Forum: Author Hangout

I am not sure if I, as a non-author, should allow myself to write in this forum but as authors are probably the best source of the info I'm going to do it.

Have you noticed a change in the scoring habits of the readers over the years? Because I am not finding new stories that interest me at present, I have been re-reading a number of stories that I read some time ago. In almost all cases I have wanted to increase the score I originally gave by one or two points.

Which led me to wonder if authors had noticed if it was easier or more difficult to score points now as opposed to 10 years ago?

Readers who understand how the scoring system works and wants their vote to be impactful would naturally gravitate to voting 1 - nothing - 10. The recalculation of scores against the mean mask and may slow down realization that 9 is a downvote, but it still is.

Absolutely. Now, we were never privy to the exact details, but the site started out as simply scoring 1-10, averaging, and posting a score.

It has undergone several changes. I'm not going to recall the exact year, but it was even posted on the previous version of this forum. I always used the cutoff to make my own determination. I noticed that there was an absolute difference in the scores of stories posted after a certain date (I think is was Jan 2006 but I certainly could be wrong about the date, just know that there was one.)

I always added or subtracted a full half a point to stories on either side of that date, earlier stories simply had higher scores. Lazzeez went in and averaged them out for us and, I was wrong. Stories before that date averaged a full .8 higher than stories after. It's probably in the way-back archives of this very forum.

Then there was the TPA era where stories could receive 3 scores, Technicaal, Plot, and Appeal to the reader. Only the "A" was used to calculate the overall score.

This gave rise to another interesting point. At that time readers could choose to use either the original scoring method, or TPA, OR the author could force one or the other. The important point here is that you could and still can score a story whenever you wanted to, but TPA scores could be changed at any time. In the original scoring system once a score was entered it was locked in.

That meant that readers could not only score your story after the first chapter, they couldn't change it! Very frustrating for me because we had visibility to all the TPA scores and I could very much see my readers increasing the "A" score once the story ended. Because of that I began to force readers to use TPA so they had that option. It was something I pointed out to Lazeez at the time and I think at least it got him thinking about the next change.

This was, of course, to remove TPA altogether, but give readers the option to change their opinions of a story as it progressed.

So, yes. Scoring through the years, well decades, has changed. You just have to live with it.