Score Vandalism

[AwkwardlySet]

ComplaintStar's small thermal exhaust port.

Size-shaming my thermal exhaust port...

 

[SimonDoom]

Size-shaming my thermal exhaust port...

Hey, hey. I didn't mean it like that.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I disagree with "no solution". The system is clearly broken, and is penalizing writers in less-popular categories. This needs to be fixed. "One-bombs" and other user-accessible manipulations have a too-strong statistical effect on scores of well-written stories in minority categories.

The solution I propose is one proposed many times: only registered users can vote. OR, anonymous votes are simply recorded but ignored in computing the score average. Anonymous voting has run its course and proven to be detrimental to site and author participation.

I'm sorry that people are bombing your stories, I acknowledge your frustration, but this is not correct. Nothing of the sort has been "proven". We don't know how much of the bombing is due to anon readers, as opposed to logged-in users, and we don't know whether preventing anonymous votes would reduce or increase the impact of bombing.

In previous iterations of this discussion, I've repeatedly given reasons why it might well make the situation worse rather than better, particularly in minority categories. If people believe those reasons are incorrect, it'd be great if they'd engage with them and explain why they're incorrect, rather than just reviving this discussion every few months as if we hadn't already been over that ground. I get tired of posting the same thing over and over.

 

[alohadave]

The solution I propose is one proposed many times: only registered users can vote. OR, anonymous votes are simply recorded but ignored in computing the score average. Anonymous voting has run its course and proven to be detrimental to site and author participation.

How does this solve the problem if you, as an author, have no visibility of votes? Whether it's an anonymous or registered user, it doesn't change anything from your perspective.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Eliminate anonymous votes and those 1s will have even more impact.

Who's more likely to sign up for an account to cast a vote? The scumbag who wants to tank your score, or the guy in a near coma with cum dribbling down his wrist?

All you do is reduce the overall voting pool for everyone and make it harder for the average reader to interact.

While making it harder to detect trolls when they do occur, and increasing the susceptibility of scores to random noise.

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm sorry that people are bombing your stories, I acknowledge your frustration, but this is not correct. Nothing of the sort has been "proven". We don't know how much of the bombing is due to anon readers, as opposed to logged-in users, and we don't know whether preventing anonymous votes would reduce or increase the impact of bombing.

In previous iterations of this discussion, I've repeatedly given reasons why it might well make the situation worse rather than better, particularly in minority categories. If people believe those reasons are incorrect, it'd be great if they'd engage with them and explain why they're incorrect, rather than just reviving this discussion every few months as if we hadn't already been over that ground. I get tired of posting the same thing over and over.

Agreed. If you're going to argue that the Site needs to make a fundamental change to how it does things, then 1) make a compelling, fact-based case that the problem is what you think it is, 2) explain in a fact-based way, rather than by pulling ideas out of your head, how the solution will solve the problem, and 3) be prepared to deal with the explanations of how the solution will make things worse.

Nobody proposing changes wants to do that.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Agreed. If you're going to argue that the Site needs to make a fundamental change to how it does things, then 1) make a compelling, fact-based case that the problem is what you think it is, 2) explain in a fact-based way, rather than by pulling ideas out of your head, how the solution will solve the problem, and 3) be prepared to deal with the explanations of how the solution will make things worse.

And as part of #3: spend five minutes asking "if I were a malicious user, how would I try to exploit this change?"

So many of these proposed "fixes" assume that trolls would do nothing to adapt to the new regime.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The big question for me is: How MUCH data do they actually have.

Do they just go in and delete all one-votes, or do they have a database column where they save additional data to identify which one-votes have been made after (seemingly) reading the story and which one-votes have been made straight away to just bomb the score?

There are stories on this site with "perfect" 1.0 scores, which have been that way for some time, so evidently the sweeps don't delete *all* one-star votes.

Beyond that, discussing technical specifics of how sweeps might work tends to get threads locked.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Are you suggesting that their votes would be public? If not, (and I don’t recommend that they should be) then your proposal would not solve your problem. Registered readers can trash a story’s score just as easily as anonymous readers.

I suspect it'd also lead to a lot of "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours"/"downvote my story and I'll downvote yours" behaviour, which is unlikely to improve the situation.

Besides which, most people with a grain of common sense shouldn't be calling for Literotica to collect more and more information about our individual reading habits and the kinds of stories we like. The #1 biggest risk for data breaches is storing sensitive info that you didn't need to be storing.

 

[KeithD]

Nobody proposing changes wants to do that.

Or you're just not listening to it having been done.

 

[KeithD]

I can't understand why a "solution" of only letting registered users vote won't die on this thread. Registered users at Literotica aren't even a quarter step above anonymous users. You'd have to be very not too bright to use your real name in registering here. Just about everyone playing here is doing so anonymously, whether they are registered or not. And it only takes a moment to register multiple accounts if you want to. There's only a sliver of daylight between registered and anonymous--none in any meaningful voting way. The identities of registered voters aren't revealed any more than that of anonymous voters are.

 

[SimonDoom]

Or you're just not listening to it having been done.

I admit "nobody" was an unfortunate moment of hyperbole. Good and well-reasoned arguments have been made for making changes. I don't think the "they should ban unregistered voters/anonymous voters" argument is an example of one of those arguments.

 

[Britva415]

maliciously-damaged scores reduce readership

Readership of the maliciously-damaged author, sure.

But you have to think of it in terms of the site at large. There's no plausible explanation which leads to the conclusion that the readership of the site at large is reduced because of "score vandalism."

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I am amazed to see how many long-time users don't know what bombing is. I agree that the term hasn't been strictly defined here but I thought everyone knew what's that about. There is no bombing while logged in. It can't be done. Yes, I have tested this extensively. I guess someone might call bombing when one user just clicks on all the stories of some author and votes 1* on all of them but while annoying, that's just casting one vote on each story and that's not really it. Most stories, although not all, have enough protection coming from the number of votes on them to be protected from a single 1*. So while people can argue whether anons should be allowed to vote or not ad infinitum, bombing is inherently a thing on anon voting.
Casting one 1* isn't bombing in my book, no matter if it's done out of spite or whatever, just as not all 5* are given because someone truly liked some story.

 

[ElectricBlue]

There is no bombing while logged in. It can't be done. Yes, I have tested this extensively. I guess someone might call bombing when one user just clicks on all the stories of some author and votes 1* on all of them but while annoying, that's just casting one vote on each story and that's not really it.

Huh? You can drop a one on a story at any time, regardless whether you're logged in or anon. Whether it sticks or not depends on other parameters.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

1 ~ comment comment comment, dot-dot-dot ...

A vote and linked comment that could be easily discarded

 

[mildlyaroused]

I think it'd be easier and more effective to just lock voting until a user has had the story open for a certain length of time (or at least clicked through all of the story's Lit pages). This wouldn't disqualify anyone from having a fair opinion of the story, but it would add a buffer for those haters who click on the story, vote in two seconds, and leave.

Even a two-minute timer before voting is allowed, in which the story has to be in focus as a device's primary window, would discourage a lot of bombers. Because everyone these days is impatient, especially in the digital world.

 

[Mastered_again]

Vandalism shoots...he scores! It's a power play goal.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I am amazed to see how many long-time users don't know what bombing is. I agree that the term hasn't been strictly defined here but I thought everyone knew what's that about. There is no bombing while logged in. It can't be done.

It may be right that one can't drop multiple votes on the same story from a single account, but somebody who's logged in on multiple accounts most certainly can do it.

A vote and linked comment that could be easily discarded

"ChatGPT, write a short comment criticising a story"

Of course, one could just run an AI detector to see which comments are written by humans. As we know, that technology never gets it wrong...

 

[mildlyaroused]

It may be right that one can't drop multiple votes on the same story from a single account, but somebody who's logged in on multiple accounts most certainly can do it.

You can't vote more than once on the same IP, though (at least anonymously). This indicates some level of sophistication about the way the site treats multiple accounts that share an IP address - in the sense that the site knows when accounts share an IP address. So, if a user creates multiple accounts, all on one IP with similar voting patterns (and assuming the moderators are strict enough), it wouldn't be hard for the admins to conclude that these supposed "multiple accounts" are likely just one person seeking to influence scores. Those accounts' votes can be removed in sweeps.

(This is probably how they stop authors from voting for their own stories dozens of times. There are also some fairly easy workarounds, but I won't voice those here, for the Greater Good and whatnot).

 

[ElectricBlue]

I think it'd be easier and more effective to just lock voting until a user has had the story open for a certain length of time (or at least clicked through all of the story's Lit pages).

You preclude yourself from any Contest wins if you do that - just so you know.

 

[mildlyaroused]

You preclude yourself from any Contest wins if you do that - just so you know.

This is true. But I meant that Lit could automate a timer system: imagine if each time a user opened a story, that user had to wait 2 minutes before being allowed to vote on that story. It would at least discourage the most impatient of trolls. Timers are hardly the most complex things to integrate into web design, either.

 

[Tomh1966]

Dumb question: Does Lit look at the IP? Ie at least force the malicious ones to find a way to change IP to multi vote? Or can they literally hit the back button and vote then hit the back button and vote again then hit the back button...

 

[Lifestyle66]

Dumb question: Does Lit look at the IP? Ie at least force the malicious ones to find a way to change IP to multi vote? Or can they literally hit the back button and vote then hit the back button and vote again then hit the back button...

The site Admins don't say how their sweep determines which votes to eliminate. But even the IP address is not a positive means. If I vote on a story, and my wife reads and votes on that same story, our votes will appear as coming from the same Internet IP, since we use the same home router on our Internet service. That is unless I use my VPN software and connect through any of two dozen VPN servers, then I could vote two dozen times looking like different IPs (and possibly the same as many other readers using that same VPN service.

MAC address is the only truly unique hardware ID, and even then, I could vote from ten different computing devices in my house with different MAC addresses. (A ten-dollar Raspberry PI is a full desktop computer with web browsers.)

 

[Tomh1966]

Thanks Lifestyle. RE Sweeps. Ive had a few LW stories where the score suddenly jumps like .05 which is quite a bit over thousands of votes. I wonder if that was a sweep.

I also wonder at the effect of the cliques that reside within the Lit world. I won't pretend to know them all, but some users seem to hang within groups of certain other users. Then again... alt names or cliques? I suspect both but won't data analyze it.