Author tantrums

[AwkwardlySet]

My last two stories would seem to counter that point. My first blush is the name and short description on my latest is more engaging than the one prior.
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Scores are most certainly not the only factor or even the most important one. I see Red H as a more important factor for example. I'd say that for those two stories, the name and the description is what makes all the difference. The first one is definitely more erotically provoking.
All of these examples bring us to the point I have been making for a while now. You can all see in your own examples that little things can influence views and feedback drastically. It's because the average reader doesn't have much time or patience to devote to any single story because every day the stories are being published in absurd numbers. It undervalues them and it forces the reader to sift through them ruthlessly, so to speak.

 

[HordHolm]

I can understand and sympathize with the impulse to lash back at hurtful commenters. As authors we publish our works here. Readers get to pick and choose from thousands of stories and read them for free. They've put zero effort in and then they leave vicious comments that aren't at all constructive. Unless you're a particularly combative type of author that sort of thing hurts to varying degrees. Think of it as sharing a deep secret with a friend and having them recoil in disgust. And there's nothing the author can do to lash back at the people who were deliberately hurtful.

If they choose to slam the door behind them as they leave then that's fine. And if they come back to try again there's no shame attached. We're all just people trying to do the best we can.

Yep, that's why there's a delete button. I've only used it rarely, and I'm not so thin-skinned I can't accept criticism over a story. But if it gets ad hominem... delete, mutha-fukka!!

 

[SookieHaze7]

I think you can confidently say that, all other things being equal, a story with a higher score will get more views. The problem is, all other things are not equal. There are too many factors.

I disagree with those who focus on "protecting" scores and concentrate too much on scores. Some of my most-viewed stories do NOT have the highest scores. They have other features that attract attention.

It's funny, but as a reader, it never occurred to me to look at a story's scores. I look solely for stories that look interesting to me or that are written by someone who wrote something else I liked.

Again as a longtime Lite reader, I appreciate it when the author puts a little warning about something that might be extreme or upsetting, especially when it might have nothing to do with the category the story was placed in. For instance, a Voyeur/Exhibitionist story that has a major or extreme non-consent component might be a major trigger for some people even if it isn't for me.

That was the case for the story I wrote for the Crime challenge and for something I'm working on for the Halloween contest. They're both mostly just public exposure and voyeurism, but the stories both take a sharp turn that might upset some people who've been victimized in their real life. I include a little warning because, while I don't care about scores or winning the contest, I do care about not hurting other people when I can avoid it.

I don't tell people not to read the story, but I do let them know that the story might not be for them if they don't like a particular thing. I didn't do that with my Santa story because extramarital sex is a core subject in Loving Wives. I figure if you read a LW story, you should know that extramarital sex is likely a part of the story. I have a feeling that a lot of the anonymous trolls scour the LW Category for stories they can attack, but that's fine. I guess that's just their thing.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I think you can confidently say that, all other things being equal, a story with a higher score will get more views. The problem is, all other things are not equal. There are too many factors.

I disagree with those who focus on "protecting" scores and concentrate too much on scores. Some of my most-viewed stories do NOT have the highest scores. They have other features that attract attention.

Yeah, this is one of those things that we just kind of have to live with. There are so many factos that go into any of the numbers ont he site that trying to say "this, because of that" is a fool's errand, at least without significatnly more data than we have access to, i.e., almost none.

In the same way that a story's score is only loosely correlated to the quality of its writing, story, plot, etc.--because failing to give readers a feel-good ending, embrace their kinks, or the like can lead to lower scores--views and ratings are perhaps somewhat indicative, but certainly not closely tied. In fact, this can be a place where more can be less; if a story is well-liked within its category but "breaches containment," more viewers will read it, some of whom are unlikely to enjoy it/rate it favorably.

Here's the highest entries on the list of the Most Favorited I/T stories:



There's not a whole lot of correlation there between views and ratings. The top story, "Sitting On My Son's Lap," has a rating of 4.43, with a view count of 16.34M, while "Words on Skin," released the same year, has a 4.81 rating with a view count of 6.71M. "Threads: The Island," released two years later, has a 4.86 rating and 4.9M views.

There's an additional problem, too, namely that I don't think the view count works like people think it does. People say that clicking into the story registers a view, but I'm not sure it does. I know, from testing that other folks have done, that ratings only get recorded if the user goes through every page, not just first and last, and I'm wondering if views aren't handled the same as well. "Sitting On My Son's Lap" is a one-pager, while the rest listed in the screenshot are all a minimum of two pages; that could be affecting numbers, too.

 

[SimonDoom]

There's an additional problem, too, namely that I don't think the view count works like people think it does. People say that clicking into the story registers a view, but I'm not sure it does. I know, from testing that other folks have done, that ratings only get recorded if the user goes through every page, not just first and last, and I'm wondering if views aren't handled the same as well. "Sitting On My Son's Lap" is a one-pager, while the rest listed in the screenshot are all a minimum of two pages; that could be affecting numbers, too.

With the clear caveat that I don't know for sure and I'm no technical wiz or statistical maven, I don't think this is correct. If this were correct, then we would expect to see stories with more pages having more views, because every page click would constitute a view, and we don't see that. I think the enormous disparity between views and votes (in my case, an average of 90:1) also indicates that a view is simply opening the story without doing anything more. Why would the Site be interested in recording it as something more than that? It doesn't make much sense to me.

Sitting on My Son's Lap is an excellent example of a story that has done "well" without having a very high score. It has multiple elements for success: it's about mom-son incest, and especially the titillating theme of mom and son in the seat of a car, it's short, which means it offers a quick erotic fix, and it's easy to finish and vote on and favorite. I've followed the toplist for about seven years and this story wasn't always the top one. It's now been favorited so many times that it appears on the "similar story" lists for a huge number of incest stories, so there's a pronounced multiplier effect with its success.

The fact that Sitting on My Son's Lap has far more "views" than any other story but is just one page supports the position that a "view" is just clicking on the story and opening it.

 

[NoTalentHack]

With the clear caveat that I don't know for sure and I'm no technical wiz or statistical maven, I don't think this is correct. If this were correct, then we would expect to see stories with more pages having more views, because every page click would constitute a view, and we don't see that. I think the enormous disparity between views and votes (in my case, an average of 90:1) also indicates that a view is simply opening the story without doing anything more. Why would the Site be interested in recording it as something more than that? It doesn't make much sense to me.

No, I think I must have explained it wrong. What I mean is that it may not register a "view" unless you click through every page of a story. That is, a one-page story records a view every time it's opened, but a two-page story only records a view if the user navigates to both pages.

The top story on that list, "Mom Sits on Son's Lap," has one page, 14.3M views and a rating of 4.44. "Accidents Happen," a two-page story from the same year in the same category with a higher rating at 4.58, has 10.95M views. "Words on Skin," with a very solid 4.81 rating and also published in I/T the same year (two months before "Accidents Happen"), is six pages long and has 6.71M views.

In addition, "Words on Skin" has nearly 2K comments, more than "Accidents Happen" and "Mom Sits on Son's Lap" combined. It's clearly getting more "real" engagement than the other stories, and is rated higher, too, but the view count is the lowest of the three.

If this was just the case of someone clicking in and saying "oh, six pages, never mind," then we should see views within spitting distance of each other IF only that first page click counts, but we don't. The most obvious answer, given the experiment run with ratings previously, is that some amount of the story has to be opened in the browser before the site records a view, which means it's quite possible that "view" is closer to "read" than we might believe.

 

[Plathfan]

If you stay on the first page of a multipage story and refresh it five times, those five views will soon be added to the overall view count. I haven’t checked if this applies to the other pages, though.

 

[NoTalentHack]

If you stay on the first page of a multipage story and refresh it five times, those five views will soon be added to the overall view count. I haven’t checked if this applies to the other pages, though.

Is it those five views, or is it five views by other users? The view counts take a while to update, along with the rest of the stats on the page. Unless you're picking a particularly obscure story (old, low-rated, and in an unpopular category), that might not be a good test.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Is it those five views, or is it five views by other users? The view counts take a while to update, along with the rest of the stats on the page. Unless you're picking a particularly obscure story (old, low-rated, and in an unpopular category), that might not be a good test.

You can test that with your own story and watch it update instantly in your control panel. He is right, every refresh of the first page counts as a view - I have tested this myself more than once.
Also, one doesn't need to click on every page of a multi-page story before going to the last page and voting for the vote to register. Going straight to the last page works just as well. I have tested this more than once as well on my own stories and saw the number of votes update instantly.

 

[Bamagan]

No, I think I must have explained it wrong. What I mean is that it may not register a "view" unless you click through every page of a story. That is, a one-page story records a view every time it's opened, but a two-page story only records a view if the user navigates to both pages.

This is contrary to my observations. I have one story in SciFi which never got many reads. I use it as a shortcut from my dashboard to the SciFi hub, connecting to the first page of the story (which runs to five pages). Doing so has always caused the view counter to increase by one, usually within about 5 minutes or so, although I've never bothered timing it. While I can't say with absolute certainty that some rando isn't clicking on it at roughly the same time (every time), the low number of views (2500ish, of which about 200 are mine) and close synchronicity make that quite unlikely. I have several other stories that I also use as category shortcuts, but none quite so obscure as the one in SciFi.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

With the clear caveat that I don't know for sure and I'm no technical wiz or statistical maven, I don't think this is correct. If this were correct, then we would expect to see stories with more pages having more views, because every page click would constitute a view, and we don't see that. I think the enormous disparity between views and votes (in my case, an average of 90:1) also indicates that a view is simply opening the story without doing anything more. Why would the Site be interested in recording it as something more than that? It doesn't make much sense to me.

Sitting on My Son's Lap is an excellent example of a story that has done "well" without having a very high score. It has multiple elements for success: it's about mom-son incest, and especially the titillating theme of mom and son in the seat of a car, it's short, which means it offers a quick erotic fix, and it's easy to finish and vote on and favorite. I've followed the toplist for about seven years and this story wasn't always the top one. It's now been favorited so many times that it appears on the "similar story" lists for a huge number of incest stories, so there's a pronounced multiplier effect with its success.

The fact that Sitting on My Son's Lap has far more "views" than any other story but is just one page supports the position that a "view" is just clicking on the story and opening it.

My opinion, but I think the main reason My Son's Lap has so many views is because the characters are likable, and even in an absurd situation, believable. It's a fun read. I should know. I've read it about six times and I/T isn't even really my thing. Yeah, I gave it five stars, too.

 

[Plathfan]

This is contrary to my observations. I have one story in SciFi which never got many reads. I use it as a shortcut from my dashboard to the SciFi hub, connecting to the first page of the story (which runs to five pages). Doing so has always caused the view counter to increase by one, usually within about 5 minutes or so, although I've never bothered timing it. While I can't say with absolute certainty that some rando isn't clicking on it at roughly the same time (every time), the low number of views (2500ish, of which about 200 are mine) and close synchronicity make that quite unlikely. I have several other stories that I also use as category shortcuts, but none quite so obscure as the one in SciFi.

Go to the second page and refresh it. Let us know if the view counter increases by two. If it does, it suggests that longer stories have significantly fewer net reads.

 

[NoTalentHack]

You can test that with your own story and watch it update instantly in your control panel. He is right, every refresh of the first page counts as a view - I have tested this myself more than once.
Also, one doesn't need to click on every page of a multi-page story before going to the last page and voting for the vote to register. Going straight to the last page works just as well. I have tested this more than once as well on my own stories and saw the number of votes update instantly.

Something else the person doing testing found out: the numbers in the control panel don't necessarily represent what will get put into the main screen. During the ratings testing, they were able to verify that a rating "counted" in the author's control panel, but only until a bit later, when the recalculations were done to put it onto the main page's ratings; then it disappeared if it didn't fit the "went to every page" criteria. It's something I've seen in game dev before: tell the cheaters everything is fine in one place, then negate their efforts where it counts. Not that I'm saying anyone is "cheating," but it's the same in a lot of security design.

It's not even security design, either. Quick-and-dirty methods for tabulation and the like for instant/near-instant feedback, coupled with slower, more processor-intensive calculations were something we used all the way back when I worked at one of the early user-tracking companies. The middle management wanted billboards that refreshed instantly, but the actual sales and marketing guys wanted real numbers that reflected actual customer usage. Quick, somewhat inaccurate numbers went on the dashboards, while the real number-crunched stuff went int he reports that got called by only a few people. The use cases were different here and there, but given that fact that people do obsess about ratings and views, something like a mix between that middle-management dashboard and the anti-cheating stuff you see in online games wouldn't be too out there.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Go to the second page and refresh it. Let us know if the view counter increases by two. If it does, it suggests that longer stories have significantly fewer net reads.

It won't increase by two, if it increases at all. It would (probably) increase by one on the Author panel, then (unless it's a two-page story where the use has clicked through to both pages) won't actually increase when the "real" tallies are done on the user-facing pages.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If this was just the case of someone clicking in and saying "oh, six pages, never mind," then we should see views within spitting distance of each other IF only that first page click counts, but we don't. The most obvious answer, given the experiment run with ratings previously, is that some amount of the story has to be opened in the browser before the site records a view, which means it's quite possible that "view" is closer to "read" than we might believe.

You make good arguments, but my last two submissions were 67k words and 47k words and got their first views within minutes. My last story of 47k had a score of 1 from 2 votes within ten minutes and also had 2 views. I just can't see two people opening every page to record the view just to bomb the story. I think opening page 1 is all that it takes to record a hit.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Actually, I have something from my own stories that might give credence to this. These are my five stories with the highest view counts:



The top three were all published within a two-week span, right at the beginning of my publishing here. Or, you know, anywhere. Regardless, "At the End of the Tour" is on the all-time most favorited list for LW, admittedly near the bottom. It has, as one would expect, the most views, but not by much. "I Know My Wife" isn't, and it has a lower rating than both of the other two. "After the Future is Gone" isn't on the all-time favorite list, but it is the highest rated of the three, and my third highest-rated in LW.

"I Know My Wife" is a one-page story, and it has 227K views, regardless of the fact that it has no other really distinguishing features. It is neither particularly highly rated nor does it have the high visibility, and yet it only lags behind "At the End of the Tour" by about 50K views, while it's ahead of "After the Future is Gone" by about 70K.

The probable reason? "At the End of the Tour" is three pages long, while "After the Future is Gone" is six pages long.

The fourth story on the list, "Her Master's Voice," has fewer favorites, a lower rating, and a much later publication date than the others. It's also a one-page story.

"No Place to Go," published about a month after the last of the top three, has an H rating, about as many favorites as "I Know My Wife," and more comments than any of them except "At the End of the Tour," and misses that one by only ten comments. It also has almost 100K fewer views than "I Know My Wife," along with a length of four pages.

Looking through the rest of the list, shorter pages generally rank higher than one would expect based on other measures of user engagement (comments, scores, and likes) and time since publication in a pattern that roughly tracks with the length of the stories, with the additional proviso that comparing two-page stories to one-page stories sees the one-page stories blowing the two-pagers out of the water in view counts, while the difference between something like a two-pager and a three- are relatively tame.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I can understand and sympathize with the impulse to lash back at hurtful commenters. As authors we publish our works here. Readers get to pick and choose from thousands of stories and read them for free. They've put zero effort in and then they leave vicious comments that aren't at all constructive. Unless you're a particularly combative type of author that sort of thing hurts to varying degrees. Think of it as sharing a deep secret with a friend and having them recoil in disgust. And there's nothing the author can do to lash back at the people who were deliberately hurtful.

They're only hurtful if you let them get to you. If you take everything objectively it never hurts.

I also disagree that the readers put in zero effort. If it did I would be reading everything here. It takes time and mental/emotional investment to read. Often lots of time, and we are not getting paid for that time. From time to time we see writers here in the AH saying stuff like "I put in all this effort to give them a story for free and the least that they could do ..." The least that they could do is nothing. If one expects something in return for his efforts, one shouldn't post stuff on a free site like lit, or at least use one of those disclaimers to say "If you're not willing to read through to the end and leave me a constructive comment when you;re done then close the window right now."

So many writers put their work out there for free and then expect to be critiqued in detail, or lauded for their efforts. Well the comments are provided for free too. There are people in the industry who get paid to critique, edit, etc. If you want that, you can pay one. None of the readers on lit owe any of us anything at all. Not even common courtesy or good manners. They owe us zero, nada, bupkiss - no matter how much effort we put into our stories.

 

[Bamagan]

Go to the second page and refresh it. Let us know if the view counter increases by two. If it does, it suggests that longer stories have significantly fewer net reads.

It went up by one about three minutes after viewing page 1, and did not increment again within the last half hour after paging through all five pages. It then went up by one more when I opened page 1 again.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Do stories with higher scores generally get more views? Is there data on that? That's the only way we can make heads or tails of this argument.

All that I can say is that there have been a number of people here in the AH over the past year and a half that I've been hanging out here who claim that when they check out a list of stories for something to read, they look for the Red Hs because they swear up and down that the Red H stories are better than the non-Red H stories. One might wonder how they could tell if they;re not checking out the non-Red H stories but yes, there are many people who will read your story if it has a Red H and will dismiss it if it doesn't.

Based on this, I would guess that it will not make much difference to your view count if your story is 4.62 or 4.76, but likely a significant difference if your story is 4.51 or 4.49.

There are tons of writers out there who even believe that their own stories actually get better or worse as the stories go up and down. "Boohoo, I was so excited that my story was 4.77 last nite and I woke up this morning to check the scores and now it's 4.58. What went wrong??" Even though not a single comma of their story had changed overnight. They honestly believe that perception and judgment of their story equals the quality of their work.

So yes, scores influence your hit count. A lot.

 

[NoTalentHack]

One quick question for the folks doing click testing: are you clicking on the page and immediately going back or staying on the page? I ask because if a view is getting recorded and making it all the way through to the stats page on the user-facing story, then hell if I know what's going on. If not, if it's only clicking up the view count on the "real" page when the user has spent a little time there, I have an alternate theory.

Back when I was performing dark magicks at a nameless tracking company, we used to use two metrics, views and time-on-page to decide if a view counted as "real" for sales/marketing reports. I don't remember the terminology we used now, because old, but it basically indicated someone that was there to buy, rather than a mis-click or someone who saw the picture and immediately decided they didn't want it. Some other firms used "percentage of page scrolled," too. It's possible that the site is using some combination of those instead, which would also account for the weird disparity between one-page stories and the rest: "whoops, this is 28K words, time to click back."

Or I could just be delusional. That's a possibility, too.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Back when I was performing dark magicks at a nameless tracking company, we used to use two metrics, views and time-on-page to decide if a view counted as "real" for sales/marketing reports.

Interesting point but the site cannot tell how long you are actually looking at the page. The only way that it can count this is to calculate the difference in time between the click on page 1 and the click on page 2 (or whatever other page). If the story is only one page then it can't make that calculation, unless the person votes or comments I guess, and the vast majority of readers don't vote or comment.

Then there are longer stories like 40k or 50k. Most people aren't going to read that in one sitting. They will read the first three pages on their lunch break, close the browser (especially if it's on their phone), then after work have dinner and reopen it new, skip to page 4 and read to page 10, then close it, go to bed, and on the weekend, reopen it on their desktop (a completely different device), skip ahead to page 11 and finish it. Calculating page time would be a nightmare and could not guarantee any accuracy at all.

 

[Otto26]

They owe us zero, nada, bupkiss - no matter how much effort we put into our stories.

I don't think I said readers owe writers praise. I think I said readers that set out to be hurtful get some authors down and I understand why those authors might storm off. I certainly implied that readers should be polite in their comments when reading the free entertainment they benefit from. And I disagree about your implication that the level of effort a reader puts in to reading a story is equivalent to the amount of effort a writer puts in to creating a story. But that's neither here nor there.

 

[Bamagan]

One quick question for the folks doing click testing: are you clicking on the page and immediately going back or staying on the page? I ask because if a view is getting recorded and making it all the way through to the stats page on the user-facing story, then hell if I know what's going on. If not, if it's only clicking up the view count on the "real" page when the user has spent a little time there, I have an alternate theory.

Back when I was performing dark magicks at a nameless tracking company, we used to use two metrics, views and time-on-page to decide if a view counted as "real" for sales/marketing reports. I don't remember the terminology we used now, because old, but it basically indicated someone that was there to buy, rather than a mis-click or someone who saw the picture and immediately decided they didn't want it. Some other firms used "percentage of page scrolled," too. It's possible that the site is using some combination of those instead, which would also account for the weird disparity between one-page stories and the rest: "whoops, this is 28K words, time to click back."

Or I could just be delusional. That's a possibility, too.

In my case, I spent about five minutes on each page when I went through the full five pages. There's a section on the first page that I'm particularly fond of and enjoy re-reading, which is one of the reasons I have it marked. I re-read bits and pieces of the other pages while I was waiting to see if the counter on the control panel incremented (and discovered a typo, because of course). So I ultimately scrolled through the entire thing, albeit in fits and starts since I didn't read every passage. On the next click, when I only opened page one, I had it open for less than a minute, which was enough for it to increment again a few minutes later. The public-facing counter reads 2.5k views, compared to 2549 on my control panel. As mentioned, I have clicked on the story an estimated 200ish times since it was published, usually only on the first page.

 

[NoTalentHack]

Interesting point but the site cannot tell how long you are actually looking at the page. The only way that it can count this is to calculate the difference in time between the click on page 1 and the click on page 2 (or whatever other page). If the story is only one page then it can't make that calculation, unless the person votes or comments I guess, and the vast majority of readers don't vote or comment.

Then there are longer stories like 40k or 50k. Most people aren't going to read that in one sitting. They will read the first three pages on their lunch break, close the browser (especially if it's on their phone), then after work have dinner and reopen it new, skip to page 4 and read to page 10, then close it, go to bed, and on the weekend, reopen it on their desktop (a completely different device), skip ahead to page 11 and finish it. Calculating page time would be a nightmare and could not guarantee any accuracy at all.

It was all stuff we could do in **********, and I imagine it all still works. You basically put a cookie on the user's browser and watched where they went. On any webpage owned by a company using the tracker's services, a new hit would show up on the back end when they went elsewhere, which was the easy stuff. We'd also have a snippet of ********** in the page that could record how long a user stayed on that page and ping the server every so often, too, so we had a rough way of telling. I'm sure Manu and Co. could do the same here, although I'm not saying they have.

I'm glad I got out of that business. The beginning of it wasn't terrible--helping people figure out what of their stuff was selling and wasn't, plus identifying any potential cross-marketing possibilities--but what it turned into later is just... gross.

ETA: interesting. The forum filters out even the mention of a certain insanely popular scripting language that appears in every web browser, presumably as part of safety concerns.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I don't think I said readers owe writers praise.

I did not say that you did. However many in the AH do believe this and have stated so. That was my point there. However you did say this.

I certainly implied that readers should be polite in their comments when reading the free entertainment they benefit from.

Which means that you do feel that they owe you something, because good manners is not nothing. The sentence directly before the one that you quoted is this.

None of the readers on lit owe any of us anything at all. Not even common courtesy or good manners.

If your stories do not contain a disclaimer at the top that says "Don't read this story if you're not prepared to be nice to me in the comments." then you can't expect everyone to be nice to you in the comments. It's the old fourth grade trick where someone knocks your pencil off of your desk, then picks it up[ and says "Oh here, I picked up your pencil for you ... that'll be ten bucks. " If you'd have known that he wanted money, you would have told him to leave it on the floor. If you want an expectation from another party you must solicit it first, so if you put your story out there without any conditions, you cannot impose conditions later, and you certainly can't get upset over not getting expectations that you never asked for.

And I disagree about your implication that the level of effort a reader puts in to reading a story is equivalent to the amount of effort a writer puts in to creating a story. But that's neither here nor there.

I did not say that it was equal effort. Usually it is not, but I know that I have read some stories where the writer had put in less effort writing it than I had reading. : P Rare cases but yes it does happen. The point is, it does take effort to read and to judge and critique. Sometimes you put in the effort to write a story and offer it for free and sometimes you don't - and sometimes the readers put in the effort to read your story and maybe even vote or comment and sometimes they don't. Fair is fair.

I can tell you that if I took 100 random stories and wrote up a 300 word review for each of them (just 300 words each) most of my reviews would require more effort than the writer put into the story. I'm not kidding.