Every story I post gets 1 star’d

[Kelliezgirl]

Yes, but isn't that better than 1s without consequence?

They are still hurting people's stories (again assuming malicious intent) this would just increase the collateral damage for all the randos that got 4s.

 

[Writer61]

They are still hurting people's stories (again assuming malicious intent) this would just increase the collateral damage for all the randos that got 4s.

Only if they realise that they need to give 4s/5s for their 1s to have much impact.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Only if they realise that they need to give 4s/5s for their 1s to have much impact.

Fair point.
Any of these systems rely on same level of secrecy, but once the cat is out of the bag...
And anyone as dedicated as the trolls some claim to exist will be the first to figure it out.

 

[EmilyMiller]

assuming the morons could figure out the consequences of what they were doing. My bet is that @Incel123 would keep doling out one-bombs.

Morons get their votes swept (not just one star votes, any star vote, the sweep doesn’t care, it deletes suspicious five star votes as well, and four and three and two). But anyone with enough brain power to figure out how sweeps work (we are talking semi-morons here, not geniuses) can avoid them with just a little effort. And hate is a powerful motivational tool.

 

[Writer61]

And anyone as dedicated as the trolls some claim to exist will be the first to figure it out.

No doubt some are so bitter and twisted to make the effort, but the sour and misshapen won't. Which I think is a GOOD THING*.

* points for recognising the reference.

 

[Writer61]

Morons get their votes swept (not just one star votes, any star vote, the sweep doesn’t care, it deletes suspicious five star votes as well, and four and three and two). But anyone with enough brain power to figure out how sweeps work (we are talking semi-morons here, not geniuses) can avoid them with just a little effort. And hate is a powerful motivational tool.

There is nothing stopping the use of sweeps AND weighted voting.

Anything which makes life harder for trolls is a plus.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Anything which makes life harder for trolls is a plus.

I agree. But the site just got kinda upset when I suggested an improved way.

 

[IWroteThis]

I have too few minutes left on my extended journey around Sol and am not going to waste any of them plodding through a story which is abysmally bad. It gets dropped like a plucked poison ivy plant, without bothering to finish. I’m not scorning those who do, but that’s me and (admittedly without proof) I find it hard to believe that most people do.

So, if you are able to tell, "without bothering to finish," that you don't like a story, why do you think it's necessary to read all of it before you can say you don't like it?

To be blunt, if you read the whole story, it's hard to justify giving it a 1* rating. If you truly hated it, it's quite understandable when you quit reading and skip to the last page to vote. There is always leeway for an ending that completely ruined the story, of course, and being a glutton for punishment, I guess.

There's a little more leeway for 2* ratings, but nobody should expect you to have to read the entire thing to justify saying you didn't like it. Even 3* ratings don't require a complete read to justify them. Giving up because it was a blah story that wasn't worth your time is perfectly acceptable. It's really just the 4* and 5* ratings that require a full read to justify them.

 

[ConsiderateBeast]

For music I like to look at either 5s or 1s on the grounds that something that really doesn't match someone else's taste might match mine, or it might not, but mediocre is probably mediocre and there's always plenty of that.

I haven't tried this with Lit yet but it might work

 

[Britva415]

Why would they be wrong clicking to the last page and clicking 1 on their way out the door?

Why would you project that onto me? I didn’t say anything was wrong. I wanted to know whether the person I was responding to had any thoughts on the subject, because their analysis I was responding to was predicated on every voter reading the story to the end.

 

[Britva415]

Those get swept.

like, maybe Do they? Reverse engineering sweeps seems as unreliable to me as reverse engineering the AI detection. At least for that, there clear statements from @Literotica we can look at which say what the intentions are, neverminding reliability. Is there any such thing for sweeps?

 

[M_K_Babalon]

It's a shame literotica doesn't have a mechanism to separate anonymous comments from people who have accounts on literotica from those who do not. They wouldn't have to reveal the member's handle just something like "anonymous Literotica member"

We might not be able to see it, but I'm certain Laurel and [especially] Manu can. To do so, you're still technically logged in, and they are aware of ones IP address.

Does anybody post/comment using their real name?

I always use my ficticious real name on principle. I think it's cowardice not to. Others do, too, at least one person in this thread has commented on one of my stories. I don't get a lot of comments, so I don't remember specifically who, but I know it was some AH folks.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

I agree. But the site just got kinda upset when I suggested an improved way.

A way that a number of other AHers pointed out wouldn't work...

 

[Kelliezgirl]

Why would you project that onto me? I didn’t say anything was wrong. I wanted to know whether the person I was responding to had any thoughts on the subject, because their analysis I was responding to was predicated on every voter reading the story to the end.

I wasn't projecting it onto you, I was agreeing with you.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

The only issue I've ever had with low votes has been 3s and 2s when they come in small groups in a short span of time across multiple stories after the story hasn't had any new votes in like a month or so.

I mostly find them amusing.

I also think it's weird that people actually bother Laurel to try to get personal sweeps on their stories.

Well... the higher your story is rated, the more 1's it takes to bring it down. If you've exceeded the minimum entry votes to get, say 4.35 to a baseline red h(4.50), and it has been near or about a week of release, then it's out of nowhere dragged down to around 1.00-2.xx, scores folks on average won't read, then you can't blame them. There's a group that'll tell with their whole chest, they won't read anything below a four. Because the human factor of voting is dissjointed. That's why the average of voting is 4.44, even though that's the whole point of three, three should be average/mid, four; great, five; excellent. Like any other 1-5 system. But a three might as well be a one. And of course there's probably a higher number of folks who don't vote, either out of not caring, or forgetting.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Is there any such thing for sweeps?

Nope. But in my case there is three plus years of experience, augmented by discussions with longtimers.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

What do you make of votes which happen without reading the story at all and just skipping to the last page?

Those get swept.

How's this for a story I don't feel the need to finish?

Title: Merry's Lamb
Description: Jack and Jill have a 3sum with Merry

Oh, oh, tha'ts so gud, sed merry as Jack's huge penis penetrated her tite twat. Jack smiled and started humping hard driving in and owt. Precumdrooled from its head.

Do you think I need to read all three pages to give that a low rating?

(I actually stopped rating stories when I started publishing here.)

--Annie

 

[YmaOHyd]

How's this for a story I don't feel the need to finish?

Do you think I need to read all three pages to give that a low rating?

(I actually stopped rating stories when I started publishing here.)

--Annie

Yes, because maybe it's a dialect story like "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785." It almost reads like Scots!

 

[AwkwardlySet]

People are always so invested in the talk about scores. There's so much energy spent in this thread, yet every single person here knows that even if we were to somehow devise a rating system that would put gods to shame, it would still be futile.

Laurel doesn't care about a huge majority of issues that bother us, and I'd say that scores rank fairly low even in that sense.

She'll never modify the system in any way, and I suspect that there will be fewer sweeps in the future on top of that. Get used to the reality because it's not gonna change. As much as some aspects of the system rightfully annoy us, it's take it or leave it, the same as with everything else here.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

A friend made me sit through "The Blair Witch Project".
I'd have given that shit a negative score if I could have.

Right. If we had a Lit meet at a restaurant, the food was cold, undercooked, burnt, the soda was warm and had enough syrup to vaguely smell like what it was supposed to be, and the waitress couldn't get off her phone, even if we could get her to the table, with roaches meddling around. The ones who would rate the place, opposed to doing nothing, wouldn't be giving it a three or four. Anybody who sez they still wouldn't rate it a one, or at least a two, if the roaches bussed the table, if they were to rate at all, is a bold faced lie. A restaurant cost money, one might say—reading trash cost one their time. I'll get the fifty dollars back, not the time spent there.

 

[M_K_Babalon]

Morons get their votes swept (not just one star votes, any star vote, the sweep doesn’t care, it deletes suspicious five star votes as well, and four and three and two). But anyone with enough brain power to figure out how sweeps work (we are talking semi-morons here, not geniuses) can avoid them with just a little effort. And hate is a powerful motivational tool.

That's why they used to stress not talking about even the slightest idea how sweeps might work. Laurel, Manu, or AH_Mod, would warn about leaving it alone.

 

[EmilyMiller]

That's why they used to stress not talking about even the slightest idea how sweeps might work. Laurel, Manu, or AH_Mod, would warn about leaving it alone.

Yeah - whatever compact might have existed with the site appears to be null and void nowadays.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I've flipped and I've flopped WRT limiting votes to registered voters. Right now, my pendulum is slightly towards Yes. That would make more difficult and solutions easier for both illicit padding and malevolent bombing.

It's far from clear that this is true. Anything that reduces the numbers of votes on stories increases the power of a bad-faith vote and makes it harder to distinguish legitimate votes from manipulation.

If your story has a score of 4.80 from 100 votes and somebody wants to drag it down below 4.5, out of the red H zone, they need to drop nine 1* votes on it. A run of nine 1* votes on a story that was scoring highly is obviously suspicious, and Lit can look at technical information recorded with those votes to help confirm that this is the same person voting nine times.

If your story has a score of 4.80 from 10 votes and somebody wants to knock off your red H, they just need to cast a single 1*. There is no way to look at a single 1* vote and determine whether that voter was being malicious or if they genuinely disliked your story, especially if they've cast a few high votes elsewhere (like on their friends' stories).

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Determination can be made by requiring registration to vote, and tracking (internally) how a registrant votes. An account with a consistent history of bombing can then be excluded from affecting scores. Even just not showing the voting frame on the last page for non-members would go a long way.

If I voted on every story that I read, and I voted HONESTLY, 75% of stories on lit would get a 1. Honestly. They're not very good. And I would not expect otherwise. The great thing about this site is that it accepts everything and everyone. The downside to that is that you're going to get a fuckton of crap. Honestly, that fuckton of crap is going to get 1s because it's total crap. Don't get me wrong, crap is allowed here. This is good. Anyone can write anything and be accepted here and it is wonderful that there is a place for that. That being said, under this idea of monitored voting, if I voted honestly I would be banned from voting. So this idea really only protects the egos of writers by keeping the scores up legitimately or not.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

1 bombs with no feedback are depressing and part of life on here. "Why didn't you like this story?" Would be a question that the site should ask after a 1 bomb.

Why do 5 votes never need justification?

There are a ton of terrible stories out there with a score of 4.8 and hundreds of votes.