Yes, the Toplists are Broken

[RejectReality]

I'm actually not sure how many times in a 24 hour period it updates? I'd believe any number between 2 and 6, but I think 3 or 4 is probably the right answer. Confounding is that I have things to do other than constantly refresh the toplists, and because the toplists are so manicured right now, an "update" can happen without anything obvious changing. You'd need hourly data for several days to be certain what the schedule was - and it might actually not be the same every day (for example: a 5-hour rotation would cause it to change at different hours on different days). But it is often different if I check in the morning and then again in the evening.

---

The final 1 is almost certainly the completion of a "pair."

As you say, there's a lot of ways to get to 4.8 at 106 votes from 4.91 at 100 votes. But since we're dealing with a trolling pattern, it would make the most sense for that to be following the pattern. And the pattern is that the troll hammer comes in pairs of 1* hits. A 1* rating followed by a second 1* rating a short time later. Since you have a snapshot at 106 votes and another snapshot at 107 votes, it would make the most sense if that last rating is something already generated by the troll vote pair having been initiated.

Dropping from 4.91 to 4.8 in 6 votes implies that your story picked up a total of 18 stars across 6 votes. That's three 5* ratings and three 1* ratings. But the 1* ratings come in pairs, so if you only got three of them, you'd expect another 1* rating to be incoming shortly after.

Getting 2 pairs of troll votes on a modest delay is actually entirely consistent with the process being automated. Especially if the pair completed after you were no longer even being displayed on the toplist. A human wouldn't bother chasing down a story that was no longer a threat, or even be able to find you, but an attack script would run to completion.

You picked the one combination that works with your theory.

Why would a middle chapter pick up three fives when nothing else in the series was voted on? It's not something special. It doesn't have one of the rare, full sex scenes of the series. This chapter is the very definition of a middle chapter. Found this cool thing on the toplist, voted five on it and decided not to read/vote on any more of them? Once? Maybe. Twice? I suppose. Three times? Doesn't compute.

18 stars is also six threes. That's the kind of votes a seasoned troll from a category with fans of stories a decade old with relatively low vote totals would cast. Then the oddball 1 hangs out there off-script.

There's no reason for a script to be dropping any fives as part of its calculation aiming for 4.84 either. And if there was, it failed spectacularly.

It's just toplist trolling.

 

[RocketGrunt]

I just imagine they keep getting hit, until the refresh.

Well, the key information is that the second pair of 1* attacks completed apparent AFTER the refresh.

While the trollhammer system is sophisticated enough to evade the site's sweeps for inauthentic votes, it's not sophisticated in any other way. Pairs of 1* reviews may be the maximum they've figured out how to get away with, but they aren't actually required on the low-vote total stories that come into the attack protocol for crossing the threshold of getting the minimum number of votes. Like, sure if there's a story with thousands of votes that bubbles back out of the 4.84 crush because of the weight of many many 5* ratings, it might take a few 1* hits to knock it down again. But the 100 and 200 vote stories usually don't even need a single 1* bomb. At 100 votes, a single 3* rating drops a 4.85 to a 4.83. These double taps are often HUGE overkill.

This is one of the reasons I think it's very likely to be automated. It's already kind of hard to imagine a real human being logging into 86 different chapters of Three Square Meals multiple times each so that they can drop enough 1* hits to drop them all from 4.85 or more to 4.84 or less. But also there was just genuinely no need to send two double-taps against One Whore's Town, Chapter 03. It entered with only 100 votes, a single double tap would drop it from 4.91 to 4.83. But the fact that the 4.91 story with a hundred votes ate two double taps and the 4.86 stories described in the original post only seem to have gotten hit with a single double tap each indicates that there's a rule being followed.

The constant use of excessive force is evidence that the actions aren't being considered by a human, and the swiftness and uniformity of the troll hammers is evidence that they are being automated. The fact that there are different rules being used on different boards is consistent with it being one person and also consistent with it being a group of different people. But the fact that the hammer falls exactly the same whether it's on the Gay Male board where the hammers only target the toplist or the Taboo/Incest board where the hammers target anything with a Red H indicates that it's the same system being used whether or not it obeys different masters.

 

[Cacatua_Galerita]

As further evidence of the Toplists brokenness. Here’s the progression of a highly rated story since before the times of the “4.84” regression…

Slingshot was published into Sci-Fi & Fantasy on January 22nd, 2024. From my (limited) data points, it appeared on the Sci-Fi Top List with a rating of 4.94 from 1651 votes.

Entering the Top List (and thus “exposing it to a wider audience”) did not condemn it. It gained at least a further 613 votes while retaining its 4.94 rating. Only in late 2024 did its ratings take a downturn.

The subsequent 269 votes were an average 4.66 stars, bringing it down to 4.91 overall.

The next 524 votes collectively rated the story at 4.50 stars. Meaning, from November 2024 to present, this ‘top of the top list’ story has been rated as ‘below average’ (for a Sci-Fi story).

Here are the data points.

Date Rating (Votes) Delta As per:
04/05/24 4.94 (1651) Debut at #8 Link
05/11/24 4.94 (1817) Up 7 to #1 Link
07/16/24 4.94 (2075) Dn 2 to #3 Link
09/09/24 4.94 (2264) Up 2 to #1 Link
11/20/24 4.91 (2533) Stdy at #1 Link
04/19/25 4.88 (2800) Dn 6 to #7 Link
06/13/25 4.88 (2852) Dn 2 to #9 Link
07/30/25 4.86 (2912) Dn 4 to #13 Link
02/13/26 4.84 (3057) Dn 111 to #124 Link

Conversely, there have been winners.

Three Square Meals, a 145-chapter series published between 2015 and 2023, had zero chapters listed in the Sci-Fi Top 50 on April 5th, 2024. By April 19th, 2025 it had four chapters in the Top 50. Today, 36 of the Top 50 stories are various chapters of Three Square Meals. No further chapters have been added to Literotica since 2023 (although, many continuation chapters are now available on Patreon, as pay-per-view).

Obviously, this is not proof that Three-Square-Meals has a group of fan-boys that are manipulating the Top List – some chapters of that story have regressed to 4.84 as well - but it shows that the Lists are becoming less diverse, thus, less useful overall.

I have read Slingshot and enjoyed it. This is the type of story Literotica should be placing front-and-center for their Sci-Fi readers. So, for those that argue that ‘fuck-the-authors’ is the site motto because readers are the only thing that counts... Why does this site let compelling content, like Slingshot, get spat out the arse-end of the Top Lists and into obscurity, only to be replaced by more chapters of the same old story? This is a reader/consumer issue for the site to address, not just an author gripe.

Today, as a reader, if you want to find a good story, I suggest you go to some archived Top List, because the live-site Top Lists are a hot mess.

Last thing to consider. Everything is being manipulated these days. Headlines, share markets, Amazon product ratings, political polls, market indexes, electricity spot prices, inflation rates – everything that can be squeezed for profit or influence, is being squeezed. I even wrote a story themed around dark money influence. So when I, or others like EmilyMiller, suggest improvements to the voting system, we’re not just trying to protect ‘our precious’ – we’re trying to protect every author’s stories from the same enshittification we see happening everywhere else. We’re not trying to gain personal advantage, we’re trying to strengthen the site against (inevitable) manipulation.

 

[RocketGrunt]

You picked the one combination that works with your theory.

Why would a middle chapter pick up three fives when nothing else in the series was voted on? It's not something special. It doesn't have one of the rare, full sex scenes of the series. This chapter is the very definition of a middle chapter. Found this cool thing on the toplist, voted five on it and decided not to read/vote on any more of them? Once? Maybe. Twice? I suppose. Three times? Doesn't compute.

18 stars is also six threes. That's the kind of votes a seasoned troll from a category with fans of stories a decade old with relatively low vote totals would cast. Then the oddball 1 hangs out there off-script.

There's no reason for a script to be dropping any fives as part of its calculation aiming for 4.84 either. And if there was, it failed spectacularly.

It's just toplist trolling.

A majority of the votes cast on Literotica are 5*. If people think something is good, they give it a 5*.

Your story, prior to being exposed to toplist trolling, received 5* ratings as more than 90% of all ratings. If it was viewed and rated by an extra group of people (for example: because it was briefly displayed on the top of the SF/F toplist), you would expect to receive extra votes that were also more than 90% 5* ratings. People who read your story think it's good, and people on Literotica don't need to think a story is amaze-balls terrific good to rate it 5*.

So if you got an extra block of votes and you wondered what the ratings given were, the most likely is just whatever implies the largest number of literal 5* ratings. Because we know that 5* ratings are more than 90% of the organic ratings that story receives.

The fact that this assumption paints a picture that fits EXACTLY with the votes over time graph of the previously studied trolling attacks shown earlier is something I find persuasive.

 

[EmilyMiller]

So when I, or others like EmilyMiller, suggest improvements to the voting system, we’re not just trying to protect ‘our precious’ – we’re trying to protect every author’s stories from the same enshittification we see happening everywhere else. We’re not trying to gain personal advantage, we’re trying to strengthen the site against (inevitable) manipulation.

You mention politics being manipulated. It’s a political tactic to create an alt universe based on straw-men and cognitive bias, leavened with twisted and cherry-picked versions of what the person you disagree with actually said, followed by demonizing your opponent, ideally personally. What counts is not facts or reasonableness, it’s owning the other side by any means possible.

This tactic has migrated to AH big time in the last few years.

 

[ThatNewGuy]

So when I, or others like EmilyMiller, suggest improvements to the voting system, we’re not just trying to protect ‘our precious’ – we’re trying to protect every author’s stories from the same enshittification we see happening everywhere else. We’re not trying to gain personal advantage, we’re trying to strengthen the site against (inevitable) manipulation.

Why does this site let compelling content, like Slingshot, get spat out the arse-end of the Top Lists and into obscurity, only to be replaced by more chapters of the same old story? This is a reader/consumer issue for the site to address, not just an author gripe.

Very well said. I also read, enjoyed, and commented on Slingshot. You know how I found it and why I read it? It was #1 on the SF&F all-time top list. It's a disservice to readers when a story that is rated 4.94(!) after 2,200(!) votes gets buried. Is it the end of the world? Not even close. Is it a problem that would be nice to have fixed? Absolutely.

Like you, I'm not trying to protect "my precious" here. My stories will get bumped further down their respective top lists if this issue is fixed.

Others are correct that this thread is unlikely to solve anything, but that's fine. Screaming into the void has always been a part of the AH community. The best any of us can do is to send Laurel and Manu a respectful PM asking if they have any insight into the cause of the top list flattening and whether anything is in the works to address it.

 

[Dodola]

enshittification

My favorite new word

Edit: *favourite,, for those who's eyes twitched a little when they saw this

 

[RejectReality]

A majority of the votes cast on Literotica are 5*. If people think something is good, they give it a 5*.

Your story, prior to being exposed to toplist trolling, received 5* ratings as more than 90% of all ratings. If it was viewed and rated by an extra group of people (for example: because it was briefly displayed on the top of the SF/F toplist), you would expect to receive extra votes that were also more than 90% 5* ratings. People who read your story think it's good, and people on Literotica don't need to think a story is amaze-balls terrific good to rate it 5*.

So if you got an extra block of votes and you wondered what the ratings given were, the most likely is just whatever implies the largest number of literal 5* ratings. Because we know that 5* ratings are more than 90% of the organic ratings that story receives.

The fact that this assumption paints a picture that fits EXACTLY with the votes over time graph of the previously studied trolling attacks shown earlier is something I find persuasive.

Middle chapters do not behave like self contained submissions. Being highlighted by the toplist or a contest win may cause a view spike, but votes only spike if the preceding chapters do as well. 3 5s on a single middle chapter simply doesn't fit readership patterns.

 

[RocketGrunt]

Middle chapters do not behave like self contained submissions. Being highlighted by the toplist or a contest win may cause a view spike, but votes only spike if the preceding chapters do as well. 3 5s on a single middle chapter simply doesn't fit readership patterns.

Why do you believe that?

The votes spiked. There was a 1 vote on that chapter from a normal readership of your series starting at chapter 1, right? That may have been triggered by you advertising it on this thread, or it may have been completely random. It's one viewer following normal read and rate patterns. Whether they were linked from this thread or found your series by a tag search or just got it as one of their random sci-fi suggestions is not something we're going to know unless they raise their hand.

And then you got 7 ratings specifically on that chapter that are one hundred percent obviously there because your story popped up at the top of the toplist, right? Some number of them are troll hammers, but why is it so bizarre to think that some of them might be actual people who clicked on it to read because it was advertised by the toplist as being of high quality?

Any number of "real" votes are overwhelmingly likely to be 5*. More 5* votes are cast than all other ratings combined. Not just on this story, but overall across the entire site. It's why I was so flippantly dismissive of the idea of dropping the "top 5% of votes." Every vote in the top quintile is an identical 5* vote, but every vote in the middle quintile is also an identical 5* vote. For a well regarded story like your own, more than half the votes in the bottom quintile are an identical 5* vote.

On the other hand, 3* reviews are incredibly rare. One person graphed their votes on this thread and identified only a single 3* vote in the entire time series (and believed that it came from a snarky forum poster in response to a statement that they never got 3* ratings at all). Certainly, the last time I am sure that I got a 3* rating on any of my stories, it came with a bewildering comment that they didn't like that my Pokemon fanfic kept using the phrase "It's super effective."

Troll votes, organic votes, almost none of them are 3*. People have made memes about it. So if we see 6 votes and the total is 18*, it is OVERWHELMINGLY more likely that three of them are 5*s and three of them are 1*s than that it is six 3*s. I have 59 stories with over three hundred votes each, and NONE of them have six 3* ratings on them.

 

[ElectricBlue]

So if you got an extra block of votes and you wondered what the ratings given were, the most likely is just whatever implies the largest number of literal 5* ratings. Because we know that 5* ratings are more than 90% of the organic ratings that story receives.

How do we "know" that? The fact that stories show a multiplicity of scores means 3s 4s and 5s are handed out, and in the long run a smaller count of 1s and 2s - because if a story is that bad, I suspect most people will quit, and not be bothered voting at all.

Seems to me that a whole bunch of these "discussions" depends on wild sweeping statements - I've seen nothing in my story file that suggests 90% of the votes given are fives.

Where's your "definitive" data, for the whole site, every story?

 

[RocketGrunt]

How do we "know" that? The fact that stories show a multiplicity of scores means 3s 4s and 5s are handed out, and in the long run a smaller count of 1s and 2s - because if a story is that bad, I suspect most people will quit, and not be bothered voting at all.

Seems to me that a whole bunch of these "discussions" depends on wild sweeping statements - I've seen nothing in my story file that suggests 90% of the votes given are fives.

Where's your "definitive" data, for the whole site, every story?

In the average rating range of 4.XX, the lowest possible percentage of 5* ratings is XX%. That assumes XX% 5* and (100-XX)% 4*. If any of the votes are lower than 4*, there necessarily are a HIGHER percentage of 5* ratings to make up whatever the reported average is.

The story in question has a 4.91 rating before being exposed to the troll bombs. The lowest possible percentage of 5* ratings is... 91%. If the non-5* ratings were 2* ratings, the percentage of 5* ratings would necessarily be 97% of the votes cast.

Every story with a Red H has more 5* ratings than all other ratings combined. That is what it means if the average is more than 4.5, and that is what a Red H requires. And that's even if literally every single non-5 rating is a 4. Add in 3*s, 2*s, and 1*s, and the required percentage increases.

Five star ratings vastly outnumber any other rating on Literotica, and it is not close. And for well regarded stories that have a hope in hell of getting onto the toplist of any category, that ratio is even more tilted in favor of the 5* reviews. For any story that is even potentially exposed to the toplist trolls, they must first have gotten 5* ratings that outnumber all other ratings combined by more than four to one.

Now the fact that 3* reviews are very rare is something that is anecdotally claimed by obsessive weirdos who count votes on their stories and figure out what votes were cast. But there are a number of reasons to believe that is the case. Not the least of which is that every 3* rating counts twice as much as a 4* rating toward setting the averages to where they are, and mathematically there just isn't room for there to be a lot of 3* reviews anywhere.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Every story with a Red H has more 5* ratings than all other ratings combined. That is what it means if the average is more than 4.5, and that is what a Red H requires. And that's even if literally every single non-5 rating is a 4. Add in 3*s, 2*s, and 1*s, and the required percentage increases.

A 4.5 can be made up of 50 x 5s and 50 x 4s.

Five star ratings vastly outnumber any other rating on Literotica, and it is not close.

Again, where's the data? You're making statements with no data behind them.

Now the fact that 3* reviews are very rare is something that is anecdotally claimed by obsessive weirdos who count votes on their stories and figure out what votes were cast.

At least those folk are citing empirical data.

I must have some 3s in my story file, because I've got four stories with a score below 4.00, which means < 4.00 scores somewhere, because maths. That's 3% of my story count, which isn't "very rare" in my world - it's above a noise floor, by any definition.

If I'm an "obsessive weirdo" who pays a moment here and there to my scores, to see what goes on, I'm not exactly sure what that makes you, who's been banging on this top list thing for 14 thread pages, for close on a week. Perhaps we have different definitions of obsessive.

Sure, the top lists are completely fucked up, and have been the eleven years I've been here. Why this is the end of the world as we know it, I really don't know. If you don't like what you see there, don't pay attention. That's not hard to do.

 

[RejectReality]

Why do you believe that?

The votes spiked. There was a 1 vote on that chapter from a normal readership of your series starting at chapter 1, right? That may have been triggered by you advertising it on this thread, or it may have been completely random. It's one viewer following normal read and rate patterns. Whether they were linked from this thread or found your series by a tag search or just got it as one of their random sci-fi suggestions is not something we're going to know unless they raise their hand.

And then you got 7 ratings specifically on that chapter that are one hundred percent obviously there because your story popped up at the top of the toplist, right? Some number of them are troll hammers, but why is it so bizarre to think that some of them might be actual people who clicked on it to read because it was advertised by the toplist as being of high quality?

Any number of "real" votes are overwhelmingly likely to be 5*. More 5* votes are cast than all other ratings combined. Not just on this story, but overall across the entire site. It's why I was so flippantly dismissive of the idea of dropping the "top 5% of votes." Every vote in the top quintile is an identical 5* vote, but every vote in the middle quintile is also an identical 5* vote. For a well regarded story like your own, more than half the votes in the bottom quintile are an identical 5* vote.

On the other hand, 3* reviews are incredibly rare. One person graphed their votes on this thread and identified only a single 3* vote in the entire time series (and believed that it came from a snarky forum poster in response to a statement that they never got 3* ratings at all). Certainly, the last time I am sure that I got a 3* rating on any of my stories, it came with a bewildering comment that they didn't like that my Pokemon fanfic kept using the phrase "It's super effective."

Troll votes, organic votes, almost none of them are 3*. People have made memes about it. So if we see 6 votes and the total is 18*, it is OVERWHELMINGLY more likely that three of them are 5*s and three of them are 1*s than that it is six 3*s. I have 59 stories with over three hundred votes each, and NONE of them have six 3* ratings on them.

You're just rattling off statistics and ignoring common sense. Twenty years of posting on this website and in that category tells me that readers do not drop 5 bombs on a Ch. 03 and then never so much as even look at Ch. 01 or anything else. The views tell that tale. Every other chapter has one new view ( I've downloaded my stats every day since posting that image. ) which coincides with the single vote cast on all of them.

There is no introduction of the characters/location/setting, because that's already been done in previous chapters. It picks up where the previous chapter left off. There's no full-fledged sex scenes in this chapter, so it's not a case of a really hot scene getting a 5 from someone who managed to do it between cleaning up and falling asleep. It ends on a pseudo-cliffhanger that's only really a point of excitement for anyone who's read the previous story this one is a pseudo-sequel to and knows who she is. Otherwise, this is some random woman showing up to end the chapter. Absolutely nothing is resolved by the end of this chapter.

The whole point of this discussion is people are trolling the toplist. Yet your first instinct is to assign half the votes that came in during the brief period it was on the toplist to someone other than trolls because it's the only way to make it fit your theory that it's being done by an automated script. Why is it so hard to believe that it was all trolls when that's the whole point of the discussion?

More often than not, the simple answer is the truth. The simple answer is that fanboys are boosting their favorites and beating down everyone else. Absolutely everything observed on every toplist can be explained by that premise. You don't need scripts, or cabals, or coordination. You just need overzealous fans being dicks.

 

[Cacatua_Galerita]

My favorite new word

Edit: *favourite,, for those who's eyes twitched a little when they saw this

Not my own word: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification but I believe it is the correct one for the context.

I write here (stories and forum) in US English (unless my story is set in Australia), so I'm used to both forms. But you'll note I spelt '"arse-end" with Commonwealth spelling, for a bit of added zest.

 

[RejectReality]

To give a little idea of how not new this is: When I first started out in 2006, I got in the habit of watching my numbers closely. If I got to 9 votes with a perfect 5, I was 4-bombing my own story to knock it down to 4.90. Reason being that it would then appear on the toplist ( which had no vote threshold at the time ) in a moderately good position, but not one that threatened the upper end, which was populated with 4.98s and such. It would put me about half to three quarters of the way down the first page of the toplist. Enough to attract new readership, but not enough to threaten the stories at the top.

I'd learned the hard way that daring to let a perfect 5 appear on the toplist was a surefire way to get bombed into oblivion. A single 1 at that point drops you to 4.63, and you almost never got a single 1. A story that was 4-bombed would remain there for a decent amount of time, until new readers bumped the score up into the danger zone. I stopped doing it once I was picking up more than 10 votes in the overnight hours on day 1. I'd been marked as a persistent threat at that point, and people were bombing me before I ever hit the toplist. LOL

 

[ElectricBlue]

To give a little idea of how not new this is: When I first started out in 2006, I got in the habit of watching my numbers closely. If I got to 9 votes with a perfect 5, I was 4-bombing my own story to knock it down to 4.90. Reason being that it would then appear on the toplist ( which had no vote threshold at the time ) in a moderately good position, but not one that threatened the upper end, which was populated with 4.98s and such. It would put me about half to three quarters of the way down the first page of the toplist. Enough to attract new readership, but not enough to threaten the stories at the top.

Haha, how dare you admit to manipulating the top lists by giving yourself a 4! That's priceless. What will the conspiracy theorists think now?

 

[RocketGrunt]

The whole point of this discussion is people are trolling the toplist. Yet your first instinct is to assign half the votes that came in during the brief period it was on the toplist to someone other than trolls because it's the only way to make it fit your theory that it's being done by an automated script. Why is it so hard to believe that it was all trolls when that's the whole point of the discussion?

Why do you have a hard time believing that your story that had previously gotten more than nine top ratings for every rating of any other number would have gotten top ratings from a couple of people who read it when the site presented it as a recommended read?

Yes, it's chapter 3, and it would probably make more sense to click on your user name, open the works, and start at chapter one. But if they clicked on the chapter link the toplist gave them, they'd go straight to Chapter 3. Since everything else has been troll bombed to 4.85 or less, a 4.91 rating would be a tempting advertisement for many people.

But the main reason I don't buy six 3* ratings is that there's no evidence of anyone troll bombing anything with 3* ratings. When people check often enough to find the ratings of specific votes, it's almost never a 3*. It's almost always a 5* or a 1*. Even the single vote you checked was a 1*. The rest of the troll votes are overwhelmingly likely to have been normal troll votes - 1* and 2*. But for every 1* there would have to have been a 5* because the total adds up to 18. It could also have been four 2* and two 5*, but that wouldn't explain where the 1* parting shot came from

We predicted this story would get troll bombed days in advance, and the numbers are consistent with getting 4 troll votes and 3 real votes. Or 5 troll votes and 2 real votes where four of those votes tried to be a bit sneaky. They are also consistent with getting seven troll votes where six of those votes were extremely weird votes that are almost never used - but that's a very strange explanation that would require evidence of some kind.

By the way, this experiment is running again tonight. The Mage of Dockside Pt. 03 by DocklessDev has entered the toplist at 4.91 with exactly 100 votes. It will have been troll bombed off the list by the next time the list updates. But I'll bet a few actual readers click on it too. And it wouldn't surprise me if it picks up 2-4 "real" votes before its time in the sun ends. Well, not the sun, but you know what I mean.

 

[RejectReality]

Why do you have a hard time believing that your story that had previously gotten more than nine top ratings for every rating of any other number would have gotten top ratings from a couple of people who read it when the site presented it as a recommended read?

Yes, it's chapter 3, and it would probably make more sense to click on your user name, open the works, and start at chapter one. But if they clicked on the chapter link the toplist gave them, they'd go straight to Chapter 3. Since everything else has been troll bombed to 4.85 or less, a 4.91 rating would be a tempting advertisement for many people.

But the main reason I don't buy six 3* ratings is that there's no evidence of anyone troll bombing anything with 3* ratings. When people check often enough to find the ratings of specific votes, it's almost never a 3*. It's almost always a 5* or a 1*. Even the single vote you checked was a 1*. The rest of the troll votes are overwhelmingly likely to have been normal troll votes - 1* and 2*. But for every 1* there would have to have been a 5* because the total adds up to 18. It could also have been four 2* and two 5*, but that wouldn't explain where the 1* parting shot came from

We predicted this story would get troll bombed days in advance, and the numbers are consistent with getting 4 troll votes and 3 real votes. Or 5 troll votes and 2 real votes where four of those votes tried to be a bit sneaky. They are also consistent with getting seven troll votes where six of those votes were extremely weird votes that are almost never used - but that's a very strange explanation that would require evidence of some kind.

By the way, this experiment is running again tonight. The Mage of Dockside Pt. 03 by DocklessDev has entered the toplist at 4.91 with exactly 100 votes. It will have been troll bombed off the list by the next time the list updates. But I'll bet a few actual readers click on it too. And it wouldn't surprise me if it picks up 2-4 "real" votes before its time in the sun ends. Well, not the sun, but you know what I mean.

You're twisting yourself up into a pretzel to try to make this work. The exact problem is that you have to have that final troll bomb fit into your pattern in order for your theory to hold water, and that requires 3 votes of 5 that defy logic. That 1 could have arisen from someone watching this thread. It could be someone else I pissed off who saw an opportunity to blast something that had a high rating that they thought would piss me off. Someone could have had my public profile or the story open ( as I have now to see what the current test case looks like in the morning. It's showing 4.91 and 103 votes on the 12 month list, BTW ) where a still lingering higher score might have still been listed, and bombed it based upon that. Or somebody saw it on the topist, bookmarked it, and legitimately hated it within a few words when they got around to it.

If there's a 5 on this middle chapter during those 7 votes without a single glance at any other chapter in the series, then that 5 is just as illegitimate as the bombs. Somebody's trying to futilely counteract the bombs because they're pissed about the toplist manipulation. Or I have a fan who hasn't gotten the hint despite constant repetition that I don't want them multi-voting or bombing others. ( Unlikely considering how long it's been since I posted and how infrequently I post. Most of my fans are probably dying of old age at this point ) Nobody is going to drop a genuine 5 on a textbook example of a middle chapter and then just walk away. People simply don't do that.

Trolls be trolls is the most likely prospect. There's no need to complicate it beyond that.

 

[RocketGrunt]

You're twisting yourself up into a pretzel to try to make this work. The exact problem is that you have to have that final troll bomb fit into your pattern in order for your theory to hold water, and that requires 3 votes of 5 that defy logic. That 1 could have arisen from someone watching this thread. It could be someone else I pissed off who saw an opportunity to blast something that had a high rating that they thought would piss me off. Someone could have had my public profile or the story open ( as I have now to see what the current test case looks like in the morning. It's showing 4.91 and 103 votes on the 12 month list, BTW ) where a still lingering higher score might have still been listed, and bombed it based upon that. Or somebody saw it on the topist, bookmarked it, and legitimately hated it within a few words when they got around to it.

If there's a 5 on this middle chapter during those 7 votes without a single glance at any other chapter in the series, then that 5 is just as illegitimate as the bombs. Somebody's trying to futilely counteract the bombs because they're pissed about the toplist manipulation. Or I have a fan who hasn't gotten the hint despite constant repetition that I don't want them multi-voting or bombing others. ( Unlikely considering how long it's been since I posted and how infrequently I post. Most of my fans are probably dying of old age at this point ) Nobody is going to drop a genuine 5 on a textbook example of a middle chapter and then just walk away. People simply don't do that.

Trolls be trolls is the most likely prospect. There's no need to complicate it beyond that.

Um.... if it's showing 4.91 at 103 votes anywhere that's proof that there are 3 votes that are exactly 5 stars each. If the 3 votes from 100 to 103 were 3*, it would have already dropped to 4.85.

You just found perfect confirmation that the vote tallies were exactly three 5*s and then four 1*s.

Thank you.

Edit: We have a snapshot at vote 99 (4.91), 100 (4.91), 103 (4.91), 106 (4.8), and 107 (4.77).

At 99 votes we know it was rounding up to 4.91, because 486 stars rounds up to 4.91 and 487 stars rounds up to 4.92. At the point of the 100th vote, we know that there are exactly 491 total stars, because it's the 100th vote and one star more or less would exactly bump the rating up or down by .01. So the 100th vote is 5*.

If even one vote between 100 and 103 was a 4* or less, it would have dropped to 4.90 or less. So all three of those votes are 5*. Since we know that, we also know that the following four votes are all 1*.

 

[Voboy]

Some people here are spending entirely too much time and effort on something they can't do anything about. But that's okay.

Let's hope we all find our joy here, whether it comes from writing words or parsing numbers.

 

[lovecraft68]

Some people here are spending entirely too much time and effort on something they can't do anything about. But that's okay.

Let's hope we all find our joy here, whether it comes from writing words or parsing numbers.

This could be an HP Lovecraft story: At the Top Lists of Madness

 

[SimonDoom]

This could be an HP Lovecraft story: At the Top Lists of Madness

Locked in a room forever with Chthulu, who complains endlessly about the errors of the Literotica voting system.

 

[RejectReality]

Um.... if it's showing 4.91 at 103 votes anywhere that's proof that there are 3 votes that are exactly 5 stars each. If the 3 votes from 100 to 103 were 3*, it would have already dropped to 4.85.

You just found perfect confirmation that the vote tallies were exactly three 5*s and then four 1*s.

Thank you.

Edit: We have a snapshot at vote 99 (4.91), 100 (4.91), 103 (4.91), 106 (4.8), and 107 (4.77).

At 99 votes we know it was rounding up to 4.91, because 486 stars rounds up to 4.91 and 487 stars rounds up to 4.92. At the point of the 100th vote, we know that there are exactly 491 total stars, because it's the 100th vote and one star more or less would exactly bump the rating up or down by .01. So the 100th vote is 5*.

If even one vote between 100 and 103 was a 4* or less, it would have dropped to 4.90 or less. So all three of those votes are 5*. Since we know that, we also know that the following four votes are all 1*.

I knew you'd jump on that. It's a red herring.

You're assuming that's new votes that have happened since it appeared on the all-time toplist, and it proves your point. In fact, you're more right than you've ever been and 3 5s is what normally happens when some middle chapter with 100 votes shows up on the toplist.

Now, look at Starlight Gleaming 25 on page 4 of the same 12 month toplist. ( Listing for Dockside is still the same this morning on both lists ) 4.87 240 votes. Now look at it on the all-time toplist for the same story. 4.85 206 votes. While we can't see the votes from the author's page, 4.85 is the current score. The 12 month listing is wrong. Toplist entries have a tendency to freeze up when they get swept. They stay locked on the old listing until the current number of votes exceeds the pre-sweep number of votes. Or, that whole toplist tab is frozen, which has been known to happen in the past.

My point in posting that for you to jump on is that you desperately need things to confirm your hypothesis, because it requires such narrow conditions to work. Dumb luck set up the current test case for it, and a few seconds of research found a second entry to establish the inaccuracy of the 12 month list. When poor Dockside gets wiped off the all-time list on the next update, you won't have nearly as much trouble. Whatever the score is, you'll be able to construct a series of 2x2 troll votes and magical 5s to come up with the correct average score. It will probably be bombed low enough that you can't find the current vote total anywhere, so you can use any combination and make your theory work.

Never mind how it flies in the face of the 4.84 line by going significantly below it.

You're clinging to this theory, and it just doesn't work. K.I.S.S. Trolls be trollin'. That has 100% confirmation from the data for 20 years.

 

[lovecraft68]

Locked in a room forever with Chthulu, who complains endlessly about the errors of the Literotica voting system.

While Abdul Alhazred demands a sweep because the score on Necronomicon chapter 309 went from a 4.91 to a 4.89

 

[RocketGrunt]

I knew you'd jump on that. It's a red herring.

You're assuming that's new votes that have happened since it appeared on the all-time toplist, and it proves your point. In fact, you're more right than you've ever been and 3 5s is what normally happens when some middle chapter with 100 votes shows up on the toplist.

Where does the 103 votes report come from? Like, obviously it's not currently correct, but presumably it is a total that existed at some time for it to be seen and recorded.

Unless your theory is that it is a report of a vote tally that never existed, it's a snapshot from a specific point in time. If it's 103 votes, that's a point in time that is between the time when it was snapshotted at 100 votes on the Toplist and when you checked in on it at 106 votes.

And if it is between those two points in time, it shows three 5*s before and then three 1*s after that snapshot. If it had shown an 11/7 split of stars that could still be three 5*s and three 1*s, but it could also be two 4*s and a 3* and then a 4*, a 2*, and a 1*. Or a bunch of other extremely unlikely splits. But what it actually showed was that those 18 stars among 6 votes came in the exactly predicted three 5*s and three 1*s.

For it to be anything else, the 4.91 (103 Votes) would have to be a complete algorithmic hallucination that corresponds to no vote totals that have ever existed. And even if it is an algorithmic hallucination, the three 5*s and three 1*s split is still by far the most likely. Because 5* ratings are the most common in general and 1* ratings are the most common troll vote and there is no evidence at all that any other kind of vote was cast.

If you didn't know anything about what Literotica voting patterns looked like, and you were told that six votes were cast and the total was 18 stars, you'd probably assume it was a nice like Gaussian curve at 5, 4, 3, 3, 2, 1. But that's INCREDIBLY unlikely given what we know about Literotica voting and trolling patterns. 3* ratings are the least used ratings on this site.