Yes, the Toplists are Broken

[Actingup]

There are how many thousands of thousands of thousands of stories published on lit. Of those, 10 or 50 or 250 make a top list, and half of those are chapters of the same freaking vanity saga. It's a tiny fraction of stories that get this limelight. Certainly that limelight significantly increases traffic on a story.

But no one is entitled to that limelight. The voting is mostly a crapshoot anyway. We have these writers bitching and moaning. I was on the toplist for three days and then I got bumped down. I deserve to be there dammit! Fix this! Well, you only deserve to be there as much as the other 1000 stories that are rotating in and getting bumped down and rotating back in when others are bumped down. You got that spot in the first place because someone else was bumped down.

1000 stories rotating in and out of a toplist. Only 250 'deserve' to be there. Ever stop to think that just maybe your story deserves to be in the 75% outside of that toplist? If you made a toplist for any amount of time whatsoever, consider yourself lucky because that's what you are.

There are currently 745357 stories, if you do a general search (https://search.literotica.com/?query= ).

So, yup, the concept of a toplist is ridiculous. Even the top 1% would be more stories than you'd read in a lifetime. Gaming the system might be entertaining for some, but it's ultimately meaningless.

 

[RocketGrunt]

If there are 100 votes and 60 of them are 5️, 30 are 4️, 6 are 3️, 2 are 2️, and 2 are 1️. Drop 5 x 5️, 1 x 3️, 2 x 2️, and 2 x 1️. I’ve got a much longer essay about it on my blog, it makes adjustments for stories with low vote counts.

You may not like it, but calling it incoherent is the sort of thing that people get rightfully pissed about.

That's incoherent. You're just discounting a proportionate chunk of 5* votes on every single story. There's no right side of the Gaussian curve to truncate. Every story in contention has a block of completely identical votes that is eighteen times the size of the pile you're taking away.

Furthermore, all of the stories in contention have less than 5% votes that are less than 4* and more than 5% at exactly 4*. So truncating the lowest 5% would just make everything in the "not a 5*" column be exactly a 4*. This in turn would mean that while a troll vote of 1* or 2* would get clipped, it would push an organic 4* rating from the clipped pile into the counted pile. It wouldn't be as big a negative vote, but the average ratings would be higher so the smaller negative would have more pull.

So for example: You have 200 votes and your score is 4.88. That means you have at least 176 5* and no more than 24 votes that are less than that. Realistically, you probably have 180 5* and 20 ratings that are mostly 4*s with a couple of 3*s or something. By chopping out the lowest 5%, you now have 170 counted 5* votes with 10 4*s and that means your rating is 4.944. Now at that level, a single extra 4* is going to drop you to 4.939, and a single extra 5* is going to raise you to 4.947. The downvote still carries more negative weight than the upvote caries positive weight. And since everything is going to be crowded in the 4.9+ range, the troll hammer still decides who gets to stay on top of the list.

Sorry, your math is bad and wrong, and your idea would not work. I stand by my assessment that it is incoherent. Removing a section of the "top votes" when nearly ninety percent of the votes are "top votes" is a meaningless waste of time and solves nothing.

 

[EmilyMiller]

That's incoherent. You're just discounting a proportionate chunk of 5* votes on every single story. There's no right side of the Gaussian curve to truncate. Every story in contention has a block of completely identical votes that is eighteen times the size of the pile you're taking away.

Furthermore, all of the stories in contention have less than 5% votes that are less than 4* and more than 5% at exactly 4*. So truncating the lowest 5% would just make everything in the "not a 5*" column be exactly a 4*. This in turn would mean that while a troll vote of 1* or 2* would get clipped, it would push an organic 4* rating from the clipped pile into the counted pile. It wouldn't be as big a negative vote, but the average ratings would be higher so the smaller negative would have more pull.

So for example: You have 200 votes and your score is 4.88. That means you have at least 176 5* and no more than 24 votes that are less than that. Realistically, you probably have 180 5* and 20 ratings that are mostly 4*s with a couple of 3*s or something. By chopping out the lowest 5%, you now have 170 counted 5* votes with 10 4*s and that means your rating is 4.944. Now at that level, a single extra 4* is going to drop you to 4.939, and a single extra 5* is going to raise you to 4.947. The downvote still carries more negative weight than the upvote caries positive weight. And since everything is going to be crowded in the 4.9+ range, the troll hammer still decides who gets to stay on top of the list.

Sorry, your math is bad and wrong, and your idea would not work. I stand by my assessment that it is incoherent. Removing a section of the "top votes" when nearly ninety percent of the votes are "top votes" is a meaningless waste of time and solves nothing.

OK - you seem to be getting kind aggressive - so onto ignore until you’ve calmed down. Great job!

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

What the site could do is:

1. Only count the middle 90% of votes cast, discarding the bottom and top 5%
2. Restrict voting to named accounts
3. Make who has voted public the same way that who has favorited is
4. Do some basic statistical analysis of voting patterns / times / relationship to view patterns - and use this to highlight suspect activity (clusters of low votes, votes cast with no uptick in views, etc.)
5. Create profiles of member voting to highlight rogue activity (e.g. someone who only ever votes 1 - 3, except on work by author X, where it is always 5)
6. Respond to author complaints in timely manner

None of these would eliminate the problem, but they would contain it.

But it’s all moonshine as demonstrably the site is quite comfortable with the status quo.

Or have vote validation be proactive instead of retroactive sweeps. If they know what a 'good' vote looks like, just disallow any that don't meet that criteria.

 

[RocketGrunt]

OK - you seem to be getting kind aggressive - so onto ignore until you’ve calmed down. Great job!

Putting people on ignore when they show that your math is wrong certainly has an effect on how much respect I have for you.

 

[jsmiam]

The view they attempted to get working in November has three taps: Popular (Category) Stories: 7 Days, 30 Days, All-Time. That update is a failure, because the tabs don't update properly and the "more stories" link doesn't go anywhere, but it's a good idea and it's where the board is supposed to be going according to the people running it….

Let me ask: were you not seeing this format of top lists before last November?

 

[SimonDoom]

Okay, that's gone now, c'est la vie. But that's why some writers cared about them: for me it wasn't about the score or the status (okay, I didn't hate those!) but about the visibility. That's why I started putting my stories up elsewhere - having gone to the effort to write them, I want others to be able to read them.

Are they getting more readers elsewhere than they would here?

 

[Djmac1031]

In E&V anything greater than 4.8 is voted down. I have had it, @StillStunned has had it, and I noticed @Djmac1031 has had it with his latest extremely good story.

In all honesty I rarely pay any attention to the Top Lists.

When @Bazzle brought this idea to my attention, I didn’t really think much of it until I noticed that my story, which had been sitting comfortably at around 4.83, dropped down to a 4.78.

Then bounced back up to 4.8 only to immediately drop again to 4.79.

So is someone, or several someones, down voting my story to keep it under 4.8?

I suppose its possible. But even if thats the case there's not much I can do about it, so...

 

[Voboy]

I don’t remember too many posts about the top lists until relatively recently around here. Speaking for myself, I’ve never cared about them as a reader nor as a writer. I’m not really sure whether I’m on any, and while I built whatever following I’ve acquired, the top lists were no part of that.

 

[RocketGrunt]

I don’t remember too many posts about the top lists until relatively recently around here. Speaking for myself, I’ve never cared about them as a reader nor as a writer. I’m not really sure whether I’m on any, and while I built whatever following I’ve acquired, the top lists were no part of that.

That's actually unlikely.

Prior to the November update fiasco there was a "recently popular" tab on the side of every category and prior to about a year ago the toplists had stories that bounced in and out of them a lot more than they do now. You have a lot of stories with red Hs that were probably on the toplists at various points, driving additional traffic to your stories and thus to you.

Further, even now your story "Calendar Girl" is #16 on the E&V toplist and has almost twice the number of views of any of your other stories. Some of that comes from having won a contest, but probably a significant portion of its legs comes from the fact that it's a top twenty story on one of the toplists and is thus presented as a link to new readers.

You don't have to do anything or plan anything or make the toplist part of your strategy. You just are on it in a reasonably prominent place and passively reap the benefits of that whether you know it or not.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Further, even now your story "Calendar Girl" is #16 on the E&V toplist and has almost twice the number of views of any of your other stories. Some of that comes from having won a contest, but probably a significant portion of its legs comes from the fact that it's a top twenty story on one of the toplists and is thus presented as a link to new readers.

My most viewed story, If Only In My Dreams, was a Winter Holidays contest winner, and has more than twice as many views as my next most viewed story, which was on the Romance top list for several years. The overwhelming number of those views came within a week or two of the announcement of the contest winners, since then it has gotten a nice bump each December, but that is as likely to be from being on the past winners list as from the toplists.

You may or may not be right overall, but don't discount the impact of contest wins when looking at total views.

 

[RocketGrunt]

My most viewed story, If Only In My Dreams, was a Winter Holidays contest winner, and has more than twice as many views as my next most viewed story, which was on the Romance top list for several years. The overwhelming number of those views came within a week or two of the announcement of the contest winners, since then it has gotten a nice bump each December, but that is as likely to be from being on the past winners list as from the toplists.

You may or may not be right overall, but don't discount the impact of contest wins when looking at total views.

Fair. Although also If Only In My Dreams is on the Romance toplist on page three. It probably doesn't get a lot of views from that (being in the middle of the 230 stories with identical ratings at 4.84 that make up almost the entirety of the Romance toplist), but it is also getting whatever traffic a page three toplist placement grants.

My experience with contests was profoundly negative, and found that entry into one really hurt viewership in a way that will never recover. However, for the people who win I hear that it's quite a bit of free advertising.

 

[lovecraft68]

The top lists just are what they are, a very ambiguous list of meaningless numbers that a lot of us take way too seriously.
Sure, I watch my numbers, too, but I don't lose sleep over some rando bombing my stories, I expect it.

Why do you write? What's your goal, your takeaway? Is it the rating, or is it the telling of the story?

If you want to watch numbers, I'd suggest watching the views. How many eyes saw your work, let your characters into their lives if only for a moment?

Are you getting comments? Good or bad, are they filled with emotion, did you touch someone? Are they raging because you let X happen to Y? It may make you want to reach through the screen and throttle anonymous, but it means your words moved someone to action. That's powerful stuff.

Don't those thing mean more that a number that we all know is bogus, anyway?

This is a great post.

We all came here because we enjoy writing and wanted to share it and yes, see what people think of it. We showed up here in blissful ignorance of top lists and Red H's and trolls and cheerleaders and all manner of vote manipulation, we came here as writers to write, and a lot of people seem to have pushed that to the side in favor of obsessing over these things.

It amazes me that there are people here-and with good sized story files-who know every time they lose or gain a single point, if they lost someone who favorited them, look at their total views every day and compare them to the day before.

Its fine if they get value from doing that, but these threads show more angst and obsession than anything conducive to a positive experience.

Fretting over the lists and numbers has been a thing since I've been here but never even close to what I've seen here the last year or so.

 

[Voboy]

Prior to the November update fiasco there was a "recently popular" tab on the side of every category and prior to about a year ago the toplists had stories that bounced in and out of them a lot more than they do now. You have a lot of stories with red Hs that were probably on the toplists at various points, driving additional traffic to your stories and thus to you.

Your posts here indicate your efforts to get on the toplists, and the ensuing frustration when you're bombed off it, are impeding your ability to gain followers. My only point is that establishing that as a deliberate strategy is not necessary. My attitude when I started here was "write stories I'd like to read, do it well, and do it often." I built a following fairly rapidly because I released many stories, all well-written, in quick succession.

More to the point, I did so without the angst and frustration you seem to feel. I merely wish to suggest there's a different way for you to be successful on Lit. But I am not wrong when I point out that the emphasis on toplists is fairly new here in the AH.

Further, even now your story "Calendar Girl" is #16 on the E&V toplist and has almost twice the number of views of any of your other stories. Some of that comes from having won a contest, but probably a significant portion of its legs comes from the fact that it's a top twenty story on one of the toplists and is thus presented as a link to new readers.

With respect, I am quite certain I know my own stories far better than you do. Calendar Girl got the overwhelming majority of its views within the month after it won its contest. The effect of that win was far more pronounced than any of my other wins; I'm sure it helps that it's a good story, one of my best.

So you don't know that its position on the list is driving traffic any more than you know that its traffic drove its position onto the list. Correlation, causality, etc.

My advice holds: you'll never know all the variables. So stop worrying about it. Write well; do that, and the rest will follow.

 

[RejectReality]

The notion of only counting fives in the toplists won't change anything either. The people currently down-voting stories will switch to cheerleading 5s. Those don't do much now, because it takes too many of them to move the decimal place. Trolling the opposition down has a much stronger effect than boosting your darling. Once you eliminate every other vote from the equation, every 5 cast moves the bar. If the sweeps aren't getting the 1s, they're not going to get the 5s either. So the bad actors will just overwhelm you and push you out of the spotlight that way.

The scores will rise, but that's just ego-stroking, and additional score inflation is the last thing you want to see. I've been through that before on Lush, where people were screaming bloody murder about 4-bombs, because a single 4 could take you from #1 on the toplist to #200 with the absurd score inflation that was in place there.

 

[FrancesScott]

I didn’t know a thing about the top lists until a reader commented that they had found my story from the all-time top ten. Then I went and looked. The next day the same story was hit by a string of low votes, with no high ones in between. An unlikely statistical occurrence. The low votes stopped when I was safely off the list.

Make of that what you will. It happened in Lesbian Sex.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Fair. Although also If Only In My Dreams is on the Romance toplist on page three. It probably doesn't get a lot of views from that (being in the middle of the 230 stories with identical ratings at 4.84 that make up almost the entirety of the Romance toplist), but it is also getting whatever traffic a page three toplist placement grants.

My experience with contests was profoundly negative, and found that entry into one really hurt viewership in a way that will never recover. However, for the people who win I hear that it's quite a bit of free advertising.

I'm sure it does get views from the top list, I am not discounting that. But looking at its totals, the win factor was large enough that it would throw off any conclusions about that particular story, and the same is probably true for Voboy's as well.

Granted, while entering contests can be an important part of a strategy to gain viewers, doing so in expectation of winning would be presumptuous.

 

[RejectReality]

There have been plenty of people able to demonstrate that having a story high on the toplist dramatically increases your views. Back when regular monthly sweeps were happening, you could see the number of views surge while you were in the spotlight, plunge when you got knocked down, and surge again when you popped back up from sweeps. I experienced it umpteen times when I had 10 or so that regularly popped up into that spotlight zone in Sci-Fi & Fantasy. It was an ongoing roller coaster that simply couldn't be construed any other way with so many identical, repeated examples.

The toplists are a preferred method of story selection for readers.

The trolls haven't gotten smarter. Most of them are unsophisticated fans who are using the simplest methods to bypass the controls. Most often that's without the knowledge or approval of the author. They're painfully obvious and will go away as soon as a sweep encounters them. They've got no reason to try to elude the sweeps, because they're not hitting very often, and it looks like the simple bypasses they're using work. As I keep saying, the problem is that the large sample sweeps from the monthly contests haven't happened since Nov. of '22, and they weren't anything resembling regular for a few years before that. It's those large sample sweeps that detect patterns, reveal bad actors, and provide the basis for wiping the catalog clean of malicious voting. The sweeps of a toplist or a themed contest simply cannot compete with the sample size of a full month worth of submissions.

When you've got competing fan groups in opposition to each other — but united in attacking anyone that isn't them as well — you get the steady score depression and flattening you see in the toplists now. They can't boost their favorite enough to pop their score that much higher, so everyone slowly sinks under the weight of the trolling. As long as their darling stays up top, they're okay with the score slipping a little. The ranking is the goal — not the score.

Anonymous voting isn't going anywhere. Stop daydreaming about that. ( You have no idea the nightmare that turns into anyway. See previous post about Lush's absurd score inflation ) Anonymous reading, voting, and commenting are one of the big draws and drivers of Lit's traffic, and they're not going to sacrifice that for the sake of author egos.

 

[jsmiam]

…

Prior to the November update fiasco there was a "recently popular" tab on the side of every category and prior to about a year ago the toplists had stories that bounced in and out of them a lot more than they do now. …

Try this.

Go to www.literotica.com. Scroll all the way down to where it says this:

PUBLIC BETA​

November 2025 update is live! We are improving site performance and adding new features based on your feedback. Exciting changes coming to Author Profiles early next year!

Then choose “switch back to classic.”

Part of what you’re so certain was an update, is a beta that’s been around a long time, and is more the standard page for most people now. You got switched last November apparently. Many of us started using that version of the page some years ago. No, I’m not saying lit’s programming is something wonderful. But your assumption that a mass new update happened last November is incorrect. So might your other conclusions.

As far as your strongly held opinion on flattened scores, you’re also overlooking the sheer quantity of stories in a given category. You are most entitled to your thoughts, but count me among the unconvinced. (And that’s my opinion)

Edit: unconvinced on flattening is what I mean. Not that shenanigans don’t exist. But they don’t exist the way you think, as it pertains to a brand new story with few votes making its first appearance on the list. Imperfect as it may be, a sudden flood of new votes with perhaps exaggerated expectations hits the story. That’s not to pretend a protective author or fan may not do something unseemly too. But that’s more likely the a demonstrable case when there are many hundreds of votes.

So shenanigans, yes. That’s not new news. Most of us aren’t disagreeing with you entirely there. Just trying to point out your interpretation of the data isn’t necessarily the only explanation. Nonetheless I suspect you won’t be convinced, just as you haven’t convinced me. And that’s all right. It’s a big world. Lit won’t listen to either of us or anyone else

 

[MelissaBaby]

Edit: unconvinced on flattening is what I mean. Not that shenanigans don’t exist. But they don’t exist the way you think, as it pertains to a brand new story with few votes making its first appearance on the list. Imperfect as it may be, a sudden flood of new votes with perhaps exaggerated expectations hits the story. That’s not to pretend a protective author or fan may not do something unseemly too. But that’s more likely the a demonstrable case when there are many hundreds of votes.

There are certainly shenanigans, particularly in contest voting, but there is a natural process of ratings deflation on new stories. On many occasions I have watched my scoring from the time the story is published. I tend to write long, so I have seen 20k+ stories rank up a half dozen 5's within much less time than even the fastest readers could have completed the story.

A large proportion of early votes are going to come from the writer's followers, who are predisposed to grant high scores, sometimes without even reading. They aren't "cheating", they are just fans behaving like fans. And, let's face it, they can get you that H fast, which attracts more viewers.

But eventually, non-follower voters will probably catch up to your followers and, as a group, will likely lower your score. And, if there is a sweep, you may well lose those early 5 votes.

Of course, this does not account for any sort of large overall shifts in general scoring, but not every decline in scoring requires interference by nefarious forces.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Only count the middle 90% of votes cast, discarding the bottom and top 5%

No problem there. I have suggested this myself.

Restrict voting to named accounts

No way. That will take a huge chunk out of legit feedback and won't stop determined trolling.

Make who has voted public the same way that who has favorited is

No way. Same as above. Don't fuck up my feedback just because you have thin skin and need to be #1.

Do some basic statistical analysis of voting patterns / times / relationship to view patterns - and use this to highlight suspect activity (clusters of low votes, votes cast with no uptick in views, etc.)

They already do to some degree. Sweep code algorithm that we should not be discussing.

Create profiles of member voting to highlight rogue activity (e.g. someone who only ever votes 1 - 3, except on work by author X, where it is always 5)

Well iunno, whatever, but it seems overboard admin just to keep the egos stroked.

Respond to author complaints in timely manner

Respond to author complaints in timely manner. I agree that the admin's communication is sorely lacking, but the site does not revolve around the authors' needs.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Imma gonna stop you there, because that is totally incoherent. There is no top 5%. There CAN'T be a top 5%. The Mode is above the average. More than 80% of votes are the highest possible value. As far as stories in contention for toplists are concerned, 5* is the normal vote and all other ratings are variable strength downvotes. There's no top 5% to discard, the top 5% is indistinguishable from the top 88%.

This is just wrong. Of course there is a top 5%. If you have 100 votes and 50 of them are 5s, just not count 5 of the 5s. We know that there is 1-bombing, 2-bombing, but there is also 5-padding. You can't discount the bottom without discounting the top. It's like figure skating, 7 judges, discard the best and worst score, count the 5 in the middle.

Your stance seems to believe that all 5s are legit and most if not all 2 or lower are obviously trolls. Of course you've never scored a legit 1 or 2 in your life before, otherwise you would not have an inherent right to the top of the toplists.

The only reason that one gets a 4.86 and one gets a 4.85 is that one of them got a few less 4* and a few more 2* among the people who voted down. The average is simply a measure of downvotes, a measure of how much the people who didn't like it decided to express the fact that they didn't like it.

Because of course none of those downvotes were legit. (eyeroll)

 

[pink_silk_glove]

You could also have trust profiles for people voting, high trust and your full vote counts. Low trust and only 10% of your vote counts.

Terrible idea. First it requires that a voter be logged in on his account. Forcing logins to vote is just a non-starter as it will kill the engagement factor that we all love here. Second, it would require admin and personal judgment. You can't automate it because someone who is a legitimate hard grader will get untrusted and not allowed to vote. So then Laurel will have to hire mods to review all of the trust and mods are often corrupt. I'm on another site with trust levels and I'm heavily restricted simply because there is a petty corrupt snob of a mod who hates my guts.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Furthermore, all of the stories in contention have less than 5% votes that are less than 4* and more than 5% at exactly 4*. So truncating the lowest 5% would just make everything in the "not a 5*" column be exactly a 4*. This in turn would mean that while a troll vote of 1* or 2* would get clipped, it would push an organic 4* rating from the clipped pile into the counted pile. It wouldn't be as big a negative vote, but the average ratings would be higher so the smaller negative would have more pull.

Okay this is total bullshit. What you are saying is, "I have the GOD GIVEN RIGHT to only receive 5s!"

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Putting people on ignore when they show that your math is wrong certainly has an effect on how much respect I have for you.

You don't know math is well as you think you do.