Lots of authors track the numbers on their stories.
As others have said, Literotica has a sweep system and regularly reviews votes that look sketchy. I think Literotica also does some funky stuff with low-vote stories to hide what individual votes are. I don't think the site every updates the rating after just one vote. Some people with only 20 votes on their stories get super-obsessive about each vote. I think they give each vote a name.
I have two stories (actually two versions of the same story) that are regularly in the I/T Hall of Fame. They've both been #1. Some days like today, both will be in the HoF. Other days, both will be out. Story ratings naturally fluctuate. I don't think it has anything to do with someone wanting to see a particular story in or out of the HoF.I had someone 2-bomb my Halloween story after the contest was over and the votes didn’t even count any more. Why? I’ll never know. It’s not like they left a nasty comment or anything either, to try to get a rise out of me. Just some kind of spiteful thing that they somehow get their jollies from? I don’t know. But I think that was enough to bump it off of the ‘Hall of Fame’ list too, which it had precariously snuck into the tail end of. That felt good...for a day, though.
Personally, I think many authors would rather believe that evil ninja trolls kicked their story out of the HoF instead of that they made it in an a fluctuation up and went out on a return to mean. I know quite a bit about statistics and what I see in my two HoF stories is random fluctuations.
I've been in two contests. In the last one, after the contest ended Laurel did one more sweep that was more aggressive than prior sweeps. My story was right at #3 before the final sweep and a story outside of the top 3 wound up being #1, so I remember that bonus sweep pretty well. I can't say it happens in every contest or for every story in every contest.
And they have to show their tits.
Don't believe everything people tell you.
The sweep algorithms clearly run through the whole story file. I rarely enter contests, but every time I see a contest sweep run, I can see the effect on my whole story file, including those in my back catalogue (up to five years old). There's no way it's a manual look-see at contest stories only - just a different algorithm scrubbing harder across the board.
Agree. They tend to be strategically done towards the end of contests, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence of an inter-contest sweep for quite a while (now that you mention it).
Yours might be random but I see it even in my own stories. Three of them took a sudden dive today after a new story got published last night.
Answer = 6 and 3.So here's an exercise for you if you're in the business and don't mind doing the calculations.
Story has an average 4.37. There are 2200 votes. How many 1 votes would it take to bring it down to 4.36. How many 5 votes would it take to restore it?
