Forum: Author Hangout

I noticed something weird, so I wanted to ask if anyone else noticed some strange score behavior?

Anyway, a few days ago I published something very atypical for me: a short story. I expected it to do much worse in the sense of score and comments than my longer work, so the low number of votes didn't come as a surprise. But I didn't expect my score to become stuck.

What happened is that when the story reached 10 votes, the score was 5.6something. Very low for me, but yeah, I didn't care. This story was mostly an experiment. When the 11th vote came, the score went up to 5.77. And that is where it's stuck now.

I received a 12th, 13th, and 14th vote, but my score never moved from 5.77. It's mathematically impossible that not a single decimal moved with even one vote, let alone three.

This seems to be a glitch of some kind, but I thought some of you might be familiar with it?

I don't know the details of the mechanism, but it is certainly mathematically possible from what I know about the score.

The key is that there is a calculation that rescales scores. It is possible for the first 11 votes to average to an integer, and the next three votes to be exactly that integer, so the average doesn't change. Then the normalizing adjustment might convert that integer to 5.77 based on 11 votes, 12 votes, etc.

I also know that the highest and lowest votes are not used in the average. If a new vote comes in and it increases the number of ignored votes, the new vote may actually be ignored. That should not happen with three consecutive votes, though.

Having said that, I think it is more likely that the numbers you are seeing were cached somewhere, and you will see some change if you wait a day (or a few hours) and try again.

What happened is that when the story reached 10 votes, the score was 5.6something.

Wait! What! When was the scoring visibility changed to ten! 😂 Guess who has not been paying attention to site mechanics... 🫣

Well, the score changed, so it's not a bug, just an unlikely set of votes. Still, readers seem to hate my little experiment of a story.