- Reviews & Essays
- The Politics and Math of Lit Voting
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Click hereYou worked hard on this story - it's a cool Fetish fantasy called "Trixie's Big Butt." It's not long on plot or characterization, and proofreading isn't your bag, but you know some interesting things to do with butts, and you know how to describe them. Your fans in Literotica's Fetish category are definitely going to love it.
Why did you take the trouble to write "Trixie's Big Butt" and post it on Literotica? Your pose is that your motives are selfless: you write only for your own amusement and you share with your adoring readers out of the goodness of your heart. There are times when you manage to believe that yourself. After all, what other motive could you have? Lit doesn't pay you a dime, and neither your wife nor anyone else in your Real Life knows you write erotica. There's no money in this. There's no glory either.
Except there is. Maybe the glory doesn't go to you, the middle-aged, balding (but quite fit, really!) Hartford actuary, but you bask in the glory that accrues to the avatar you created to author your stories - BJJustAskGrrl. It was an inspired choice of name: you picture men getting boners just thinking about a girl who'd call herself that. And when a story is a hit, it's such a high! Two thousand reads before lunch! Dozens of men may jerk off into the laundry basket (remember the guy six months ago who commented, "I came three times reading this"?). Wives may show your story to their husbands and say, "I want you to do that to me." You get hard imagining it.
But things have got to break right for you. You timed your submission so your story would be on the Fetish hub over the weekend, but that's always a gamble. Sometimes it appears too early, and sometimes there's a delay. And then, how long the story stays on the hub depends on how many people are submitting on that and the following days.
And so very much depends on how those early readers vote! They're the ones who get up early in the morning and check out their favorite Lit hubs. They drive your view count up quickly, and they vote a lot. Their votes will determine how many more readers are going to wager an hour of their precious time that your story will arouse and entertain them.
If you get at least ten votes in the first hours of your story's life, and the votes average at least 4.5 out of 5, the Lit server will put a little red H next to your story's score. That H will draw the eyes of potential readers, saying to them, in effect, "Your time won't be wasted here." Your view count will go way up, and so will the number of wanking readers and couples who decide to go to bed early, inspired by your squicky imagination to perform sordid and delicious sex acts together. And since human beings are herd animals, that little H may even draw more high votes. H's tend to be sticky: once you get one, you rarely lose it, especially if the count of votes goes high enough that the occasional disgruntled reader ("that is so not my kink!") doesn't make a big difference.
You're eager to know whether your story has gone live. You get up early to check out the site. Yes! It was posted in the wee hours. You'll spend much of the morning tracking the view count and the voting on your "View Submissions" page.
But something's not right. Oh, this is very bad! RaunchyMynxInDallas posted a story today. Shit, shit, shit! RaunchyMynx is one of the most popular authors in this category. Every time that nasty cunt publishes something, everybody drops whatever they're doing to read it. The comments are enough to make you throw up. "Oh, RaunchyMynx, this one's hotter than ever!" - "A big 5, wish I could give you 10!" - "I'm just breathless, RaunchyMynx!" - "I've been walking around with a hard-on all morning!" - "Will you marry me?" Such an idiot, that last commenter: RaunchyMynx is about as likely to be a pustular frat boy as a marriageable female.
You absolutely hate it when RaunchyMynxInDallas is your competition. She sucks the air out of the whole category. You give the story a quick once-over. It's trite, a stupid fucking tale about a girl who likes to piss in public places. It's disgusting, it doesn't get you hot, but it's got a certain glibness, as usual; gullible readers are going to mistake that for real quality. They're going to flock to it, especially when that little H appears, as it will soon - probably hours before you get yours - if you get an H at all.
It's possible, though, to delay that fateful moment. You click the "1" star at the bottom of the last page and chuckle, "Eat that, you sack of shit." You've just dropped what Lit authors call the "one-bomb" - a kind of tactical vote - and you've probably delayed the appearance of RaunchyMynx's red H by at least an hour, maybe more. How so, when practically all the other readers are giving it 4s and 5s?
It doesn't take a statistician like yourself to understand how this works. It's the power of the statistical outlier. Have you heard that joke about how Bill Gates goes into a bar full of construction workers, and suddenly everybody in the room's a millionaire because the average income has shot up into the stratosphere? It's like that. If it was all billionaires in that bar, Gates's arrival would nudge the average income up only a little, but in a bar full of construction workers, he's a statistical outlier, and his effect on the average is enormous.
You imagine that diseased skank RaunchyMynx watching her vote, the same way you're watching yours. Suppose she's got nine votes and her average score is 4.67. That means she's probably gotten six 5s and three 4s - not bad. But when your one-bomb shows up on her screen, her score will drop to 4.30 - no little red H for RauchyMynx! And now it'll take her four more votes at minimum to get her red H. That's right: the next four voters have got to cast 5s before her average creeps up to 4.5 again. She'll have to get a lot more 5s than that before she gets back to 4.67. You can almost hear her head explode, all the way from Dallas. It feels so damn fine.
Of course you know you aren't doing her any permanent damage. If enough readers vote, her story will recover from your one-bomb. And the Lit gurus seem to have clever algorithms for figuring out which votes were cast for strategic reasons like yours: in a few days they may very well detect your one-bomb and delete it. But you've slowed her down during those critical first hours of her story's life. And while her score is recovering, readers who aren't already her fans are just as likely to savor the delights of Trixie's butt as they are to read about that pissing girl. You'll probably get at least some of the time that readers might have given to her.
In a couple of weeks, long after both your stories have cycled off the Fetish hub, you may notice that she's back, down there in the "Hall of Fame" section of the page. That means she's gotten at least a hundred votes and has one of the highest scoring recent stories. Back on the hub, her story will be getting lots of views, unlike yours, which will be languishing largely unread in the vast Lit archive.
"Bitch!" you'll snarl, and one-bomb her again. Let's look at the effect of the one-bomb now. Say she had an average score of 4.85 with 110 votes. Now her score will be 4.82. If that drop isn't enough to knock her out of the Hall of Fame, just one-bomb her again, and that will take her down to 4.78. She'll still have her red H, but in most categories the Hall of Fame will be out of the question. And because your one-bomb is still a statistical outlier and another 5 vote is not, it will take quite a while for the damage to be repaired. With one more 5, she's still at 4.78; with two, she's just climbed to 4.79; with a third, she still hasn't broken 4.80.
A statistician like yourself could suggest ways to mitigate the effects of statistical outliers in an online voting system like the one at Literotica. But you're not going to volunteer that information, now, are you? That would take away a lot of your power. The fact is, the best defense against the one-bomb is a high vote count. The more readers vote, the more accurate a story's score will be as a reflection of the judgment of the Lit readership.
- COMMENTS
How depressing. Why should writers feel in competition with one another? Just because another writer's story in the same category does well, does that mean mine won't? Why would that be my first assumption? As a READER, I read lots of stories: just because I read (and vote, and comment on) one, doesn't mean I won't read another.
Writers, who understand the effort it takes to write a story, should be supporting one another, not trying to knock each other down. Personally, I always vote (and nearly always comment on) stories I read, unless I didn't like it. In which case, assuming I read to the end (unlikely, I probably stopped after a few paragraphs if the style wasn't to my taste) I just won't vote at all. I'm not going to insult the effort the writer put in by 1 bombing. Sad to think that any writer would.
I understand that this is all hypothetical, but it's depressing to think that this is how some writers imagine other authors behaving.
Nice. The discussion about the LW category is so spot on. What frustrates me about that is that many, if not most of the consequences voting 1's are afraid to show their names, so that we can go shame them on whatever category their fetish is.
That was a thesis in itself, and a well-thought-out one.
There is, of course, some difference in the motivations of authors, readers, voters and commenters in the different categories of story on the Literotica site.
I have for some time been especially interested in the Loving Wives commentariat, which I see as very different from those who read, vote and comment on stories in other categories.
A reader of a Romance story (my favourite category) will read the story and judge it according to how well the author has structured and written the story, how well the erotic elements are described, and so on. They come looking for romance, and romance is generally what they find.
But readers of Loving Wives stories form several camps. The clearest division is between the Consequences crowd and the Reconciliation tribe. A reader who believes that a wandering wife should suffer consequences of her infidelity will often one-bomb a story in which she 'gets away with it'. Other readers will one-bomb a story in which the consequences are violent.
Many LW voters and commenters judge a story by whether the characters are doing what the reader wants them to rather than by how well the author achieves what he or she set out to achieve. That is not the case in other categories because there is not this division.
Twistedsickmind's Humour & Satire story 'The One Bomber' remains my favourite spoof on those who vote down a story for reasons other than how well it is written.
Lue
Nope, not an actuary and I try to avoid them. In fact I shy away from all but the simplest mathematics. Fibonacci numbers interest me up to about thirteen and then my eyes begin to droop, my head clouds up and I start daydreaming about women. But I've observed the same behavior in myself, blogging and then babysitting that blog post to see how it's being treated by the cruel and fickle public. Lots of bloggers and writers claim that they write for themselves and don't care what anyone else thinks. I don't see much point in calling them on this, but I don't believe it for a minute. If I wrote for myself alone and didn't care what readers or other writers think, I'd put it in a private journal and it'd never see the light of day. Hell yes I care.
I read stories on Lit for a long time before I decided to try my own hand at fiction. There began to be some appeal to the idea of becoming a purveyor of smut. I did notice the special rancor that is elicited from readers by a story about a woman who is less than pure and faithful. Too bad! That's a fascinating topic for me. I also noticed that such tales evoke a visceral hatred that's reflected in the comments. I don't see that as different from what happens on political posts or posts about social movements like 'Me too'. I do not see any such comments as particularly sincere. The language used in comments in Loving Wives is identical to what you'll find among white supremacists and the more vicious misogynists. I've come to believe that troglodyte trolls lie in wait for the chance to pounce on what they call 'cuck shit' and one bomb it. I'm sure some of the trolls genuinely think that western civilization is being brought to its knees by males who permissively allow 'their women' to monitor their own sexual behavior. It's a sad day for sure when adults can fuck whoever they want to. I've already said too much about the LW category, since as you mentioned your post is not centered on behavior there.
I think it's the nature of writers to want to have their work appreciated, in spite of all protestations to the contrary. It hurts to submit what you are certain is a clever and entertaining piece- not to mention wankworthy- only to watch the apes throw feces at it. Just as many writers explain in a preface that their work is one of fiction or fantasy and warn the reader not to get his panties in a wad over it, the writer must also realize that this is now the internet age and you just can't take the criticism to heart. The critics can be vile, but seriously, do I care much for the opinion of a fat forty six year old living in Mom's cellar subsisting entirely on Hot Pockets and Mountain Dew, cloaked in a Cheeto encrusted Metallica shirt and parachute shorts? No.
More than one writer has told me that Literotica is changing, and not for the better. This isn't Literotica's fault. The internet is changing. The barbarians have stormed the bastions of free speech and are rendering it worthless. People are talking about living in a 'post truth' world. It can be really hard for any writer who values truth in any personal and artistic sense to remain centered in the chaos and anarchy of the mob.
Sorry! I began channeling Leon Trotsky there at the end. What I meant to say was: I loved your essay and it I saw myself in it. It's funny, insightful and true.
Your essay is great. For the record I do not one bomb other authors nor am I a balding actuary in Hartford (maybe two of three?).
Well done.
I only clicked on this story cause of the blue "W" and the red "H" and the title intrigued me. I can prob count on one hand the number of essays I have read.
on a subject I did not know a lot about. Cant one bomb you like you wanted; did like the live blogging commentary from you on your score.
I typically only read LW, so I dont know anything except other categories have higher rated stories, You get a 4.75 in LW for a story 4 yrs old and you are a rock star, and an excellent writer, and made the majority of readers "feel" something thru your tale. A 4.75 in romance is not the same quality. A 4,75 in incest or interracial is way down from the 4.75 in LW in terms of quality of the writing, it is more of a stroke fest fueled by cliches.
I like that the site polices the scoring, although I have seen some strange things (a writer or two with lots of red "H" that are, oh so so).
Speaking for LW only, There is a definite difference in scoring in late 90's, early 2000's vs scoring since 2008. I think a lot of it has to do wiht the divisiveness of the presidential election, that absolute hate that 40% have for the president we have and his policies; and the 2008 financial crisis that led to a stagnant economy that has never fully recovered. The comments and hate take on a political tone. Ok great job, I wish I had given you a 5 now instead of the four. You got me to write a lot more than I normally do.
Thanks to erotichajj, GigglingGoblin, and the latest Anonymous for these excellent comments. It's absolutely true, Anon: reading is its own reward. And everyone should run over and read the Goblin's essay on Sexualizing Rape. It's excellent, and it totally deserved to win this category (in which the voting was in essence a coin flip).
Time spent reading, writing, and listening is never wasted. Good read or bad read doesn't matter much. Reading in itself is peace. Art in itself is perfect.
I tend to place more stock in comments (if written in intelligible English) and e-mails than I do in scores.
Yeah, sure I do. One-bomb ME, willya?
Oh, and I just realized that I got so caught up in the joke, and in my own thinly-veiled befuddlement with why a writer who uploads at roughly three times my speed and with more consistent high ratings should somehow have more followers than me*, that I forgot to—shoot, I'm doing it again. Anyways, I liked this essay! It nailed down some good points and backed them up with math. And there was good use of humor to keep the casual reader interested.
5/5!Or it would be, if I weren't currently trying to one-bomb this story without actually understanding how the site works well enough to do so with any real effectiveness. Boy, long sentences tonight, huh? I gather my sentences get long when I'm trying to seem smart. Goblin is feeling threatened. Goblin's hackles are up. Damn it, I didn't even know there WAS a People's Choice Award and now I'm griping about it.
:P
*It's a mystery, is all I can say.
I'd like to believe that this is the case, but I feel like it's just as often a cushion assumption for a fragile writer's ego. And that's me speaking as a pretty low-key writer who would probably feel a lot better if she did buy into this.
But no, I'm sure it's all baloney. There's no conspiracy, there are no insecure writers trashing other works just to—WHAT?! This essay beat MINE for People's Choice? This . . . crude, this VULGAR piece of wish fulfillment trash! I'm gonna one-bomb this sucker into the ground! Teach YOU to try to teach ME!
(Seriously, though, what's the secret? I feel like I'm not playing this game right. XD)
In the sequel, dozens of rage-bots bomb the shit out of "The Politics and Math of Lit Voting," and yet it goes on to win the category in the year-end awesome-story contest with FOUR VOTES!
Watch for it on HBO.
Wow, great story! But what happened to the real-time vote update?! Please tell us you're going to write a sequel! I wanna know what happens!!
I enjoyed this piece and had a really pithy and amusing comment to add. Then I read Morion's comment below. He's like the RaunchyMynxInDallas of comments: what's the point of trying for humor after he's posted?
If you are truly interested in higher scores, try no spelling errors, no grammatical errors and no punctuation errors.
You write for your own satisfaction; you post for EGO. If you really want to dilute the "1" bomb start an Erotic Writing class. Brainwash your students into voting the way you want otherwise don't worry about it. Most are saying that they did not like your story for what ever reason. Contrary to popular belief, people NEVER do anything without a reason. Yes I'm including those that are drunk, high on drugs and those that are depressed or all the above.
Comments? I read a story that had about 15 comments 14 of which were nothing but platitudes (garbage, they don't say anything). One just said "die" which made it the only constructive comment listed. I would scan the comments, delete the platitudes and those made by trolls and if it has something to say, pro or con, keep it.
What has happened to craftsmanship. You take the time to construct a good story, you respect your readers so you take the time to do a good job of editing then let it stand on it own merits. Who are you writing for. I think I would be most interested in those vote and comments that came after the story left the hub i.e. standing the test of time, also being more honest and constructive. But I guess that underlines the real reason you wrote the story.
What do you mean you didn't understand the statistics used. You all can add, subtract, multiply and divide without using a smart phone can't you. It was not that difficult to reason out. I do believe that "smartphones"? are making homo sapiens stupider and stupider along with being lazier and lazier. I can remember a time when just admitting that you did not know would get you fired not because you did not know but because you admitted it and suggesting that you were to lazy to look it up.
If you are really writing for your own enjoyment then who cares what the votes avg. out to or what the comments say.
And I'm not sure anyone understands the way voting works. A few have figured out a way to bypass the one person, one vote factor and vote numerous times on a single story. (Hello computer nerds and hackers). I also think that different sections achieve a higher (or lower) number of votes and comments. I don't think anyone reads every story in every category. Therefore it would be difficult to quantify any particular stories responses. Since most authors profess to write for their own satisfaction, it always amazes me when they pay any attention to the voting or the comments. Since it's also been shown that a huge percentage (more statistics for you) of people neither vote or comment one would naturally wonder how the voices of the minority should adversely effect the authors? Maybe voting and comments should not be allowed? Who knows.
I think part of the issue is the "hover text" that appears over the stars. I thought that 3 stars meant "average", but the hover text states "Liked It - Keep on Writing". Since 1 star means "I hated it!" and 5 stars means "Loved It - One of the best!" I think that those votes would be the most infrequent (since statistically, most people tend near the middle of a bell curve). I vote 5 stars infrequently (for me, 5 stars means an outstanding masterpiece) and 1 star even less so (find it difficult to hate stories, and if I don't like the content, I just don't read it). So when I read a story that's "OK", that I neither like or dislike, I typically don't vote, as there's no star that covers that feeling.
But that being said, thanks Serafina1210, you bring up an interesting point (that most readers wouldn't think about) and you did an excellent job of explaining yourself. So in this case, I'll depart from the middle of the bell curve and vote (and no, I didn't vote 1 star).
This is a nice overview of the realities of the voting process on Lit. I particularly enjoyed the wry humor interspersed with the harsh realities. This author clearly knows how to write, and does so in an entertaining and provocative fashion. If this author isn't already writing commercially for profit, he/she should clearly start doing so. This is as good, or better, than many magazine articles. Very, very nice work.
Always great to hear from another Oscar Wilde fan!
Yeah, people will 1 bomb a story, but does it matter? People do seem to do it out of spite. (meow!) If you are any kind of writer at all and you keep the stories coming, you'll keep your readers happy.
The only reason I care about the voting at all is to gauge audience reaction. I tend to write long series (15 or more chapters) and watching the voting to the different situations I put the characters in is very interesting. Surprisingly, chapters without sex can do just as well with chapters with sex, if it is interesting enough. It's been an education as what readers like, and for that I'm grateful.
In the meantime, it's best, like you seem to do, not to take the voting too seriously.
Thanks for this piece!
I'm just too damn sensitive to post on this site.
As a female with a real vagina and the ovaries and hormones to go with it, I wonder why I subject myself to the abuse I have endured. Fortunately, I get a lot of positive feedback too, but the one-star bombs are a drag. They don't have much impact due to the number of over all votes, but it makes me lose faith in humanity that people can be so spiteful. Fuck...I think I'll go listen to a Taylor Swift song and keep writing. (anonymous only because I am dealing with trolls myself - this essay gets 4 stars, because that is my honest opinion. I'd give it 4.5 if I had the option. I've never voted 1 star because if a story is that bad, why waste time reading it?)
Could you really be so great an idiot as to think that I'm advocating the behavior I describe? I suppose you are, since you did actually one-bomb this essay. Either that or a troll.
Your essay is on the money, but feeds into the basest instincts of the readers. Instead of voting your conscience and what you feel will reflect the true worth of the story, you suggest, for most of your essay, a strategic, manipulative method for bringing one's own story's score up at the expense of other authors' stories' scores. What a mean-spirited, spiteful thing to do! And whatever for? As you well noted, it only works for a limited amount of time for those authors who have large readerships anyway - their score numbers will eventually outrun the 1-bombs. But it WILL work to keep down the work of new authors, who are discovered by chance and rewarded over a much longer period of time. Why do that????????? So I did the logical thing - I 1-bombed your essay. Do better. Obviously, you can!!
This is both informative and funny. I love your writing style in general though. Over the past few months I've read all your fics here, and your writing has managed to make me able to read about fics with things I otherwise would find too disgusting (scat), without getting snapped out of the story world. I'm greatly looking forward to your future fics, and I guess I should cave in and get an account just so I can upvote your stories.
Face it: You are writing for an audience of crazies and perverts (I'm exaggerating, but still . . .). I tried to make sense of Lit voting, and how the admins try to correct it by manipulating it. You'll just go crazy thinking about it. There is a vague general correlation between score and quality, but in the area between 4 and 5, fughedaboutit. Your speculations are an interesting attempt to rationalize the irrational, but no cigar. Attributing the irrationality to jealous competitors is probably not the answer. It's more likely about the crazed lurkers. The fellow authors are probably more invested in hoping for a fair and honest system.
I never considered the possibility that readers might cast one-votes to warn other readers away. I'd say it's still expressing your view when you do that, and so within the rules of the game (assuming there are any). I'd prefer that no one, readers or authors, attempt to manipulate a story's score, trying to override the judgment of the collective readership--but that's an author's point of view.
I can't help wondering, now, how often I've benefited when someone has one-bombed a story I've shared a hub with.
I have four favorite categories and another five I check intermittently. The rest I know I don't care for so I don't go there. I give feedback and votes and try to be constructive about what worked or didn't for me. I think it is the best way to improve the chances of more stories I like.
I try to vote according to the quality of the writing. I sometimes vote higher on weak writing when the story is strong or different. That said, the stars do say liked it/hated it. Sometimes the gut reaction over rides the thoughtful response of well that's not my kink. My finger may find itself slamming the 1 repeatedly in the vain hope a few extras might slip through. When does this happen? When an author blatantly mis-categorizes, poorly rosa-blanca.ru, or pulls a clear bait and switch within the story in the attempt to be clever. I have given 1's specifically to reduce the score on a story in the hopes of reducing future reads. To me it is much like sharing my horrible dinner experience at a restaurant with anyone who mentions the place.
Have I ever voted down a story specifically to reduce its ranking? Yes, I have. Not often and not blindly across an author's works. But if I strongly believe that story A is better than story B, yet B sits higher and I have that empty ballot, it is high school all over again.