Silly ratings (yawn)

[Esperanza_Hidalgo]

I got H cups, so that would make me the made in the shade winner I think!

Will you be my wife? Teeheehee

 

[vrosej10]

Will you be my wife? Teeheehee

No but you can have my boobies; they're making my back hurt.

 

[theognis]

I think that the problem with Literotica's voting system of 1 to 5 is that a casual reader could assume that the norm is a 3, and that is appropriate for a reasonable piece of work.

In practice the average poem (or story) should be about 4.5 which means that any vote of 3 or lower distorts the rating.

The same thing applies to feedback ratings on eBay. Anything less than a 5 is a black mark against the eBay member.

Og

I understand your point of view on this, but it's somewhat different than mine. I don't think a vote of three is all that harmful.

Hate is a strong word. That is what a one vote represents. I wonder how many people even realize that.

 

[twelveoone]

The ratings for poetry aren't objective, not that I agree that one can't in good conscience give scores to aesthetic valuations. The poetry ratings have a subjective question paired with each number, with 5 being hot-sexy, 2 being "I didn't like it", 1 resembling "I hated the work" -- it never resembled "rate this work from 1-5 in the scheme of all poems that have been written"

H is significant because it's usually the first poem read when a visitor enters your profile to read your work. Why not put your best foot forward and have your most liked poem be the first read by said visitor? With a volume of unique visits and votes there is a better representation of what is quantitatively a more enjoyable poem for future readers.

I attempted to get my fellow lit writers to read and vote in a very similar program to the one currently in place and was laughed at a few years ago. I'm glad its happening now, but it shows that people that have been around the site still care about the H and group aesthetic valuation. So, this isn't going to be the last thread on voting.

Most people know nothing about poetry, but think they can write it.
If they see shall we say less than quality work on things like the top list, they will assume it is easy, and have little incentive for improvement, either in writing or reading. There is a place for "popular" and quality, Sometimes they exist in the same poem. The H's and voting lead to the top list which acts like a window to this place. It becomes an attractant for the audience. I would much rather have it attract an audience that thinks before it writes.
Senna's objection seems to stem from the fact that he is not a popular writer. A purist of sorts. He reminds me of John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, I. A. Richards, etc., all good poets, critics, all rather "unpopular". But he should be able to see that if you have a front window, it should be filled with Lit.'s version of say popular and quality, as opposed to cluttered with trash.

What determines quality, knowing something about poetry for starters. How to you get there...for one, you do have to think about it.

I respect Senna's knowledge, even some of his work, but he is taking a purist position here and in doing so, stands the chance of not having an audience at all. Because the window will be wide open, and who knows what will fly in.

I hear the rattle of empty heads.

 

[EroticOrogeny]

Hey, hi!, you've got some background!

Thanks. Looks like bronzeage understood it too.
One aspect of the pursuit of physics strikes me - that wish for elegance,
such as getting the wave equation from Maxwell's equations.

 

[Epmd607]

Most people know nothing about poetry, but think they can write it.
If they see shall we say less than quality work on things like the top list, they will assume it is easy, and have little incentive for improvement, either in writing or reading. There is a place for "popular" and quality, Sometimes they exist in the same poem. The H's and voting lead to the top list which acts like a window to this place. It becomes an attractant for the audience. I would much rather have it attract an audience that thinks before it writes.
Senna's objection seems to stem from the fact that he is not a popular writer. A purist of sorts. He reminds me of John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, I. A. Richards, etc., all good poets, critics, all rather "unpopular". But he should be able to see that if you have a front window, it should be filled with Lit.'s version of say popular and quality, as opposed to cluttered with trash.

What determines quality, knowing something about poetry for starters. How to you get there...for one, you do have to think about it.

I respect Senna's knowledge, even some of his work, but he is taking a purist position here and in doing so, stands the chance of not having an audience at all. Because the window will be wide open, and who knows what will fly in.

I hear the rattle of empty heads.

I do understand and sympathize with poets who are worth reading who don't get read for whatever reason. But this site isn't really the place to champion and promote poetry to the uninitiated, for a myriad of reasons. The main problem with the top lists for poetry is they're littered with old guard manipulators and simple alphabetical happenstance that has only been mended in the last few years with randomization. Many poems likely have so many views from winning a year end contest that a handful of people(or one person) voted on. A poem is promoted as a winner and gets views at year end, but the voting for those poems was likely manipulated to begin with via the message board voting style the site owners favor.

The problem remains that when people go to top lists for poetry views and scores they're greeted by rubbish. Vote score is harder to manipulate now, so there are a handful of top poems that remain for a few years. What other ways are there for a website to promote only quality poems on top lists? I don't really see what the problem is for poets who want to be read and will work to be read. They can come here and participate and their poems will be read and criticized and they'll get recognition for their work. With enough participants a quality poem should receive its H and then just turn off your vote score and you should have it indefinitely, if that's the sort of recognition you crave.

Worrying about what visitors see when they glance at the top lists for poetry seems silly. It's not a poetry site, there's a poetry message board that people seem to find, and if they're not really into working at poetry they post their one or two threads then disappear. Others stay and go and come back. I know the work of many poets here, Senna, 1201 etc. but no one that hasn't visited the message board regularly at one point or another. There isn't a lit poet I've read and admired that I haven't spoken to in these text boxes. Even Bill Dada is still around.

 

[twelveoone]

I still think an effort should be made to educate the "consumer". A slight raising of the bar.
Ask not what....blah, blah,blah
But what have you done...blah, blah, blah
yeh, emp. I do get the feeling I am flapping my gums. But, it all ain't over here. And I suspect the top list is what newbies shoot for, and H's and all that.
So I feel it may be better if those that know at least something let new writers know that there is at least a bar. i.e you do have to make some kind of effort.

So I try, ho, hum.
To avoid the bullshit that happened six years ago.

 

[Senna Jawa]

Thanks. Looks like bronzeage understood it too.

Very true -- or should I say: very real!?

 

[Senna Jawa]

Incompatability

Different groups of people vote on different poems. These groups have no common criteria. Thus do you vote according to your internal scale, or do you take into account the general level of poems, and of voting? All this makes voting pretty meaningless, some kind of noise, and overall a little bit harmful (not too much ).

 

[twelveoone]

is what is known as diversity, all valid.
the one true path does not exist.
(yawn) turn your voting and comments off, if it is meaningless.

 

[butters]

there's a saying somewhere, maybe in my head, that only where extremes exist will the middle ground hold course

or something


meh, it's a democracy!

 

[Senna Jawa]

there's a saying somewhere, maybe in my head, that only where extremes exist will the middle ground hold course

or something


meh, it's a democracy!

But the Literotica democracy looks rather like this:

adam and eve​

Right?

 

[bogusagain]

One comment with insight is worth numerous 5s. But hey! Who is counting? It's fun and it's nice to get a pat on the back nowandagain. If learning to write poetry isn't fun enough, why bother? It is not as though you can put your Literotica score card on your job CV. If there is little pleasure in being here and your lack of points total is diminishing your pleasure, why be here? I've got one person who consistently scores me low but I'm not having a crisis about it, in fact I'm quite amused, s/he's adding to my fun and has got me wondering, isn't s/he getting enough attention of god forbid, sex! I hope so!

 

[butters]

But the Literotica democracy looks rather like this:

adam and eve​

Right?

only to the uber cynical.
misperception accounts for so much.

someone moons me, they'd better have a damned fine apple, no pimples, and maybe a coupla plums to boot before i give a five, especially after cosying up with a snake. i hope i am not alone. actually, i know i am not alone. but then maybe i speak more for the forum members who vote than for those out there in the wider world of lit - members i don't know, clusters of fan-based voters... in which case, you might be right, SJ. but not for this forum.

 

[Angeline]

Different groups of people vote on different poems. These groups have no common criteria. Thus do you vote according to your internal scale, or do you take into account the general level of poems, and of voting? All this makes voting pretty meaningless, some kind of noise, and overall a little bit harmful (not too much ).

I have some experience in this having worked for years with large scoring sessions of college student's essays. In order to be able to report scores that had any consistency of agreement about their meaning, you first had to come up with criteria that defined each point on the score scale (we used six points). This took groups of linguists and teachers of writing years just to get that basic agreement!

Next you had to teach large groups of essay scorers to a) accept the criteria as correct, and b) apply those criteria for each score level consistently. There was a formal training to try to achieve this. And then, once scoring actually began, there had to be X amount of inter-scorer agreement on the same essays to ensure statistically that the scale was being interpreted the same way most of the time (i.e., 90% or more agreement) by different people. That's a lot of steps and a very hard thing to do even with a system that is taught and overseen closely throughout the process.

And that wasn't even criteria for poetry, it was used for three types of prose writing: narrative, informative and persuasive. Even within those three seemingly straightforward types of writing: tell a story, describe or explain something, convince me (the reader) of something, it is really hard to get that 90% agreement: a group leader (one of the jobs I had) had to be constantly reinforcing "this is a three" or "this is what a four should look like.").

So this was just a huge, complicated labor intensive thing to do, to get people to keep agreeing that this is a 2, a 5, etc. I did essay scoring for reading comprehension questions, too, and that was much easier. Why? In an answer to a question that tests understanding of a reading passage, you need to have the right answers. Either you can define a word or you can't. Either you can recognize that a character is the main character or not, the writing needs to be coherent enought for you to understand which answer the person is giving but that's all. There are maybe five or six ways a person can answer a question like that and be right, or partly right. But writing? You can write a story or compose an argument in any number of different ways, lots and lots of ways to get it right.

I worked very, very hard on those projects and sometimes I got it "right" (i.e., 90% agreement, but not always). And my point in telling this long, boring story is that if a group of people as educated as writing teachers and people trained to judge certain types of writing in a controlled environment have such a hard time agreeing, how can I possibly accept that one person's 4 on my poem here means the same as another's? I can not. And this is why I pay no attention to scores. I give them because most people seem to want them, but the real info is in my comments.

If people are voting it is good in that people get H's and we can see that poems are being read and considered, and also that there is consensus about certain poems. But that's all it tells us. Like Senna says, not really helpful and sort of harmful because the person who wrote the poem and the once who voted on it probably have very different ideas about what the score means.

 

[EroticOrogeny]

Very true -- or should I say: very real!?

Complex - so cut branch.