Forum: Author Hangout

Negative reviews are strongly discouraged, and rightly so.

Yes it's Lazeez' site and he can do what he wants with it of course. It's a sensitive subject, because writing is exposing, but on Wattpad the voting doesn't get discussed, or hidden, because negative is not an option. And you know what you're getting and get notified even.

Since you seem to hold up Wattpad as the ultimate benchmark, why not simply confine yourself to posting stories there..?

No need to get huffy.

Well it's Lazeez' policy, and if you look down the reviews they mostly rate 9's and 10's. Ours are (mostly) free stories written by rank amateurs in our spare time, and posted for people to enjoy. We don't post them to get brought down by people posing as smarter.

It's a positive policy that encourages people to write and publish. This site is supposed to be fun isn't it? Not an exam. There are always Comments for being critical, that we can choose to leave up or have deleted.

Yes okay, my point starting this thread is that quite often a vote is not feedback :)

Over time the vote system has evolved to protect us from itself.

All votes are feedback. Sometime a vote is not reliable feedback; such as, a voter saying the Author put out the effort so they deserve a 10.

You will need to explain why you think the voting system protects us from the voting system. If the system reported the average of an author's raw scores, it would reflect the reader's votes, and in theory, their opinion of the story. Unfortunately, using raw scores leads to a large grouping of stories in the range of 8-10. Lazeez's system is an attempt to normalize the votes that are grouped close to 10. While I would prefer the average of my raw scores, I accept Lazeez's algorithm for it compares my score against other author's scores. It does not protect me from the system being used.

Quite often I know there has been a vote but I can't tell whether it was a positive vote or a negative vote, because the average hasn't changed or it was in the 7's and only dropped by .1. Also I don't get notified I have to check and hunt for them.

I understand the system and how it has evolved to be the way it is. It's well-intentioned but a lot of writers react badly to the negative votes, and so over time we have been protected from them, with this element of secrecy.

So the question I'm floating is whether it would be better not to have negative votes, but just the option for the reader to recommend/upvote each chapter. Either vote, or don't vote.

In the end we the authors get the same message about how well received the story is, and even each chapter, but we can see all the votes and even be notified, because we don't need our sensitive souls protecting any more :)

It's what they do on Wattpad and on Wattpad there is no discussion of the voting system. And it would be an easy recode for existing stories.

Anyway this is just a bit of feedback for Lazeez, to do with as he pleases. This is entirely his great, great site and he is not made of glass :)

It's what they do on Wattpad and on Wattpad

But the score is part of the search on SOL. Wattpad has nothing like that. SOL has a much better scoring system.

Scores on SOL are more for readers than authors. So how would a star-system work? Search on stories with the highest number of stars? And back to wattpad, the number of stars is misleading. A 10-chapter story can get 10 stars from the same reader while if it was a single chapter story that reader would only give it one star. Is the story 10 times better because it's broken into chapters?

Yes true a recommendation by chapter rewards short chapters. But conversely, only one vote per story is pretty limiting as well, when stories can be any length. And in practice readers tend not to vote chapters if they find them too short to be satisfying.

As a search aid, I don't find the 1-10 score works very well at all. My highest-rated story has the second-lowest number of reads!

So you want a vote for each chapter? If that farce was implemented, then how does it help? Do readers skip those chapters with poor scores?

He was responding to me about wattpad. The giving of stars on wattpad pretty much happens while the story is being posted. The kids there give the posted chapter a star to encourage the writing of the next chapter. No one's proposing we score chapters on SOL.

Although, on SOL that pretty much happens while the story is being posted. A reader will change his vote based on the last chapter read.

As a search aid, I don't find the 1-10 score works very well at all.

I meant it's built into the search engine. You can sort results by score (ascending or descending).

wattpad is more of a social media site. The stars are like the "like" on other sites.

Well what I mean is that the number of reads my stories get doesn't seem related to their score. So it doesn't appear that score is much of a search criterion.

That fits in with my own experience: that a 9.x story is generally no more rewarding than a 6.x; it is just more likely to be something uplifting for a young man's male ego :)

For my stories the title seems to be by far the biggest factor in how much it gets read.

Yes indeed Wattpad is a very different place, BUT one of the differences that might appeal to Lazeez is that nobody discusses the voting system :))

This system it started out simply, and with the best intentions, as a 1-10 scale. What could possibly go wrong? Well various trends emerged, mainly around the fact that it enabled negativity and this is the Internet. So it was fixed, in stages, to defeat trolling and reduce the whingeing, to be consistent over time, until we arrive at this situation where, again today, people voted two of my stories and I have no way of knowing whether it means they liked them or disliked them.

On Wattpad I'd get a message about each and even know who voted - because they could only be positive. The vote count would increase by one each, or if they didn't like the chapter I'd see a read with no vote (or possibly a comment just like here). I'd even get an estimate of how much of the chapter they'd read.

Not saying it's perfect on WP, but everyone just accepts it and gets on with it, while here this seemingly innocent thread rocks on getting more heated every day.

Yes indeed Wattpad is a very different place, BUT one of the differences that might appeal to Lazeez is that nobody discusses the voting system :))

No, they always complain about nobody reading their stories. They always ask, "How do I get more reads?" That doesn't happen on SOL.

There are 80 million people on wattpad (one of the ambassadors recently mentioned that) and the number of stories is huge.

Also, if I remember right, you can't give a star or comment from the phone app and many (most?) people access wattpad on their phone.

By the way, how do you find stories to read on wattpad? Surely not by the number of stars given. There really isn't much search capability.

I happen to love the SOL search (I remember suffering through ASSTR's). I believe it's one of SOL's strengths.

SOL's scoring system is what it is. However, it's only as good as the readers voting. Some of the weird things about the scoring system are a result of the way people score stories.

I like romantic stories. Most romantic stories are not tagged as romantic though. Tags are a crap way to find stories.

And collab filtering is also great for suggesting stories someone will like after that person has scored a handful of stories.

How would you go about implementing collaborative filtering?

In a commercial setting, the cost associated with defining the criteria used by collaborative filtering is paid for by the website's marketing budget.

For SOL, there would be costs incurred by Lazeez to establish and support such a system. In a cost-benefit analysis, I doubt the benefit to SOL would warrant the cost. Even more important is, who would evaluate the story and define the criteria used to link a story to other stories? Your basic choices are the authors, the administrators, and the readers. There are problems with all three. Authors assign codes based on how they see their story and readers can view the story differently. The administers don't have the time to read the stories so they could define the criteria. Each reader is going to see the story differently and assign different criteria. Which criteria should be used?

Such a system would result in a story being linked to so many stories that the readers would be overwhelmed by the number of 'you may like' recommendations.

For example: Most stories have an element of humor even though the author did not code the story as humorous. If Humor was used as a collaborative filtering criteria, the reader could receive 10K+ 'you might like' recommendations.

The algorithm would use just the top 3 or 5 to display as a recommendation.

So, if all of my 10K+ potential recommendations were appropriate for recommendation, how would an algorithm go about determining which ones should be recommended? [I mean that as a rhetorical question.]

Using the Humor code and SOL's current search algorithm would give me a listing of stories the author thought were humorous. If the listing is too long, I can add to my criteria to reduce the length of the listing.

I would prefer a Recommendation system that gives me some control instead of a system that just feeds me 3 to 5 recommendations that it thinks I want out of a possible 10K recommendations.

I was referring to stories, not a commercial enterprise.

I was also exaggerated for effect the number of stories on the site that have the Humor code. There is also a difference between a story coded as humorous and a story the readers find humorous. So a CF system could potential result in a very large number of story recommendations if Humor was a CF criteria even though it would only display a recommendation for a few stories.

Most romantic stories are not tagged as romantic though.

That's the author's fault, not SOL's.

Many years ago, I designed a system for something new at the time — credit scoring (to assist the New Accounts department in approving whether or not to give someone a credit card).

It was based on statistics. The user plugged in numbers to 6 questions (like how long the applicant lived in their current home) and it came out with the score. Above that score: give him a card. Below it: no card.

The VP of New Accounts asked me what would happen if the person entered the wrong number. I told him he would get the wrong score. That wasn't the system's fault. It was human error. The VP blamed the system.

(btw, they didn't let me talk to users for some time after that.)

Some of the weird things about the scoring system are a result of the way people score stories.
Isn't that a 'problem' for every scoring system?

The big one I was thinking about is that many people don't score a story they abandon because they don't like it. Those stories should get a low score. And they pretty much only score stories they like. The result is a lot of 8s, 9s, and 10s. That's why Lazeez adjusts the score.

Well this is a general comparison and of course SOL is vastly better for us. The voting system there just works though. It's simple and positive and hasn't needed any secrecy. Over there it's a non-issue.

I don't personally see evidence that the extra resolution of 1-10 is effective in searches either, even if theory says it should. Perhaps the difference between "good" or even "not bad" and "most amazing" is not really significant, compared with other factors? When it's just other people's tastes after all.

a lot of writers react badly to the negative votes

Yes that is true. What you are actually saying is those writers have an ego problem and are unable to accept criticism that does not conform to their opinion of the quality of their writing.

Personally, I think those writers would react even worse if we changed to a system where voters provided a narrative of why they liked or disliked a story.

Either vote, or don't vote.

One of the problems we currently have with voting is only a small percentage of the people who read our stories vote on them; the percentage is arrived at by a comparison of download count to vote count. Changing the method of voting is not likely to cause more people to vote.

So the question I'm floating is whether it would be better not to have negative votes, but just the option for the reader to recommend/upvote each chapter.

If I had a high download count and a very low upvote count, I would consider that to be a negative vote. A system that only has an up-vote option protects the authors from knowing how many down-votes they would have had. I believe such a system is used to protect the author's fragile ego.

because we don't need our sensitive souls protecting any more

An author with a sensitive soul will always need to have it protected. As they say, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen."

Yes that is a better solution.

Part of the problem is a few authors need the adulation that goes with high scores and are unable to handle the implied negative criticism of a low score. Turning off voting will protect those authors from low scores, but it will also prevent them from getting their fix from high scores.

Thus growing a thicker skin, while it may not the best solution, will allow those authors who need it to bath in the praise of high scores while ignoring the negative criticism of low scores.

what's happened is that so many of us are sensitive snowflakes with fragile egos that the voting has become a bit secret. And as you say a low count of only-postive votes sends the same message, to everyone, but without the downside.

I'd think that a simple yes/no decision would attract more responses than having to decide which of 1-10.

How can a 10 make the rating go down? The help text says a 10 is always a 10. It could coincide with a recalculation perhaps. But then, if it could, how can you say it's a better system than Wattpad?

A Wattpad vote is simply a recommendation. It can always be seen, and you get more of them if people like your chapters. Because they don't upset the authors, they don't need to be hidden. Of course Wattpad gets so many stories submitted that a lot of them get no readers, but that's a different issue, and comments are a different issue too.

A lot of my point is that often I do not know what a vote was - whether it means somebody enjoyed it, or was disappointed. But Lazeez knows of course that being a writer, if I get a 5 I'll burst into tears and message him about it :))

How can a 10 make the rating go down?

All of the story's raw scores (less the top and bottom 5%) go into an algorithm that determines its final score. Part of that algorithm has to do with other stories being scored in the same timeframe (I call that the fudge factor). If the other stories happen to have low scores, your score gets a boost.

Now, at a later date, you get one more vote which happens to be a 10. Your story goes through the same calculation as before, but let's say the other stories being scored at the time were all highly scored stories. That part of the algorithm (fudge factor) gives you a lower score.

So even though you got a new score of 10, it's just one of many scores that are being fed into the algorithm. From what I understand, it can be lower if the other stories being scored at the time were higher rated than the stories the last time your story was calculated.

I saw it when we were testing the new scoring system. All stories went through a recalculation when the new system was implemented. Then, to test the system, I gave my story a 10 (I hadn't scored it before that). The score went down when it was recalculated.

How can a 10 make the rating go down?

https://storiesonline.net/h/8/how-are-scores-calculated-and-how-does-scoring-work-in-general

The main cause for the effect Switch mentions is the way the top and bottom 5% of votes are cut prior to to the votes being totaled and the score averaged by the calculation on the current votes. This is because the system only deducts whole votes after the percentage is counted. For example: 99 votes are cast so the top and bottom 5% is theoretically 4.9 votes, but the system will only drop the top and bottom 4 votes. When the next vote is cast that makes in 100 votes and the 5% is now 5 votes to be dropped before calculating the average. If prior to this 100 vote you have 4 votes of 1 and 4 votes of 10 with the rest of the votes being 40 votes of 7, 50 votes of 8, and 1 vote of 9 the system will drop 4 votes of 1 and 4 votes of 10 to remove the 8 votes for a total of 44 prior to making the calculation by adding up the remaining 91 votes and averaging them. With the 100th vote is is now dropping 5 votes from each end to remove a total of 61 before calculating the average on the 90 votes. As the number of votes goes higher the number of actual votes making the difference between the 4.1 percent and the 5 percent grows.

I hope I haven't confused you too much.

Also, over the twenty years SoL has been in operation the scoring system has changed a number of times. To make it possible to relate the scores from the different system used for each period with a different scoring system the scores have been normalized with a median of 6 so they can be added together with reasonable validity of the scores being relatively valid. Thus a vote of 8 from 2001, and a vote of 8 from 2010, and a vote 8 from 2018 would have a slightly different value via the normalization process, but they would always be the same when value relative to all of the other votes during their period, scores, and stories of the same period.

edit to add: The last scoring change was made some years back so all of the stories since that change are part of the current period.

The main cause for the effect Switch mentions is the way the top and bottom 5% of votes are cut prior to to the votes being totaled and the score averaged by the calculation on the current votes.

My example predates the top and bottom 5% change to the scoring system.

A Wattpad vote is simply a recommendation.

It just means they liked it. Often to encourage you to post more chapters.

My time on wattpad is spent in the Industry Insider's club and sometimes the Improve Your Writing club.

I learned a lot about the publishing industry in the former. I use the latter to help young authors, but also learn about what readers like and don't like. And since wattpad has such a global membership, I use it to get foreign language translations.

I've tried reading stories there, but they are so poorly written that I can't get through them. What enlightened me most is how dirty teenage girls' minds are. I didn't know that when I was a teenager or maybe back then it was different.

Yes okay but why "just"? People liking my story and wanting more chapters is perfect! :)

Wattpad is totally different otherwise of course. Yes teenage girls - if only we'd known!! :)). But they don't discuss the voting system. It's all positive and the amount of activity on there is ridiculous.

A 10 can never make the score go down.

It did on several of my stories when we were testing the new scoring system.

It wasn't the 10. It was the recalculation that happened at the same time.

I know it was the recalculation. I thought every time a story gets a new vote it's recalculated.

So what you're referring to is quite a rare event.

Got it. Thanks.

The scoring system ccmpares your story with others at the same time.

The same time period.

If one person tells you about something they dislike about your stories, then there are probably other readers that dislike that aspect of your writing but don't give feedback.

Or that one reader's feedback was wrong. When you use Beta readers before publishing a novel you look for that. If one reader thought something was wrong (slow, confusing, etc.) then you should check it out but don't necessarily change it. But if several people say the same thing there's probably a problem.

Or that one reader's feedback was wrong.

That is always a possibility. Of course there may also be readers with the same idea that didn't provide feedback. I take all feedback under consideration event if it doesn't seem right initially. Then I try to understand why my reader had that impression. I sometimes find that I agree with something that initially seemed wrong.

I take all feedback under consideration

I do as well. I said, "If one reader thought something was wrong (slow, confusing, etc.) then you should check it out but don't necessarily change it." So you should check it out.

because it needs too big a part of the display area

The score could be one of those fields you can hover a mouse over and what you're asking for can be displayed realtime in a little window that goes away when you move the mouse.

But authors are too sensitive and that's why that information isn't available to authors. Kids on wattpad constantly ask for advice on writing. I often say, "If you're going to publish your story, grow thick skin." It's advice for adults too.

But authors are too sensitive and that's why that information isn't available to authors.

I think you meant to say the information is only available to the author who wrote the story.

I think you meant to say the information is only available to the author who wrote the story.

No. Authors don't see their own raw scores. They see a bar chart, but not the scores. And they don't see the top and bottom 5%.

I thought some authors had promised Lazeez not to bitch about scores in return for seeing their 'raw' scores..?

I'm one of those. We don't see the raw scores. We see the bar chart with only one number (number of the tallest bar?)

I just looked at one of my stories. The top 5% is obvious. They are 10s since 10 is the second highest bar. But what are the bottom 5%? There's a smidge of 6s. So is 6 the lowest score I got or did I get 1s or 2s, etc.? A rocket scientist wouldn't know so I sure don't know.

If you are one of those, then you are seeing the raw scores, so the 5% are included, no need to guess...

Not true.

So either my belief was wrong, or you are.

I see the "VA Score" in addition to the "Score" next to my stories. That's the raw average (I don't know if the 5% is included or not). That's what authors got when we agreed not to bitch about the scoring system.

I thought the bar chart was also part of that, but if you also see it, it's for everyone. If you see the "VA Score" then either I'm wrong or you are also being given that privilege.

Although we see the raw score average (VA Score), we don't see the raw individual scores.

I don't look at scores other than when I first post a story so I'm not familiar with them. But when I look at them I look at the VA Score.

Nope, no 'VA score" visible to me.

I know that was given to me when I swore my oath. I thought the bar chart too. So you have those privileges, or Lazeez eventually gave them to everyone.

your bar chart displays all votes, without the 5% deducted.

I'm 99.9% sure the 5% is deducted before the bar chart is generated.

I'm a prolific reader. I've started to read hundreds of stories, giving them a chance. I've finished and voted on probably nearly a hundred too.

So how do I find them? I've been down the sort-by-score list. I've done category search. I've looked down the author pages for those authors I've discovered and enjoyed. I've looked at old threads in the forum, I've blogged and asked for recommendations. I've done it all, and I'm currently just hitting the "random" button.

And I keep coming across stories that I haven't read by authors I don't recognize that are excellent. Below 8, score is a poor indicator in my opinion, and I've sampled a lot of stories to base this conclusion on.

The beauty of mathematical recommendation systems is that they help you find stories with your fetish whilst also making the trolls impotent. A recommendation system that looks at what others who vote like you also liked is just making it so trolls make recommendations to each other instead of polluting the results of those with mainstream or refined tastes.

I've worked a lot with the math and know people who do it for real and it's just an obvious tried and tested solution. When you see it working badly on some crappy webshop it's not a maths failure, it's a programmer failure.

Sol has such a massive amount of votes recorded that the recommendations a normal algorithm like slope1 would make would be really useful to all users.

Has anyone had a trolling problem on this site? I definitely haven't.

It was a very significant problem until Lazeez changed the scoring system to eliminate their effect on the scores via the 5% cut method. The most common troll method was to vote 1 on a story with a tag or author they didn't like without actually reading the story. Once it became clear this 1 vote process wasn't having a noticeable effect many of them stopped their troll activities and went to other places where they could get a response from their troll activities. Since the change was many years ago any author who hadn't been trolled by then is unlikely to have been hit since, and if they were the current system would make a minor number of hits invisible to them.

Below 8, score is a poor indicator in my opinion, and I've sampled a lot of stories to base this conclusion on.

I don't have any story with a score of 8 or higher. The raw scores are all in the 8's or close to it but not the score that is displayed.

My stories aren't for everyone, but if someone only reads stories with a score of 8 or higher they will miss out on good stories. And there are plenty of stories rated over 8 that aren't good.

I prefer to sample a story rather than go by the score. I can usually tell the bad ones right away and stop reading. But that's a problem for someone who reads a lot of stories on SOL and only gets (I think) 10 a day. Too bad SOL doesn't have a sample to read for each story, like the first n%.

I agree, there are also many stories with low scores that deserve high scores.

But the opposite isn't true. I don't ever remember a story with a real low score (like 4 or below) that was any good.

recommendation systems are a solved problem and it would be beyond trivial

There are two significant recommendation systems in place already.

1. Each author has the ability to recommend stories as their favorite stories, so just check the story list pages of authors whose work you like.

2. At the end of each story there's a list of other stories based on the same tags as in the story you just read.

A third option is to go to the Story Recommendation forum page and ask for some.

https://storiesonline.net/d/s9/story-recommendations

I never worry about the scores as either a reader or writer. I only ever look at them when we have theses sorts of discussions.

Me too. I forgot all about the VA Score. However, I do look at the score for a few days after posting a new story.

On my bar chart I only see the vote count of the highest bar. As I recall from the discussion in another thread, Lazeez's offer was to display the vote count of each bar. I think that is what you are referring to as the VA score. If my understanding is correct and you have given your oath to Lazeez and aren't seeing those numbers, perhaps you should ask Lazeez.

Lazeez's offer was to display the vote count of each bar. I think that is what you are referring to as the VA score.

No and no.

I don't remember there ever being a count on top of each bar. Does anyone see that?

The VA Score is on the story stats page (Name, Size, Week, Votes, Score, Cmnt, VA Score).

I didn't finish reading it is not always a reason to give it the equivalent of a "1".

Very true, however, the reason for abandoning the story may be the very reason you give it a 1 vote. I've only ever given a story I abandoned a 1 vote on one occasion, and it's also the main reason I gave up on reading stories as they posted. The story was very good for several episodes and then the author introduced some extreme torture that was never coded for in the story. I got half way through that chapter when the very graphically detailed torture made me give on on the story, skip to the end of the chapter, give it a 1 vote, and place that author on my 'never read' list. Some months later when the story turned up on the concluded stories list I checked the codes on it and it was not coded to include the torture at all. That was 7 years ago and I just checked the story to find it now has the torture code added. If that had been on the story at the start I would never have read the story or given it the 1 vote, but it earned the 1 vote by being deceptive in the coding at the time I read it.

basing a score on how well a story is coded isn't actually scoring the story, it is punishing the author for an error, which could be an oversight.

No, it is punishing the author for not coding the story correctly in attempt to get in readers who would've avoided reading the story if he did it properly. Because the vote is on how much you like the story to be hit with something you find extremely distasteful to the point you don't like the story at all, a 1 vote is an appropriate response.

I agree in that you should not include a code that covers a single short scene unless it's something that could be a major squick, but to not code for a number of scenes running into hundreds of words on a major squick is not an accidental missing of a minor matter. When I complained to the author he said that chapter was the set up for a change in the main character's behaviour for the next several chapters, so there was no way it was accidental.

I didn't finish reading it is not always a reason to give it the equivalent of a "1"

Doesn't have to be a 1. A 1 is "You call this a story?" There probably aren't too many of those. It could be "hated it" (2), "pretty bad" (3), "not good" (4), or even a higher score. I may get bored reading a story and give up on it. That doesn't mean it's a 1. It might even be "not bad" (6). Just not "good" or higher. If it was "good" I'd have wanted to know what happens at the end and finished it.

If you turn your comments section on, take the creative negatives as criticism, not dislikes, but ways to improve your craft.

The comments section was added by Lazeez to allow the readers to talk about the stories, and that's why I turn them on for the readers to have their discussion, but I only read them if someone sends me an email pointing out a specific comment I should respond to as I see it as a service for the readers. Than can use the SoL message system to talk to me, and many do.

The two people that dislike my stories have commented on over 15 stories, but keep reading. These two offer no ways to improve my writing, they just don't like my stories. (and still, they read them)

I've had lengthy correspondence with people who dislike my characters and even dislike main themes who continue to read, comment, and write me. I suspect they give low scores, but I don't know and don't care.

To paraphrase Dale Earnhardt - doesn't mater if the fans cheer or the fans boo, it means they're engaged with you. When they're quiet, then it's time to hang it up because they don't care.