Is there a one bomb bott?

[ElectricBlue]

I've written a handful of I/T stories. Discounting the one where I used 2P POV and highlighted the inherent wrongness of incest, my I/T scores would go up when the new story was published, but most of my other scores would drop. But after a prolonged period of no I/T, all my scores just generally go up slowly, even the I/T ones with thousands of votes ("Too Cold Not to Fuck" has nearly 3k votes, and has climbed from around 4.5 to 4.56 over the past six months or so).

My portfolio isn't affected by LW or I&T foibles. I think my scores are more balanced because of that.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

I have consistently received two 1-bombs on every submission I've made since I started publishing stories (2020), regardless of what category they were put in. I don't think it's a bot but people who, for whatever reason, like to 1-bomb new submissions. They usually occur on the day of submission but several times they were a few days late so that's why I don't think it's automated.

 

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

Yep, a whole lot of whining.These folks remind me of that author who harassed a reviewer for leaving a four star review. Not every Shakespeare play deserves a five star review! Are your skins so thin that anything less than five stars is a personal affront? Some of us baseball fans understand statistics. If you are batting .1000 and you strike out once, it is virtually impossible to get back to .1000 even if you never strike out for the rest of the season. Is there a one bot lurking? Possibly. On the other hand NONE of us is churning out perfect fiction. Traffic to the site has increased meaning more eyeballs and more votes. As a point of fact, scores tend to decrease with time for everybody.

Yeah we still get to salty about it though, Jesus. No one said we wrote Shakespeare or can't understand average, it's just annoying when it's clearly just a bunch of ones in less than a day

 

[ThanksForAllTheFish]

Well, indeed.

But I think you are missing the point. Unless you win a contest, the ONLY way to stay on the home page for a category (and thus get regular eyes on your work) is to have a story in the top twenty. So this is less about "oh no my scores have gone down" and more "damn, now I'm not in the top twenty I'm going to get fewer views".

That smarts whether the votes were legit or the work of a troll.

Maybe if you've never been in this position it's hard to sympathise and it comes across as whiny. Okay. I have been in this position so can see the point. Our stories are our babies, so we want them to do well.

And I would disagree scores HAVE to go down over time.

Well said

 

[Bazzle]

Curiously, my facts show that scores go up over time.

Mine tend to go down. I have a core of maybe 8 people who like my stories. The stories get to 8/5 then its downhill from there on in.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Mine tend to go down. I have a core of maybe 8 people who like my stories. The stories get to 8/5 then its downhill from there on in.

Hmm. Maybe someone is just taking the piss so your stories end up getting smoked?

 

[Bazzle]

Hmm. Maybe someone is just taking the piss so your stories end up getting smoked?

Also I do try to have a plot in the story somewhere

 

[StillStunned]

Mine tend to go down. I have a core of maybe 8 people who like my stories. The stories get to 8/5 then its downhill from there on in.

To be fair, if you start with only 5s, the only way is down.

 

[Wifetheif]

Curiously, my facts show that scores go up over time.

I have a few stories that gain and lose a red H with some regularity. To borrow a baseball analogy it is my batting average settling in. Somedays I'm a .300 hitter other days I'm under the Mendoza Line. It is the nature of the game and demonstrates how only a few votes can alter your average. Malice need not figure in the equation.

 

[Bamagan]

My observation has been that story ratings tend to rise slowly after the initial period of volatility while it's on the new list (or the active contest list). I believe that's because most of the people reading it after that point are ones who are actively searching for tags and keywords, or they're going through an author's back catalog because they liked something else enough to want more of the same/similar. In both cases, they're predisposed to liking the work they find and voting high.

There are a few situations that may have the opposite effect. As mentioned by others several times already, a story on a top list has a higher visibility and attracts all kinds of attention. Some of it likely is from highly partisan readers who don't like anything that displaces their own favorite stories and vote maliciously low because of it. Some of it likely from regular readers who gravitate to those lists with high expectations (perhaps unreasonably high) and feel like the story doesn't measure up. The same is probably true of any story with a Hot rating even if it shows up on the random story spinner. Since the ratio of 5s to 1s needed to maintain a Hot rating is 7:1, even a small number of such readers can cause a noticeable dip.

I have no data to support this idea, but I think some people may also be downvoting stories that show up on the 'Similar Stories' suggestion list. It's not uncommon on other sites for people to try training the content algorithms by overreacting to their suggestions, hoping that it will make them better or more personalized. I'm a little skeptical that Lit's algorithm is sufficiently sophisticated to respond to such stimuli, but from the user's perspective, it doesn't hurt to try one-bombing any suggestion that's even slightly off-target, at least initially. I don't think the suggestions are personalized, so anyone attempting to train them is probably accomplishing little other than annoying or distressing the handful of people who are invested in the scores of particular stories (not that I expect most users would care much, even if this was a fact and they were fully informed about it).

 

[NotWise]

Out of curiosity, I looked at the most popular list for Romance. I already knew my story there had taken a hit, but it hadn't occurred to me that it happened to other stories. The changes were so sweeping that I think that, rather than a 1-bomb bot, the site may have recalculated the averages with a different method.

More generally, even without a drop in scores, you can expect that your story on a top list will drift down the list over time because it's displaced by stories newer than it is. It's an inevitable process.

I decided, after my story was hit, that I'd wait for the sweeps for the Holiday contest before I considered doing anything else. Maybe I won't do anything even if the sweeps create no change. I don't see a lot of reason to moan about top scores going down. My goal is to write better new stories, and beat my own best.