- Reviews & Essays
- The Writing of RolloJTomasi
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Click hereThis short essay was inspired by the thread , which was posted in The Author's Hangout by StillStunned.
Let's cut to the chase, RolloJTomasi is my alt. Alts are a sometimes fraught subject round here. People believe that they are involved in all sorts of nefarious activities, like carpet bombing rival authors, and surreptitiously boosting the ratings of your own stories. I'm sure that both happen. In fact I've suffered from the former issue myself (more on this later). However, alts are widespread, not specifically objected to by the site, and often entirely innocent. Probably the most frequent reason for an author creating an alt is to publish in multiple categories where there might otherwise be kink contention. For example, writing both Gay Male and Loving Wives stories could lead to reader confusion and even antipathy.
In the case of RolloJTomasi (which sounds awfully like a Sherlock Holmes fan-fic), my motivations were different. I went as far as telling Laurel what I was doing and why. I don't believe that I am breaching any confidences by stating that she said my actions were within site rules and indeed quite common. Let me start by explaining to you what I explained to her.
There were two main issues that I was looking to address. The first was something that any author with even the lowest of profiles has to adjust to, a "fan club," thanks to Duleigh for the nomenclature. Such clubs may be very small, they might even consist of just one person (or one person and their multiple alts, as referred to above), or they may be legion. It has been reported that a subset of the "fans" of Author A have sometimes targeted the portfolio of Author B, either in "support" of Author A, or because Author B has done something to offend them. Either way, an author's "fan club" is dedicated to the simple task of downvoting every single story that they post, regardless of quality.
I think for me, it was competition entries that were the final straw. These seem to inject "fan clubs" (and maybe also overly competitive authors) with steroids. Any work by their target author that has the temerity to rack up a decent rating must be aggressively pulled back into the pack. Sometimes this is not personal, they 1 bomb all authors, rather than just a lucky few.
Sweeps are the site's response to antisocial voting. For me, they seem to remove a fair number of malicious votes, but not all. However, speaking personally, sweeps became kinda depressing. Yes, my ratings would increase dramatically, maybe from 4.3x or 4.4x to 4.6x or 4.7x, but that just told me how many malicious votes I had received.
I'm not going to speculate too much on why I have acquired a "fan club." It happens to many authors, not just me. But I have one, as proved by sweep-related ratings leaps, as well as some other activities that I will not give the oxygen of publicity here. Given this reality, I began to wonder what sort of scores my work might attract if not saddled with the handicap of being written by, well, me.
I have also heard the hypothesis that publishing as a woman inflates an author's ratings. I always thought this was unlikely to be true, but it's maybe worth investigating.
The second major motivation was a hypothesis propounded to me by a Literotica member. I can't claim it was the most scientific of hypotheses, but at least it was easy to state, with its meaning accessible to a general audience. It reads like this:
"Any -- and I should stress this -- absolutely any success, or absolutely any positive feedback, I had ever achieved as a writer was solely -- again I should stress this -- absolutely solely to do with the 'fact' that readers fantasized about fucking me."
Now my initial reaction to this hypothesis was that it wasn't well-founded. But I don't believe in making claims that are not backed up by data. The ex-scientist in me began to think about how to gather such data, or at least indicative samples.
The obvious approach was one that could help me with both of my motivations. Create an alt that has none of the assumptions and baggage associated with EmilyMiller, and one which is sexless (both in the sense of being gender-neutral, and also not engaging in any of the sex-related discussions that I get involved in from time to time on the forums). This would allow me to explore and analyze both areas.
It was simple really, and hence I created RolloJTomasi (or RJT). No stated gender, no potentially alluring profile page, no pornstar as an avatar [not that I have had such in quite some time either], no interactions with the forums at all. I guess it's testimony to my success in this objective that RJT hasn't received a single PM in their time here. Not one. My real account had been inundated with inquiries after a similar amount of time. RJT can't have been objectified, as there is nothing about them to objectify.
Why the name? Well RolloTomasi was taken, so I inserted a middle initial randomly. As for Rollo Tomasi -- he's a character (never seen, but omnipresent) in the movie L.A. Confidential. A cypher created by one of the two MMCs to rationalize the murder of his cop father. Rollo Tomasi is an avatar for anonymous people who get away with things. It seemed appropriate.
I initially planned to keep publishing as RJT, but I find a double life exhausting, also -- without revealing too much about what I found -- the process has brought me some perspective, and even some inner peace. So here I am unmasking the miscreant.
I haven't decided whether to leave my RJT stories where they are, or to republish them myself. Watch this space.
Now, before launching into results, let's set a...
RJT had posted eleven stories at the time of this article (there most likely won't be any more). So I wanted to take my most recent eleven EmilyMiller stories and use these as a baseline. However, in order to compare like with like, I excluded all my 750 word stories, two other WIWAWs, and Traffic 2, which was co-authored. This left me with the following:
Data harvested around 8am EST on 04/02/2024
🔥 indicates a rating of 4.5 or higher
1. Bouncing Back Ch. 02 🔥
❤️ 4 📊 2.9k ⭐️ 4.57 / 58 💬 20
Cathy grapples with her feelings for Sarah and her husband.
03/08/2024 in Lesbian Sex Stories
2. A Family Ritual
❤️ 12 📊 27.2k ⭐️ 4.10 / 219 💬 31
Turning 18 is a rite of passage, especially for Tiffany.
02/24/2024 in Incest/Taboo Stories
3. The Undoing of Emma 🔥
❤️ 0 📊 2.4k ⭐️ 4.74 / 23 💬 36
Emmoreth becomes a pawn in Hell's political battles.
01/30/2024 in Sci-Fi & Fantasy Stories
4. A Good Girl Gone Bad Ch. 03: Gaped 🔥
❤️ 10 📊 6.5k ⭐️ 4.71 / 38 💬 17
Her friends help Ella achieve two anal ambitions.
01/25/2024 in Fetish Stories
5. Bouncing Back Ch. 01 🔥
❤️ 11 📊 7.1k ⭐️ 4.72 / 135 💬 35
Cathy meets a young woman who reawakens lost feelings.
01/21/2024 in Lesbian Sex Stories
6. Cressie Craves Cream-Pies
❤️ 8 📊 11.2k ⭐️ 4.37 / 67 💬 24
3,000 words of pure and unadulterated filth with a bad girl.
01/20/2024 in Group Sex Stories
7. Lily's First Valentine's 🔥
❤️ 4 📊 13.5k ⭐️ 4.64 / 83 💬 17
An ex-angel takes some novel approaches to gift shopping.
01/12/2024 in Sci-Fi & Fantasy Stories
Incidentally LFV is an example of a comp story that got battered down to 4.4x pre-sweep
8. A Holiday Wish 🔥
❤️ 10 📊 5.2k ⭐️ 4.63 / 217 💬 47
A Sexy Seasonal Fairytale.
12/24/2023 in Romance Stories
9. A Good Girl Gone Bad Ch. 02: Bound 🔥
❤️ 9 📊 6.1k ⭐️ 4.67 / 39 💬 19
Ella's plan to fulfill a fantasy almost goes awry.
11/23/2023 in Fetish Stories
10. Cocksuckers
❤️ 4 📊 12.9k ⭐️ 4.39 / 79 💬 18
Emma & Lily record their seasons greetings.
11/19/2023 in Humor & Satire Stories
11. At A Good Girl Gone Bad Ch. 01: Ella 🔥
❤️ 20 📊 8.9k ⭐️ 4.66 / 96 💬 38
Ella finds what she has been looking for in a surprising way.
11/12/2023 in Fetish Stories
These have a simple average rating of 4.57 and a weighted average rating of 4.50.
You could argue that my poorly-received attempt at an I/T story, A Family Ritual, dominates the numbers too much. If I replace it with the next story off the rank -- the final chapter of Teaching Eden, which has stats as follows:
12. Teaching Eden Ch. 05: The Prodigal 🔥
❤️ 4 📊 2.4k ⭐️ 4.64 / 44 💬 13
Do Eden and Michele have a future?
10/29/2023 in Exhibitionist & Voyeur Stories
-- then both averages increase and converge to 4.61. I'm happy to use the higher figure as a baseline, though I think it is perhaps a little flattering. As I've excluded lower rated stories and replaced them with higher rated ones, it feels a bit like cherry-picking.
Data harvested around 11am EST on 04/08/2024
🔥 indicates a rating of 4.5 or higher
1. A New York Fuck 🔥
❤️ 20 📊 12.6k ⭐️ 4.69 / 151 💬 11
A college senior flies to meet an older man in the city.
03/01/2024 in Mature Stories
2. While There Is Hope - Ch. 01 🔥
❤️ 7 📊 2.8k ⭐️ 4.64 / 158 💬 4
A woman walks out in front of a car and a mystery unfolds.
03/10/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
3. While There Is Hope Ch. 02 🔥
❤️ 3 📊 1.8k ⭐️ 4.75 / 116 💬 2
Hope wakes in a strange room and has to deal with her trauma.
03/13/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
4. While There Is Hope Ch. 03 🔥
❤️ 4 📊 1.9k ⭐️ 4.68 / 97 💬 2
Hope relives a dream that became a nightmare two years ago.
03/16/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
5. While There Is Hope Ch. 04 🔥
❤️ 1 📊 1.4k ⭐️ 4.65 / 84 💬 2
Hope and Bill agree an arrangement. Her father plots.
03/21/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
6. While There Is Hope Ch. 05 🔥
❤️ 0 📊 1.3k ⭐️ 4.70 / 87 💬 2
Hope and Bill make a discovery, and tail a car.
03/23/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
7. While There Is Hope Ch. 06 🔥
❤️ 0 📊 1.1k ⭐️ 4.68 / 69 💬 1
Hope & Bill make good use of a water tower, then head for LA.
03/29/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
8. While There Is Hope Ch. 07 🔥
❤️ 3 📊 993 ⭐️ 4.71 / 55 💬 2
Her father's plan goes terribly wrong for Hope.
04/04/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
9. While There Is Hope Ch. 08 🔥
❤️ 1 📊 855 ⭐️ 4.57 / 51 💬 0
Ashley falls in love, with consequences for all around her.
04/05/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
10. While There Is Hope Ch. 09 🔥
❤️ 0 📊 1.0k ⭐️ 4.62 / 55 💬 0
The aftermath of the ambush dominates everyone's lives.
04/06/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
11. While There Is Hope Ch. 10 🔥
❤️ 0 📊 771 ⭐️ 4.72 / 64 💬 1
Epilogue.
04/07/2024 in Novels and Novellas Stories
These have a simple average of 4.67 and a weighted average of 4.68. These are 0.06 and 0.07 greater than the benchmark.
I present a series of caveats around these figures at the end, but one thing is worth noting here. It's entirely feasible that -- given that EmilyMiller and RJT are publishing in different categories -- the difference between their ratings is due to differences in how categories are rated. In order to examine this area, I asked 8letters if I could borrow some of his data.
I won't show all my [rather complicated] workings here, but, using his average ratings by category, the weighted expected rating for my eleven EmilyMiller stories is 4.51 and that for my RJT ones is 4.56. This suggests that RJT was indeed writing in a kinder basket of categories (ones where the average rating is higher than for EmilyMiller), but it only explains 0.05 of the differences. Reducing the gap from between 0.06 and 0.07 to between 0.01 and 0.02. RJT's stories are still rated slightly higher.
In the above, please also recall that I have probably somewhat inflated the ratings of my EmilyMiller stories by removing a few (for a variety of reasons) that would have pulled the average down from 4.61.
Let me stress that I am not trying to be statistically robust, there are too many variables for that (see both above and the Caveats section). Instead, what I'm considering is how well my RJT data supports the observations and hypotheses above.
First "fan clubs." RJT is too new an author and has never posted on the forums and so they haven't as yet acquired a "fan club." It's too simplistic to state that my "fan club" has suppressed my ratings by around 0.01 -- 0.02 points, for example turning a naturally 4.51 rated story into a 4.49 one (or -- more positively -- that my very highest rated story should be at the 4.81 level rather than its current one). But the data certainly suggests that some rating suppression takes place (as it does with all authors with any kind of profile).
Next the hypothesis that women writers get an easier ride and higher ratings than men. Well, again I can't be definitive, but the [genderless] RJT data suggests the opposite. Contrary to anecdote, there is indeed possibly (I stress possibly) a slight "tax" associated with being a female author (it's just as likely that the tentatively observed "tax" relates specifically to being me). At the very least, the data suggests that there is no clear advantage to being a woman writer. So much for forum lore.
Finally, the hypothesis that every shred of success that I have had with my stories is totally explained by men desiring me. Well RJT is genderless. RJT has no salacious profile. RJT doesn't discuss their IRL sex life on AH (current and historical). RJT has never posted on any forum, let alone been flirty on them. RJT has neither sent, nor received a single PM. And yet...
RJT's stories all have the coveted red H. The simple and weighted average of RJT's ratings are both better than those posted under my own name, even adjusting for category. There are still asterisks against all these observations, they are not totally robust (again see the Caveats section), but it's very hard to say that the RJT data supports this second hypothesis. It seems my meager success is not proven to be due to objectification. There must instead have been some non-data-related reason for this hypothesis having been propounded.
I'm far from surprised by these results, tentative and indicative-only as they may be. The hypotheses propounded never seemed to be based in fact, instead relating more to how the propounders would like things to be; convenient untruths maybe.
I'm more than aware that, by drawing attention to myself (something I'm often accused of devoting my life to -- though generally as a form of projection on the part of the accusers), I'm likely to be inviting rating suppressing votes on my main account and on RJT's. It would actually be kind of funny if RJT's ratings plummeted, it would do nothing but confirm my other observations.
The thing is, I care much less than I once did. Once upon a time, I took bad ratings very personally. I don't really anymore. Some of this is getting used to Literotica and its idiosyncrasies and irritations. Some of it is feeling more comfortable in my own skin as a writer. Some of it is being happier and more stable in my personal life.
But some of it also relates to the outcomes of this little experiment. It's confirmed a few things. First that ratings are basically totally decoupled from the worth of stories and entirely open to manipulation and abuse. This is not big news obviously. Second that my writing has intrinsic merit and that is not going to change, even if my fifty plus red Hs all get bombed into oblivion.
Finally, it's nice to at least get some indication that the quality of my storytelling stands up without the prop of my forum personality. And that any limited success I have had is despite my public profile, not because of it.
All of the above gives me a rather Zen outlook. I doubt that this sense of equanimity will be punctured by even a legion of 1 bombs. That's a nice sort of feeling to have.
Caveats
If we consider the hypotheses presented in Motivations #1 and #2 above, I'm not seeking to either definitely disprove these, or to prove the opposite. More data would be required to do either, and ideally RJT would also publish stories in a wider range of categories. What I am seeking to do instead is to see if my limited data is consistent with the two hypotheses or not.
Back to categories, most of RJT's stories are in Novels & Novellas, a category I have not written in before, so that is a potential red flag.
Ten of the eleven RJT stories are chapters. However, six of the eleven EmilyMiller stories are also chapters, and three more are stand-alone stories, which are part of larger series (specifically my Angels & Demons stories), so I think this aspect is reasonably comparable.
Only one of the RJT stories was written contemporaneously to the EmilyMiller ones. However, both sets of stories are sufficiently close together that me improving as a writer seems unlikely to be a major factor.
My eleven benchmark stories have an aggregate of about 80k views. The same figure for the RJT ones is the rather lower 27k views (mostly related to Novels & Novellas being a low traffic category), so this is a quite large difference between the datasets. Another red flag.
However, my eleven benchmark stories attracted 882 votes, whereas the RJT ones had 987 votes. So the numbers of votes cast are more comparable than the views. Again, this may be a facet of Novels & Novellas. I'm not sufficiently au fait with the category to say more.
It is worth noting that my main account has over 700 followers, who get notified when I publish a new story. RJT has just over 40. This is a much lower figure and it is fair to say that -- as most followers would have a positive view of an author's work -- EmilyMiller has a significant advantage over RJT in this area.
RJT doesn't have a Xitter account -- let alone one frequently featured by Literotica on that platform, so this is another disadvantage.
I told two Lit friends about RJT, and another worked it out. But, given the volume of votes against each RJT story (see above), I don't think that this was a material factor.
I write stories in Word365 on my iPhone. I did all the calculations for this essay in Excel365 on my iPhone as well. Given how fiddly Excel365 is, the chances that I got something wrong at some point are quite high. I doubt however I made so big an error as to wholly undermine the results.
Finally, the assumption that rating is a valid metric, correlated to literary worth, is at best flawed. However, it's really all we have to go on, so I'm using it here.
- COMMENTS
- there is this canard that 1 bombing is done by authors’ fans. It’s pretty obvious that there are quite a few competitive and insecure authors out there. My thesis is that some of them have little else in their lives and so jealously guard their little successes here. Emily
I’m convinced there is all kinds of bias when it comes to voting. Some of it gender based, yes. But there are more variables than just gender.
I’ve seen interesting storylines written so badly that they’re practically unreadable, yet they get stellar ratings. I’ve seen ultra crude ‘hillbilly’ trash get high marks. I’ve seen beautifully written stories that were very creative and original get bombed in the ratings. I’m honestly not sure ratings mean anything.
As far as other authors deliberately bombing pieces. Oh, that happens for sure! Every new story I publish ALWAYS gets a handful of 1’s in the first hour and it takes days for it to eventually level off in the 4.5 range. I may not be a phenomenal writer but there is nothing I’ve written that should get a 1 star.
I read this because I have a particular fascination with women writers. As one commenter mentioned I love stories written by women in the first person. I intentionally look for women authors. I occasionally will read a male author and find it does not seem right. When a story is written by someone whose gender is not specified I often feel I can tell whether it is a male or a female. Men and women can both write well and that is part of a highly rated good story. The erotica part of a story is the other part. I have read well written stories that I enjoyed even though the erotica wasn't entirely there and they had a high rating. I have also read highly erotic stories and thought if only this author could write and still there was a high rating because the erotica was so good. I really appreciate your essay. I read essays often to get to the psychology of the whole Literotica thing.
Vanilla
I have read many of your stories and never once thought about fucking you. I have given all of them a five star rating because I enjoyed each one. That is why I follow you. I think the rating system is a bogus way to measure the success of an author. The comments are more demonstrable of the readers thoughts. Eliminate the trolls and see if the favorable out number the unfavorable. The trolls are easy to figure out. I do think that female authors do have an advantage. They tend to be more realistic in their writings than most males. Thank you for making my day brighter each time I read an EM story.
… nerd! I love it. I especially like the subtle dig at people’s projections too, haha. 😻
Good stuff.
- I adjusted both my 11 EmilyMiller and 11 RJT stories by using the average score for the category of each story care of Novels & Novellas does have higher scores (so does Sci-Fi & Fantasy by the way) but I took this into account in my analysis. Emily
I'm not sure if it's relevant, but in my experience Novels section **in general** is super highly rated. I'm used to LW being 4.3 average on a good day even for stories I like, and it takes being someone like NTH to consistently get much better ratings. I don't read too many N&N stuff, but any that I run into when I search for things with rosa-blanca.ru that may interest me, routinely seem to average 4.6-4.8 without fail. I have no idea if that is reflective of N&N on average, or just the rare examples I run across. Or maybe simply a consequence of N&N attracting better quality writers who don't just do simple stroke stories. Or something ese.
Another complexity with this comparison is that Angels series is a bit... niche? Not sure if that's the right term. I know I skipped some of them because I simply don't enjoy reading supernatural stuff most of the time.
Also, may of Emily account stories I recall were... well, kind of designed to not be highly rated. Pessimistic. Heavy topics. Fetish of some kind. That's not a criticism, but it is an objective fact that people tend to react better to optimistic fuckfests/pure romance, ratings wise.
I think to do a more balanced comparison (assuming you'd even remotely cared to put in EVEN MORE effort :) you would need to literally post identical type stories consistently into identical categories. 2-3 LW stories (OK I know not your particular niche :) each, 2-3 Romance, 2-3 Incest or Fetish.
I don't care what you may feel about ratings, good or bad, how they may be slanted, or how some troll may dump on you. I only care about story content, and wicked hot monkey sex of course, and how I view it. And I viewed While There Is Hope as out-fucking-standing!
I go to erotica sites, this and a couple others, to read erotica. But I do detest stroke stories. Seeing how many times one can cram fuck, cock, cunt, jizz, pussy, dick, cum, and slit into one paragraph does not constitute a story, and shows the author is likely dumb as hell, and likely an incel. There should be a well written story with said wicked hot monkey sex inserted.
Occasionally, there is a story, that while having the hot sex, grabs more attention with the story than the hot sex. Hope was one such story. In fact I somehow missed the final chapter, wondered when Rollo would release it, saw this article by you explaining you are one and the same, and now I must rush to finish the story I've been jonesing for.
So tell your alter ego I said hi, good job, and I'll see one or both of you down the road. 5/5 stars.
Dewey Cheatham
- the total number of votes was comparable, which I point out. Votes per views was higher for N&N, but why would that be pertinent if I’ve already adjusted for the average rating by category? Asking for a friend. Emily
Emily - you adjusted for total ratings based on data from 8letters. not total number of votes.
You also say that the larger number of votes for RJT may be due to category, but your don’t know enough about the category to be sure.
I am adding data to this , and suggesting that the category may be a larger contributor than your initial analysis suggests.
Again, 🤷♂️.
No negative tone on this or my other message intended. Just speculation.
- starting “To do a better comparison” - I guess I wasn’t clear enough about what I was trying to achieve and what I wasn’t. Please feel free to do your own follow-up research, I’d be interested in your findings. Emily
- starting “I'm a fan of anyone” - thanks for the comment, Lit is a weird place in many ways, with lots of things going on 😊 Emily
- thank you. It might be nice to make data collection / analysis a little easier 😊 Emily
- thank you for the comment - I didn’t follow it all I’m afraid. Emily
- I adjusted for category, based on actual data, not opinions, provided by 8letters. Emily
To do a better comparison, you should have created two new accounts and given them equal treatment. Give each account a similar set of stories and post them on roughly the same schedule (although not in the same order). Include multiple categories, but make sure each account has the same number of stories in each category.
As you explained above, there are just two many differences between these two accounts to produce viable results.
I'm a fan of anyone who gets the Rollo Tomasi thing! I've never really paid attention to scores of stories. For laughs I reviewed the 72 stories I have saved as favorites and of those:
17 had a rating above 4.5 (Hot)
17 had a rating below 4.0
5 had no score (a couple of my favorite authors don't allow scoring or comments)
In the LW section of Lit I believe that female authors who present stories from the POV of the female and/or in anyway don't have the cheating wife punished are heavily "taxed" in their scores.
I never really was aware of a "fan club" thing or "Alts" but, I guess it might make sense. There are a couple of writers I used to try to read because their stories had very high scores, but the stories were awful! I don't mean subject matter, just written poorly. I noticed a trend that there were the same glowing comments being posted shortly after the story was posted. It was always the same commenters and the language extolling the virtues of the stories was the same. So I guess it's true?
At any rate thanks for the information.
Thank you for sharing. I'm relatively new to posting stories to the site myself. My observations of reading, voting, and commentary behavior (including, it seems, a nascent "fan club") has been all over the map--encouraging yet sometimes painful or even cringeworthy. Like you, I come from a background where I want to dive into the data and I've done some similar analysis (napkin backed) that what you've done here.
One thing I found interesting was to look at the voting rate: the percentage of viewers who voted (votes / views). In general, my best/most successful stories (from an author-satisfaction point of view, not viewership or score necessarily) tend to have higher voting rates. On average, I hover a little under 1% early, with the voting rate declining as stories age, so variations "stick out".
Anyway, good food for thought. I think the experiment was worthwhile. 5-stars ;-)
Hi, an interesting and unusual read. In some ways a bit disturbing, even if only the characters are the objects in question. The separation of writing and reading surely should remain healthy in what is after all fiction. The crafting of erotica is a difficult thing to perform well, the writing of short stories more notoriously so. I enjoy reading this type of work as much as any classical literature, but for it's name sake, to think there is an unhealthy sub culture being targeted would be bothersome, rather like the ridiculous description of women on porn sites.
I am glad you write with fun and intelligence.
I think the category may be more important than it looks initially.
My profile matches RJT, except for not posting in forums.
All but two of my stories have less votes than any of RJTs. Even with higher views.
Maybe I am not as good a writer as you/RJT is, but I have also never published in Novels/Novellas.
🤷♂️
- I’ll do my best, but back as me, or a reasonable facsimile of me anyway 😊 Emily
I laughed at the authors name as i thought of the movie it came from....i thought....thats a funny person. I'm not an author and had no real knowledge of the rating systems and how they work, i read a story and if i like it i vote, sometimes i will make a comment, but without a writers background i usually have nothing positive to add, just that i liked the story. but i hope you lovely people keep writing stories
Good point, all 10 in a row from one chapter series stood out to me but most of the others were part of various series in various ways. This seems like a fun thing to do and I'm looking forward to checking them out.
- thanks I don’t mind people fantasizing about fucking my characters, just me. It’s kinda hard to maintain any detachment when a fictionalized version of me is sometimes my FMC. Emily
- oh, hun, I mention “ I had no idea this account existed! Well the most significant statistical thing that jumps out at me is RJT has 11 stories and 10 are chapters in a series. Series chapter tend to skew high rating and low view, as readership skews toward the dedicated ones who keep reading later chapters.” in the text. 9 of the 11 EM stories were also either chapters or part of a series. I don’t think this area skews things at all. Emily
I had no idea this account existed! Well the most significant statistical thing that jumps out at me is RJT has 11 stories and 10 are chapters in a series. Series chapter tend to skew high rating and low view, as readership skews toward the dedicated ones who keep reading later chapters. So I'd expect a higher average on RJT due primarily to that if other factors were equal. Of course the 'only get good feedback due to attraction ' but was bs and I'm glad this exercise reinforces that to you. I'll have to check them out...
Thank you. Personally, I prefer female authors writing in the first person. Can’t say I imagine fucking them, but I may start., The personal perspective is preferred. I would have agreed with your hypotheses. I actually have had marked RJT as a favorite. I will now follow his/her true self. Thank you again.
I rated this 5 just to counter your "fan club" 😉
I think the idea that your stories are only supported by men who fantasize about fucking you is preposterous.
Sounds like whoever pitched that to you is pretty insecure about themselves and their own writings.
Just thought I’d add that the weighted and unweighted average ratings for the RJT stories were 4.70 just before posting this article. So the current gap is bigger than the one I cite (the comparable figures were 4.67 - 4.68 when I harvested the data).
- I lost count of how many times o stated that the results are not robust. I use stats professionally and i understand how they work. But two things: people make all sorts of assertions here based on zero data and 100% opinion, here i at least try to be more dispassionate. Also, I disagree totally that there is no value in comparing the datasets - I critique my approach and lay out the issues with it - but in the real world, partial data is often all you have to go on. It’s not unreasonable to draw tentative conclusions from this, so long as you state the uncertainty. I am entirely happy to state that the analysis fails to support the second hypothesis. It doesn’t refute it, but it casts very substantial doubt on its veracity.
- ratings can go down post-sweep if you have another type of fan club, one who gives you multiple 5s for the same work. Sweeps get rid of suspicious votes regardless of value. Emily
- the stats were easy and basic - writing the stories took some effort 😊 Emily
- I guess you skipped the why - and this is not an ongoing thing 😊 Emily
- thanks - as I say multiple times, it’s far from robust, but yeah, it helped. 😊 Emily
I think your two data sets are too unalike and too small for such a comparison to be meaningful. I don't think you're comparing apples and apples in terms of your story content - very different categories - and your overall View and therefore Vote numbers are too low to read much into the differences/similarities.
If you had kept the experiment going for over a year, AND published a similar number of stories under both Account names, in the same categories, conclusions could be drawn, but I'm not convinced this dataset tells you much, except that your productivity is quite remarkable!
I reckon you should concentrate on writing stories, and de-couple your AH persona from your abilities as a writer - I get the sense that you're clouding your own judgement.
You should let the stories stand on their own, regardless of the Alt on the cover.
Interesting. As for the sweeps... I'm terrible at keeping score with all the stats, but I definitely have noticed that a couple of times, my star rating has decreased along with the number of votes. It seems that a sweep not only wipes away malicious votes, but can wipe out benevolent votes as well. However these "fraudulent" votes are determined, it appears to go both ways.
This is q really interesting read and also an interesting theory and one in fully behind. Thank you for putting in a super amount of effort with the stats etc.
I'm sorry. I started reading this article, then found myself skimming and finally skipping to the bottom. Out of fairness, I didn't score this. It's not a subject of particular fascination.
I stick with one 'label' for posting stories. Why hide behind other masks? I don't care who wants to read them or declare 'war' on them if they are out to lower scores.
I use Excel to collect data, but not to this depth—too much tribulation.
RolloJTomasi, revealed at last. The results turned out much like I had predicted, but I still greatly enjoyed reading this scientific breakdown of all of the little facets that came into play. A wonderful analysis. I sincerely hope that this will eliminate any shroud of doubt that you may have had when it comes to your writing abilities. Your passion has always been crystal clear.