What does targeted, sweep-evading, story vandalism look like?

[OddLove]

I don’t estimate. I count. In low vote frequency categories, you can see the votes coming in. Worse case I have two votes to figure out and they could be a 3 and a 5 or two 4s. But that doesn’t happen very often and has little overall impact. Normally the change in the rating can only be explained by one value in the range 1 - 5. And I record that.

My spreadsheet calculates the running average as I add each new vote and I can cross-check. When regular suspicious votes get swept (I’m not talking about the pairs of sweep-proof votes here), I can take out votes until I match the resulting score. This isn’t rocket science, anyone vaguely numerate could do the same.

Obviously my approach wouldn’t work in a high voting category (e.g. Romance), or a high view category (e.g. Loving Wives).

How do you tell the difference between your malicious pairs of 1 stars and the non-malicious 1 stars?

For example, if your story got a total of eight 1 stars, then a sweep removes four of them, how do you know they didn't remove the paired ones you tracked and just *left the legit 1 stars? We don't have access to that kind info as far as I know.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

You can talk to me face to face. I'm right fucking here. Obviously it's me because I'm the only critic here.

How fucking dare you accuse me of that? And how fucking double-dare you accuse me like that passively? Say it to my fucking face or shut your big coward mouth.

LOL wut?

This is a "touch grass" moment.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I know this is easier said than done, but it seems like it would be a good idea to try not to care about what people like that do

A few points:

1. Telling an autistic person not to care about unfairness is like telling a depressed person to cheer up
2. More broadly - I’ve had these pairs of unswept one bombs for years - they’ve robbed me of placing in four competitions.
3. BUT - it was all very low level and manual before. Enough to knock me off the podium, but the stories would recover later. What has changed recently is the volume of them has dramatically increased, suggesting automation. The bombing is now sustained
4. Each time one of my recent stories gets last 4.5 then it gets bombed like clockwork. Again suggesting automation
5. And the well-documented suppressing of top list stories is achieved via a very familiar (to me) mechanism
6. We are getting to the point where no rating is robust

You can say, it’s OK, it’s just happening to them. Until it happens to you instead.

Personally I’d be fine if they turned off ratings. But while they exist they need to be at least reasonably fair. They aren’t. And they are getting worse.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

But why keep talking about it? What is the point?

It's called attention whoring. She couldn't top the lists because of the trolls, so she held a big press conference to announce that she was no longer publishing here (so yes, downvotes can stop you from enjoying writing and publishing ... if you choose). Then she hypes up her Nix novel, everybody read it! Then she starts a self-stroke thread where all of her friends chime in to tell her that her Nix novel is indeed the best story on lit. Okay great. She wins. She's topped all. She doesn't need scores. Everyone agrees that her story is best. Awesome, right? Nope. Not enough. Gotta keep bitching about her stories getting trolled on a site that she adamantly no longer publishes to (on this account at least).

Attention whoring 100%. There is no other reason for this behavior and it's as childish as the trolls themselves (which absolutely do exist no doubt).

 

[SimonDoom]

(so yes, downvotes can stop you from enjoying writing and publishing ... if you choose).

I think this is the crucial point. It's a choice. It seems like an odd choice to me.

I realize I'm repeating myself just as much as everyone else is, but this forum is constantly getting an influx of new participants and I want to let the newbies know that not everybody is wrapped around the axle when their story goes from a 4.92 to a 4.87. Some of us shrug and move on to the next story. Or we make a silly contribution to the limerick thread.

It's a choice.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I think this is the crucial point. It's a choice. It seems like an odd choice to me.

I realize I'm repeating myself just as much as everyone else is, but this forum is constantly getting an influx of new participants and I want to let the newbies know that not everybody is wrapped around the axle when their story goes from a 4.92 to a 4.87. Some of us shrug and move on to the next story. Or we make a silly contribution to the limerick thread.

It's a choice.

Exactly.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Quirks, as I said, just a personal picadillo, I have lots of them, but none of mine involve votes.

 

[OddLove]

On the point of "Why care?"

I think it's fair to give a shit about this if you're trying to pursue writing beyond a hobby. If your goal here is to gain a following and convert that following into some kind of monetary success like selling books or patreon/substack subscriptions, then getting 1-star bombed actually slows you down, and if done bad enough, can completely derail all your momentum.

That's where it matters in my opinion.

If you're just posting stories on here cause you enjoy writing and want to see if anyone else likes your story, then 1-star bombs are as meaningless as the overall ratings.

 

[crookedletter]

I think this is the crucial point. It's a choice. It seems like an odd choice to me.

I realize I'm repeating myself just as much as everyone else is, but this forum is constantly getting an influx of new participants and I want to let the newbies know that not everybody is wrapped around the axle when their story goes from a 4.92 to a 4.87. Some of us shrug and move on to the next story. Or we make a silly contribution to the limerick thread.

It's a choice.

I think it's worth adding, in the interest of general context, that this is an incredible place to post content as far as engagement. Some of that engagement is haters and trolls. But so much more is a huge readership, many of whom are only too happy to praise work that resonates with them.

I've said it elsewhere, but trying to publish content in more traditional markets, unless you're a lucky Big Name, can feel a lot like stuffing your work into a bottle and chucking it out to sea. Maybe it'll get picked up, maybe it won't. Maybe, if it does, someone will read it. But there's a good chance you'll never hear from them if they do. Maybe if you publish a book you'll get some notes on Goodreads -- but anyone who's waded into those review sections will know that they're hardly a safe haven from trolls.

A good rating is fun. It's nice to know people like my work. But the biggest upside to posting content here, to me, is not the ego-stroke of a nice review. It begins and ends with having an audience. And I would hate to let the effects of a few bad actors take away from all the unique benefits of posting my work in a place like this.

 

[SkyBubble]

Thanks to @Cacatua_Galerita for suggesting a good chart-based approach to visualizing this area here.

I don’t track voting on all my stories, and sometimes I do it at the beginning and then stop (though I keep an eye on voting even if I no longer update my spreadsheet). But here are partial voting patterns on five of my most recent stories.

View attachment 2599799

I’d draw your attention to the pairs of 1️ votes in red ellipses. This same pattern being repeated across multiple stories is not explainable by a stochastic process, it’s a clear signature of malign intent.

In all of the above cases, the pairs of one bombs continued after I gave up tracking them. And, as the real views / votes dry up over time, virtually all of the later votes are pairs of 1️s, regularly appearing each morning and - in particular - if any of my recent stories ever claws its way back over 4.5.

The result is that between 12 and 20% of the votes on these stories are 1️s. And the story ratings are sadly between 3.84 and 4.25. With that high a percentage of one bombs, it’s not mathematically impossible to break 4.5, which is of course the intent of the vandal.

None of the above malicious votes have ever been swept. They are cast in a manner which is sweep-proof. But I challenge anyone to argue that these votes are anything but intentional, motivated vandalism.

I have informed the site multiple times, but there has been no action. I no longer publish here as a result.

I now read that is happening to other people - @MelissaBaby has mentioned it only yesterday.

It could happen to you next.

I don't know, but I know that yesterday my newest story, Boudoir Awakening, had a "Hot" tag and today it doesn't.

 

[EmilyMiller]

I don't know, but I know that yesterday my newest story, Boudoir Awakening, had a "Hot" tag and today it doesn't.

Your mistake was mentioning it on AH

 

[SkyBubble]

They are cast in a manner which is sweep-proof.

How is that done?

 

[SkyBubble]

A year or so ago I made a suggestion that Lit do away with stars and give the red H through some sort of ratio between reads and .

That's not a bad idea.

 

[SkyBubble]

Maybe we should go visit stories like @EmilyMiller's that we know are being vandalized and vote 5 stars.

 

[SkyBubble]

It's sad that people would spend their time trying to prevent someone else's stories from getting too popular. What weird, pathetic behavior.

Do we know who they are?

 

[SkyBubble]

Your mistake was mentioning it on AH

?

 

[KittyOfSteele]

I beg to differ with the people caring for one reason: metrics really don't matter to me anymore, especially on a site where the metrics happen on a weird way. A story can be a Red H with 15 votes, but have thousands of views screams to the outsider botted views more than actual views. It's not just this discrepancy, but also gaining the Red H is based more on votes rather than views, so it gets me confused. What is s Hot story then? What does the Red H means? Is it trending? Is it accumulating good scores? What is it?

Not to mention Views and Ratings are the least honest metric possible, even in the market. Virality isn't success, high scores isn't success... I mean, even comments that here, in my personal experience, are as uncommon as comets, which are the one thing that I take more value of, can be a dishonest metric too, because neither of these three can be in harmony. Honestly, my metrics are different. The only metric that is honest, the one that I really trust, the one that speaks the biggest value, is lettuce, but unfortunately Literotica isn't a pulp paying authors 0.01$ a word.

So my metrics are in leveling up my skills, angering my own government, leaving something online out of spite against the trends, and overall writing stuff meant for someone who understands what I'm screaming into a void where moans of pleasure is all you hear. Ultimately, all I want is people to wake the fuck up, even if I have to go into samizdat territory to do so. I really don't like to see these 1-bomb threads, and if you are one who is nerding about your own numbers, be my guest and do whatever you want. I'm chill with it. I just prefer to write more and let the story have it's own life once it's released, and only check up on it whenever I feel like it. Anything that happens after publication is completely out of my control, and I rather to not stress about it. You might disagree with me, and feel free to do it. I just wanted to get this off my chest.

It's just that I disagree with these metrics. If you're only measuring your worth based on the audience you get in Lit only, you might be stalling your own growth. And this is me telling all of this to myself too.

 

[Rob_Royale]

It has been made ubundantly clear that this issue is not a concern to our site owners. So getting upset is pointless and like tilting at windmills.

What matters to me is that in less than four years, my stories have been clicked on (and hopefully read/enjoyed) over 1.7 MILLION TIMES. There is nowhere on the internet where you can have that kind of exposure unless you're naked on XVideos. And no one wants to see me that way.

So I will happily accept the deficits for the advantages.

 

[EmilyMiller]

How is that done?

The site doesn’t like us talking about it. Though at this point, with the practice unchecked and endemic, it’s kinda hard to know why. It only requires a little thought to figure out how sweeps work and an little effort (or an automated script) to evade them.

 

[SkyBubble]

Why don't they want us to talk about it?

 

[EmilyMiller]

To anyone who says to me, “Why do you care?” I have a very simple response. “Why do you NOT care?” Both are personal choices, which reflect that people are different. I won’t tell you that your position is invalid, please extend the same courtesy to me. Telling others what they should care about is deeply uncool.

Some people here care about the rating system. They ought to have information about how easy it is to manipulate, and that things are getting worse, with the legacy response of sweeps being much less effective than it used to be.

And when the same thing happens to you, know that it’s part of a wider problem.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Your mistake was mentioning it on AH

There is truth to this. I was lucky enough to get a blue W on one of my stories. I put a link to it in my signature, noting the blue W, and it dropped from a 4.93(It had been there for 18 months with over 1K votes) to a 4.63 in less than a week. It has since somewhat recovered, but I don't see how that can be anything but malicious envy.

Hubris is not appreciated here, I think...

 

[EmilyMiller]

Why don't they want us to talk about it?

Because they believe that it will make it easier for others to also evade sweeps with their malicious (or self-aggrandizing) votes.

 

[StillStunned]

Bombing sucks, for whatever reason it happens: whether to curate the Top Lists, for contest scoring or because you've picked up a personal troll. It makes you feel helpless, knowing that the bombs are coming but there's nothing you can do to stop them.

It also sucks when people say it doesn't happen. That all 1s are a reader's valid opinion. Of course stories are going to get low scores, even here on Lit where the scores are generally inflated. Of course there are plenty of valid 1. But there's also enough evidence - patterns of voting, instant voting on any story that breaks into the Top List - to show that it *does* happen. And no, it's generally not the "fans" - after all, aren't we always complaining about lack of reader engagement?

What can you do about it? Unfortunately, not much. I had a troll who gave up after I gave up caring. That's one possibility. The other is to decide whether Lit is the place where you want to be. Because the bombing isn't going to stop, and it's unlikely the sweeping is going to improve.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

On the point of "Why care?"

I think it's fair to give a shit about this if you're trying to pursue writing beyond a hobby. If your goal here is to gain a following and convert that following into some kind of monetary success like selling books or patreon/substack subscriptions, then getting 1-star bombed actually slows you down, and if done bad enough, can completely derail all your momentum.

That's where it matters in my opinion.

If you're just posting stories on here cause you enjoy writing and want to see if anyone else likes your story, then 1-star bombs are as meaningless as the overall ratings.

Yet the person who started this thread has frequently stated that it's just a hobby and they have no desire to monetize it.