@richardshagrinScores mean very little on here. it's an antiquated, easily abused system.
They are statistically fewer than 1% of voters on most stories, representing a small group of people who typically have strong opinions, one way or the other.
The best authors to me aren't always the ones who told my favorite stories.
The best authors are the ones like Ernest Bywater that touched and influenced people, even if they didn't write the same things/genre.
The ones like MaryS and Vulgus who inspired me to write, even if they don't know my name or ever read any of my stories.
The ones who keep trying to write, even with all the trolls who downvote their story because they can't stand the one kink the author included in the story codes.
The ones who deal with the trolls and copycats stealing their ideas keep on trucking.
And yes, the ones who told stories that took me out of my real-world shit show, and put me in their world for just a short time. The ones who painted a word picture and let me see it and share it with them.
Those are the best authors, too numerous to mention.
In 2026, I want to be more like all of those perverted motherfuckers.
Fuck the broken voting system. In the world of AI agents that can create unlimited temp accounts to vote, I am shocked no one has figured out how to bring it to its knees with AI agents created to create free accounts and vote the same score over and over. It's always been broken, though.
It never accurately reflects quality. You don't need college level statistics to know that a small population of subjective voters with no established criteria isn't enough to base the decision on.
All you have to do is find enough stories with great quality in the 5.0+ rating to know voting is not the best indicator of quality. The majority of the femdom stories on the site are likely ranked low.
Is that because the authors suck and have no quality? Or more to do with them being the favorite targets of trolls who are too insecure about their masculinity to just ignore stories about things they don't like.
High scoring stories may very well have some quality, but it doesn't mean the low-ranking ones were shitty. Statistically, it doesn't reflect quality.
When a story has been here for a long time with tens of thousands of views, it has a large base to draw from, but taking 1000 viewers of a story is not enough of a population to average against, either. If you took that established story with 9.9 and picked 1,000 of the hundreds of thousands of readers, you'd probably skew the results.
For stories with few voters, the entire sample set is too small. The voter pool is too small.
"0.00000057% of people in America believe this story sucks, so it has low quality. The author is shit and should be discouraged from writing by their low scores.
"Wait, did you ask everyone else in the world? Or even a statistically significant population of people in the world?"
"No, just the 1,000 that clicked on it, and only two people decided to answer. They downvoted it because it was about femdom. Also, it was the same guy with his alt-account that he uses to downvote every story about femdom."
Voting does more to discourage authors than it ever will to help them. Constructive feedback is a far better gift/tool.
I'd have better luck judging books by their covers.