Rating and Raters

Yeah, I would have never guessed searching "spreadsheets" would have gotten me my answers. Mostly because doing that on an erotic fiction site would probably get you lots of information on bondage bed linens.
 
Yeah, I would have never guessed searching "spreadsheets" would have gotten me my answers. Mostly because doing that on an erotic fiction site would probably get you lots of information on bondage bed linens.

In fairness, on most of the site, it might have. Literotica is a diverse place. But the AH is a little more serious. Get to know it.

I’d imagine you’d have had success searching “stats” or “vote stats,” as well.
 
Just as a comment on ratings and raters and favorites.

I'm not sure I'm going to manage to submit a Winter Holidays story (what I had in mind has turned into a novella and growing). The couple I have nearing completion are tied to a couple of my existing series so not eligible. But I might wait until after the hubbub to submit those.

But I felt the need to submit SOMETHING so an idea popped into my head for an ~1800 word story, the shortest I've ever published here. Right now, it has 2.7K views and has been made a Favorite 6 times. Might not sound like much, but that's my best ratio of Favorites to Views.
https://literotica.com/s/the-night-train-1

All that and its rating is only 4.08/13. I also received an incredibly complimentary comment about it (from that very busy Anonymous, but I'll take it.) I don't check obsessively but its rating has pretty well hovered around 4.00 (the first time I saw it was 4/4). So it seems to be a love it or hate it sort of story. No idea if it's from the length (1/2 a Lit page) or the subject (Erotic Coupling, nothing too far out.)
 
I'm a bit of a nerd and have been tracking my numbers on my stories.
Lots of authors track the numbers on their stories.

10/14 Votes: 354 Rating: 4.48
10/18 Votes: 359 Rating: 4.48
10/29 Votes: 358 Rating: 4.51
11/02 Votes: 350 Rating: 4.6

So was I (and others in the contest) getting Trolled or something and they pulled the negative votes/voter?
The Voter/Rating system just got some glitches in it and it caught up with reality?
Or something else?

It sucks that for 19 days essentially nobody has voted on my story but... 4.6 is good.
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.

At the end of every contest, Laurel (the site owner) manually sweeps the entries and more aggressively removes votes. So what happened to your story is not surprising.
 
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. :)
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.
 
May be a little glass half full there. I/T has historically been one of the most manipulated toplists. There are some seriously rabid fans there with questionable morals.

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 don't think it has anything to do with someone wanting to see a particular story in or out of the HoF.

Numerous top authors that have been there and immediately dropped again have noted the problem. Do a search. It happens all the time. That isn't random fluctuation.

At the end of every contest, Laurel (the site owner) manually sweeps the entries and more aggressively removes votes.

I doubt the manual part. First or all LW stories & other categories can get thousands of votes. More than anyone wants to wade through. Secondly all stories get swept. Over a 30 day contest with a 100 or so stories daily that would require 3000 stories to be handled manually. Not happening. After all that she might go through a few top contest stories to make sure everything is kosher, but that would be the limit on it. There's just too many stories around here for manual work. JMO!
 
Numerous top authors that have been there and immediately dropped again have noted the problem. Do a search. It happens all the time. That isn't random fluctuation.



I doubt the manual part. First or all LW stories & other categories can get thousands of votes. More than anyone wants to wade through. Secondly all stories get swept. Over a 30 day contest with a 100 or so stories daily that would require 3000 stories to be handled manually. Not happening. After all that she might go through a few top contest stories to make sure everything is kosher, but that would be the limit on it. There's just too many stories around here for manual work. JMO!

I'm not going to speculate about how the sweeps work, but as for the broader issue of why these fluctuations happen, my guess is, it depends.

There seems to be plenty of evidence that lots of gaming occurs with new stories. So I suspect that deliberate 1-bombs play a role within the first few weeks after a story is published.

In the case of 8Letters's story, however, it's been around long enough and has so many votes that my guess is that score fluctuations are just products of random voting. The score for the number 1 story in the I/T Hall of fame is separated from the number 20 story by only .01, so minor vote changes can make a big difference in placement.
 
Numerous top authors that have been there and immediately dropped again have noted the problem. Do a search. It happens all the time. That isn't random fluctuation.
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 doubt the manual part. First or all LW stories & other categories can get thousands of votes. More than anyone wants to wade through. Secondly all stories get swept. Over a 30 day contest with a 100 or so stories daily that would require 3000 stories to be handled manually. Not happening. After all that she might go through a few top contest stories to make sure everything is kosher, but that would be the limit on it. There's just too many stories around here for manual work. JMO!
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.
 
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.
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.
 
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.

That's pretty common. It happened in the Halloween contest. When a story has a small number of votes but a score out of the running because of a few low votes, the sweeps take the low votes, and the story gets a high score.

In the cases I've seen, the high ending score is higher than the readers/votes agree to, and the story's score usually sags back close to where it was before the last sweep. The top three finishers are targets at the top of the contest page after the results are announced, and that accelerates the changes.
 
Contest sweeps are not the only sweeps. There is also an end of the month sweep ran.
 
Contest sweeps are not the only sweeps. There is also an end of the month sweep ran.

I think there are fewer sweeps now than there were a couple years ago. I haven't seen recent evidence for an end-of-month sweep, but a lot of times any such thing would overlap with a contest sweep.
 
I think there are fewer sweeps now than there were a couple years ago. I haven't seen recent evidence for an end-of-month sweep, but a lot of times any such thing would overlap with a contest sweep.
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).
 
For quite some time I had over 30 stories that were all over 4.50, and one that was not. That story sat for more than a year at 4.49. Every once in a while it would creep above 4.50, then in a few days, get a 1 or 2 vote and drop back down.

Maybe someone doesn't like me, or they really hate that one particular chapter in a 13 chapter series, or maybe they just thought it was funny, but the lesson to be learned is that ratings are a very imperfect measure of quality.

As soon as I posted this, the story I mentioned dropped back below 4.50 again, after being above it for months.
 
As soon as I posted this, the story I mentioned dropped back below 4.50 again, after being above it for months.

There is a troll or trolls reading AH. I think it would be great if Laurel could root them out and get rid of them, but I doubt that's possible. It might be a good idea not to talk about or post links to your own stories.
 
The score for the number 1 story in the I/T Hall of fame is separated from the number 20 story by only .01, so minor vote changes can make a big difference in placement.

That may be but stories like that have thousands of votes. If it has 2000 0r 3000 votes each 1 vote only affects by a thousandth of a percent. It takes massive number of 1 votes to bring a story like that down and even more 5 votes to bring it back up. So when a story like that takes a sudden dive it's contrived.

. 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.
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.

So here's an exercise for you if you're in the business and don't mind doing the calculations. :D

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?

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).

Been a while for sure.

As soon as I posted this, the story I mentioned dropped back below 4.50 again, after being above it for months.

It really doesn't pay to talk about scores here MB.

So what else can we talk about? Whistles tunelessly and looks around :eek:
 
So here's an exercise for you if you're in the business and don't mind doing the calculations. :D

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?
Answer = 6 and 3.

4.37 x 2200 = 9614
9614 + (6 x 1) = 9620
9620/2206 = 4.36

9640 + (3 x 5) = 9655
9655/2209 = 4.37

ERROR - see next page for the correct answer
 
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Answer = 6 and 3.

4.37 x 2200 = 9614
9614 + (6 x 1) = 9620
9620/2206 = 4.36

9640 + (3 x 5) = 9655
9655/2209 = 4.37

I think you have an error there? Otherwise not sure how you're getting from 9620 to 9640.

For a story sitting at 4.37, it should take about 5.35 five-star votes to cancel out a single one-star. The exact formula is (R-1)/(5-R).

This ignores rounding; a story that displays at "4.37" could be anywhere between 4.365 and 4.374999, so if you want to get precise you need to look at different possibilities over that range.
 
Answer = 6 and 3.

4.37 x 2200 = 9614
9614 + (6 x 1) = 9620
9620/2206 = 4.36

9640 + (3 x 5) = 9655
9655/2209 = 4.37

How did we get from 9620 to 9640 in the 5 example?

Edit: Sorry I see Bramblethorn already caught that.
 
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