for six weeks and has 5 votes with about 700 views.

I don't expect that it will reach 10 votes this side of Christmas. As for 100 votes? Never.

It was the final episode of a six part story and my past experience has been that each subsequent part has fewer votes, fewer views and fewer PCs than the previous parts.

I'm wondering why I bother to write multi-part stories.

Og

 

[EldridgeinOO]

Since Manu/Laurel doesn't seem to have found the time to answer yet, I just want to state that they've reminded me of the testing mode of the algorithm for the "Top Lists". Laurel called the 1000 votes treshold for the incest category an "error".

Hence the case is not done and dusted yet.

Hopefully, in the end they'll find a satisfying solution.

I sure hope so... I really shouldn't care so much, but it's pretty annoying to have three of your chapters ripped from the top 10 all-time...

 

[TxRad]

My question is, what the heck does the number of votes have to do with top stories. Most popular or most hated yes but not for the top lists.

The 30 day and 12 month lists would be fine if done the way things were. Stories would slide from one to the other until they end up on the all time list. Just forget the total vote crap or start a most popular/hated list for the big vote number stories.

Another thing, the top list has 182 chaptered stories in it out of 250 stories. chapters are not stories but parts of stories. Either submit them whole or have them in their own list.

Another thing about the top list. It is the only list where I see an increase in vote totals would help. Increase it from the 10 now to say 25. That would do away with a lot of the chapters and the friend vote.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

The top lists seem fairly sensible to me, especially now the thresholds have been tweaked.

The last month and last year tabs mean new stories still get a chance to show up rather than being swamped out by the oldies.

The next step is to figure out how to combine the multichapter stories into one entry as Tx suggested.

 

[jomar]

...

Another thing, the top list has 182 chaptered stories in it out of 250 stories. chapters are not stories but parts of stories. Either submit them whole or have them in their own list.

Another thing about the top list. It is the only list where I see an increase in vote totals would help. Increase it from the 10 now to say 25. That would do away with a lot of the chapters and the friend vote.

The top lists seem fairly sensible to me, especially now the thresholds have been tweaked.

...

The next step is to figure out how to combine the multichapter stories into one entry as Tx suggested.

Hush up now! I had two stories where both chapters made the toplist. Three got wiped by the 100 vote requirement so I can support 25 or 50.

But I know what you mean.

 

[TxRad]

The top lists seem fairly sensible to me, especially now the thresholds have been tweaked.

The last month and last year tabs mean new stories still get a chance to show up rather than being swamped out by the oldies.

The next step is to figure out how to combine the multichapter stories into one entry as Tx suggested.

But why should it be tweaked? What does the total number of votes have to do with how good a story is? Sometimes, yes it does indicate a good story but most of the time not. Like someone said, how does a story with 500 2's& 3's get to be better than a story with 50 4's and 5's.

As for multi chaptered stories. Combine the scores for existing chapters and divide by the number of chapters. The score is posted individually except the first chapter has two scores. the chapter score and the overall score. That is the one posted to the tops lists.

 

[Owlwhisper]

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[driphoney]

Why even write at all anymore, when you're a new author? Literotica makes it more than clear that they don't give a crap about new writers. You need to be a part of the good old boys network before you get to be in the top lists now.

The 12 month list is a joke. If there is an all-time list, why would you click on a 12 month list? All-time >>>> 12 months.

Not even mentioning the fact that the 12 month list is screwed up. I should be 1,2, 4, 5 and 6 in it, simply based on votes and score, and I'm not. All-Time is now a list of VOTES ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SCORE, but then in 12 months, several stories with the same score and lower vote totals are ranked higher than mine. Makes great sense!

It's awesome the way Lit treats their new authors. I guess they feel they don't need them. It's much better to have a site with nothing but five and six year old stories being promoted.

For the most part I agree with you about losing motivation knowing a story will disappear after 12 mos. However, as a reader, I would hang out quite a bit on the 30 day or 12 mos. list as it's fresher, with more movement. I'd avoid the All-Time list for the same reason everyone is complaining about. The stories are often old, I've already read them, or they stink.

As for how a lower number of votes and the same score can (as in might I'm just guessing) rank higher than one with more votes, well, Lit cuts off the percentage at two decimal places, but it's possible the the real number is higher. Say, a story with 20 votes might have a real average of 4.5642, and another story with 80 votes might have a score of 4.5611. The 20 vote story trumps. They both look like 4.56.

 

[TxRad]

For the most part I agree with you about losing motivation knowing a story will disappear after 12 mos. However, as a reader, I would hang out quite a bit on the 30 day or 12 mos. list as it's fresher, with more movement. I'd avoid the All-Time list for the same reason everyone is complaining about. The stories are often old, I've already read them, or they stink.

As for how a lower number of votes and the same score can (as in might I'm just guessing) rank higher than one with more votes, well, Lit cuts off the percentage at two decimal places, but it's possible the the real number is higher. Say, a story with 20 votes might have a real average of 4.5642, and another story with 80 votes might have a score of 4.5611. The 20 vote story trumps. They both look like 4.56.

The difference in 20 votes and 80 votes might just be the difference in the three days a story was on the new story list. Friday through Sunday will generate more votes than say Monday through Wednesday. Winter months in the states seem to generate more votes than the summer. Different Categories generate far more votes than others. Again, I ask, What do the total number of votes have to do with the top lists. Popularity or dislike, yes but not how good a story it is.

 

[driphoney]

The difference in 20 votes and 80 votes might just be the difference in the three days a story was on the new story list. Friday through Sunday will generate more votes than say Monday through Wednesday. Winter months in the states seem to generate more votes than the summer. Different Categories generate far more votes than others. Again, I ask, What do the total number of votes have to do with the top lists. Popularity or dislike, yes but not how good a story it is.

I was just attempting to answer his question as to how a smaller number of votes seems to 'outrank' a story with a larger vote count when they both have the same score. The only explanation I can think of is the one I gave. This would be two or more votes on the same list with the same score.

I agree with you on the vote numbers. Who cares?

 

[manyeyedhydra]

What does the total number of votes have to do with how good a story is?

It says to me that more people were gripped by the story to the point where they both read it to the end and took the time to register a vote.

Total votes is still a metric, probably not a particularly good one, but given that "better" in writing is going to be horribly subjective in any case, it does have some value (although nowhere near as much as a certain person thinks it has )

 

[EldridgeinOO]

For the most part I agree with you about losing motivation knowing a story will disappear after 12 mos. However, as a reader, I would hang out quite a bit on the 30 day or 12 mos. list as it's fresher, with more movement. I'd avoid the All-Time list for the same reason everyone is complaining about. The stories are often old, I've already read them, or they stink.

As for how a lower number of votes and the same score can (as in might I'm just guessing) rank higher than one with more votes, well, Lit cuts off the percentage at two decimal places, but it's possible the the real number is higher. Say, a story with 20 votes might have a real average of 4.5642, and another story with 80 votes might have a score of 4.5611. The 20 vote story trumps. They both look like 4.56.

Interesting idea about the score totals, but it doesn't track with what we see in the all-time list, where it's simply according to number of votes. Unless coincidentally every story with more votes also has a higher decimal rank than the story with fewer votes? After 50 instances of that, however, it seems to start defying the odds for that to be able to occur.

As for the 30days and 12 month lists, all we've had on Lit for 9 years has been an all-time list, so I doubt many people use the new lists. If you're here for one story and you want to read a great one, why would you browse the new lists, rather than the all-time lists?

I'm sure some people use them, but I would guess that most still browse the all-time list. In fact, that is easily born out by the fact that, since Lit deemed me too young to be on the top list, I've lost a huge amount of readers. Chapter 9, when it came out, got TONS of views and votes in its first week, because chapter 8 was at the time the highest ranked story, and quickly got surplanted by chapter 9.

Now that I released chapter 10, it's getting nowhere NEAR the views and FAR fewer votes, because, well, I'm not in the top list anymore. No more free advertising.

Instead, the top list is filled with stories that are five and six years old, and whose authors have, for the most part, long since split.

It's sheer craziness to me that a site chooses to promote its old stories of people long since gone, rather than do its best to attract and retain new writers. But that's pretty much the way things are at Lit. Age over substance, it seems.

 

[sr71plt]

I like the new 30-day and 12-month lists. Especially the 30-day list. To get votes and ratings for something this new (and thus something most readers are actually looking at), readers had to go to the category lists and check on each title. Now we can see how they are building in relationship to other new stories in the category.

I also wish the chapter series could be lumped together as of the 12-month list (anything going on longer than this is really just going on too long and there's no reason not to lump its previous chapters together at this point). They are glopping up the works now, and, really, what reader with half a brain would jump in to read a middle chapter just because it was rated really, really high? They aren't completed works until/unless they are all lumped together. It's a false picture now.

 

[EldridgeinOO]

I like the new 30-day and 12-month lists. Especially the 30-day list. To get votes and ratings for something this new (and thus something most readers are actually looking at), readers had to go to the category lists and check on each title. Now we can see how they are building in relationship to other new stories in the category.

I also wish the chapter series could be lumped together as of the 12-month list (anything going on longer than this is really just going on too long and there's no reason not to lump its previous chapters together at this point). They are glopping up the works now, and, really, what reader with half a brain would jump in to read a middle chapter just because it was rated really, really high? They aren't completed works until/unless they are all lumped together. It's a false picture now.

As the writer of a chaptered story that's still currently ongoing, I'm going to have to disagree. If you just lump all the chapters together, you're needlessly punishing authors that take their time with stories and write chapters that are story over sex. Those chapters receive lower scores because we all know what sells on Literotica : 6 pages of fucking.

So a single 2 page story that starts off with

"Jack grinned at Laura as she took her panties off and spread her legs for him."

then proceeds into two pages of well written sex, with no explanation of why they're fucking or anything else, is somehow a better story than a compilation of 12 chapters that gets dragged down because there are a few chapters in it that are used to build up the tension and characters?

Why is my chapter 8 suddenly less hot because chapter 1 was just an introduction of my two main characters and, as such, got voted a lot lower? That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever, and what it would do is encourage people to just write chapter after chapter of sex, sex, sex. The quality of Literotica would suffer for it.


As for people not reading a chapter in the middle of a story, I dunno, I'm pretty sure I have the view totals to prove that they do. Once a chapter reached the #1 spot, its views soared. Correspondingly, I got an increase in chapter one views, but not the extent that the #1 chapter got increased (happened to both my chapter 8 and chapter 9).

So obviously readers do do that.

If you lump every chapter together, you're punishing authors who write a complete story. In my opinion. I fail to see why a 12 chapter story should somehow average a 4.85 over 12 chapters in an attempt to beat out a single page story that got a 4.85 too. Let's all start writing single page stories then...


I think the easiest way around it would be to see if you could get people to vote for the story as a whole once it is finished. Let them vote on individual chapters, then vote for the story in its entirety. Then have a top list of chaptered stories, probably separated out per category.

However, I think those votes would be very little. It's hard enough to get people to vote for your story, I doubt anyone but the staunchest fans of a chaptered story would bother to vote for the whole thing once it's done.


Btw, thanks Lit for reversing your crazy 1000 votes decision! 200 is a decent cutoff, maybe even a little low, but it works. A new author has a chance to show up again, which is all I wanted. Thank you, thank you, thank you.


On a sidenote, have there been vote sweeps? I seem to have several fans who keep voting for me over and over again, as I've lost 500 votes over 10 chapters overnight... :|

I wish there was a way we could put a stop to people doing that. The thought behind it is nice, but it's unfair and disheartening to see that happen to your stories. I hope the trolls who bashed me down 0.03 in one night got ganked too, though it doesn't look like it.
Sigh.

In any case, thanks again Lit for listening to (some of) us. I definitely appreciate it!

 

[sr71plt]

We do have different perspectives on chaptered stories. I can't say I think much of series put together in stream of consciousness over a two-year--or neverending--period. I can see posting a novel in chapters. I don't really think that posting a year's worth of chapters while you are still wondering where the novel is going is much of anything in terms of a high-quality read. I wouldn't normally do anything like that to a reader I wanted to keep. Having said that, I'm guilty of having added to a novelization here after it was posted--but was a writing exercise in and of itself.

The problem of having different heat levels in different chapters--or even some meaty-activity in some chapters and others mostly transition--is a given with erotica. It's up to the writer to be good enough to figure out how to structure around that.

Just my opinion, of course (although a few others here have expressed it as well), but a novelization is one work, and when works are being compared against each other here for rating and listing, it shouldn't have the advantage of being treated as more than one work. This has recently been addressed in the periodic contests. So the definitions seem already to have been settled.