Holy carp. I'm popular?

[Rob_Royale]

In the past few days, someone has one-bombed the stories down a few tenths. Of course, maybe they just don't like them.

Par for the course, sadly.

 

[Kelliezgirl]

In the past few days, someone has one-bombed the stories down a few tenths. Of course, maybe they just don't like them.

It might not necessarily have been a 1 bomb. One of my stories hit #14 on the all time list in Romance. Since then, every day at about the same time it received a pair of 2 votes until the score was low enough that it isn't on the list at all anymore. Then it stopped. None of my other stories were touched, so it seems unlikely that it was personal, they were just "protecting" the lists.
Odd behavior.

 

[RocketGrunt]

I was on the all time top ten of Lesbian for a whole week, before someone noticed and hammered my story from 4.86 to 4.80 over two days.

As I had about 250 votes at that point, it must have taken a sustained effort to achieve that level of suppression.

As an aside the much vaunted competition sweep didn’t delete a single one of those downvotes. I guess they were all totally genuine.

Troll veto is very powerful. The drop from 4.86 to 4.80 at 250 votes can be done with FOUR 1-star votes.
If one person has a desktop, a laptop, a phone, and a computer at work, they can hammer your rating down like that just by voting anonymously once from each device. If they don't do it all at once, it won't even get flagged as suspicious.

Since an upvote can't really be any different from a 5-star rating, and most votes on highly rated works are 5-star ratings by definition, the differences in average rating are simply driven by the number of downvotes. And you can send downvotes 4 at a time just by hitting the 1-star rating. If a work is at 4.9 and one person hits the 1-star for any reason, the rating will fall unless THIRTY NINE more people hit the 5-star rating to balance it out.

High ratings are normally a marker that a piece hasn't been looked at much yet. There are some pieces that have massive followings with thousands of votes, but MOST pieces that are over 4.9 just haven't been troll bombed YET. My pieces that have over a thousand ratings are at 4.65 and 4.76. It is what it is.

It's a bad system that gives way too much power to a small group of haters while at the same time promoting stories as "most popular of all time" for the perverse distinction of having attracted so little attention that no one has bothered to downvote them. The "all time" popular section for Sci-Fi/Fantasy right now is a block of late chapters in series with smallish fandoms that have 5 star averages, meaning that none of them have gotten a single downvote yet. And also none of them has gotten favorited more than four times. It's bogus and sad.

 

[FrancesScott]

If one person has a desktop, a laptop, a phone, and a computer at work, they can hammer your rating down like that just by voting anonymously once from each device. If they don't do it all at once, it won't even get flagged as suspicious.

Yes, I figured that out myself. It’s indefensible that bad actors can have such a disproportionate impact.

 

[RocketGrunt]

Yes, I figured that out myself. It’s indefensible that bad actors can have such a disproportionate impact.

I mean, that's just the inevitable result of the hugbox nature of our voting public. A majority of voters on Literotica give 5* ratings to everything they like, which means that there is no way for people to register that they like something more.

As long as people are giving out 5 stars to everything they enjoyed, it's just going to be very easy for anyone to bring the average down. If we lived in a world where almost everyone gave 3 star ratings then 4 star and 5 star ratings would be as powerful as 2 star and 1 star ratings. But we don't live in that world.

The indefensible part is actually basing the "popular" lists and "top" lists on those average ratings. The average rating of a story is almost completely at the mercy of a small number of haters. Having stories be presented to viewers based on such a vulnerable number is absolute madness. The popular lists should be about engagement metrics over time. Like, the most popular story could be number of views or five star ratings or number of views or five star ratings per month. You know, something that corresponded to how popular something actually was. Instead of what we have now which is just an indicator of how few people have come to trash something.