The Politics and Math of Lit Voting

You worked hard on this story - it's a cool Fetish fantasy called "Trixie's Big Butt." It's not long on plot or characterization, and proofreading isn't your bag, but you know some interesting things to do with butts, and you know how to describe them. Your fans in Literotica's Fetish category are definitely going to love it.

Why did you take the trouble to write "Trixie's Big Butt" and post it on Literotica? Your pose is that your motives are selfless: you write only for your own amusement and you share with your adoring readers out of the goodness of your heart. There are times when you manage to believe that yourself. After all, what other motive could you have? Lit doesn't pay you a dime, and neither your wife nor anyone else in your Real Life knows you write erotica. There's no money in this. There's no glory either.

Except there is. Maybe the glory doesn't go to you, the middle-aged, balding (but quite fit, really!) Hartford actuary, but you bask in the glory that accrues to the avatar you created to author your stories - BJJustAskGrrl. It was an inspired choice of name: you picture men getting boners just thinking about a girl who'd call herself that. And when a story is a hit, it's such a high! Two thousand reads before lunch! Dozens of men may jerk off into the laundry basket (remember the guy six months ago who commented, "I came three times reading this"?). Wives may show your story to their husbands and say, "I want you to do that to me." You get hard imagining it.

But things have got to break right for you. You timed your submission so your story would be on the Fetish hub over the weekend, but that's always a gamble. Sometimes it appears too early, and sometimes there's a delay. And then, how long the story stays on the hub depends on how many people are submitting on that and the following days.

And so very much depends on how those early readers vote! They're the ones who get up early in the morning and check out their favorite Lit hubs. They drive your view count up quickly, and they vote a lot. Their votes will determine how many more readers are going to wager an hour of their precious time that your story will arouse and entertain them.

If you get at least ten votes in the first hours of your story's life, and the votes average at least 4.5 out of 5, the Lit server will put a little red H next to your story's score. That H will draw the eyes of potential readers, saying to them, in effect, "Your time won't be wasted here." Your view count will go way up, and so will the number of wanking readers and couples who decide to go to bed early, inspired by your squicky imagination to perform sordid and delicious sex acts together. And since human beings are herd animals, that little H may even draw more high votes. H's tend to be sticky: once you get one, you rarely lose it, especially if the count of votes goes high enough that the occasional disgruntled reader ("that is so not my kink!") doesn't make a big difference.

You're eager to know whether your story has gone live. You get up early to check out the site. Yes! It was posted in the wee hours. You'll spend much of the morning tracking the view count and the voting on your "View Submissions" page.

But something's not right. Oh, this is very bad! RaunchyMynxInDallas posted a story today. Shit, shit, shit! RaunchyMynx is one of the most popular authors in this category. Every time that nasty cunt publishes something, everybody drops whatever they're doing to read it. The comments are enough to make you throw up. "Oh, RaunchyMynx, this one's hotter than ever!" - "A big 5, wish I could give you 10!" - "I'm just breathless, RaunchyMynx!" - "I've been walking around with a hard-on all morning!" - "Will you marry me?" Such an idiot, that last commenter: RaunchyMynx is about as likely to be a pustular frat boy as a marriageable female.

You absolutely hate it when RaunchyMynxInDallas is your competition. She sucks the air out of the whole category. You give the story a quick once-over. It's trite, a stupid fucking tale about a girl who likes to piss in public places. It's disgusting, it doesn't get you hot, but it's got a certain glibness, as usual; gullible readers are going to mistake that for real quality. They're going to flock to it, especially when that little H appears, as it will soon - probably hours before you get yours - if you get an H at all.

It's possible, though, to delay that fateful moment. You click the "1" star at the bottom of the last page and chuckle, "Eat that, you sack of shit." You've just dropped what Lit authors call the "one-bomb" - a kind of tactical vote - and you've probably delayed the appearance of RaunchyMynx's red H by at least an hour, maybe more. How so, when practically all the other readers are giving it 4s and 5s?

It doesn't take a statistician like yourself to understand how this works. It's the power of the statistical outlier. Have you heard that joke about how Bill Gates goes into a bar full of construction workers, and suddenly everybody in the room's a millionaire because the average income has shot up into the stratosphere? It's like that. If it was all billionaires in that bar, Gates's arrival would nudge the average income up only a little, but in a bar full of construction workers, he's a statistical outlier, and his effect on the average is enormous.

You imagine that diseased skank RaunchyMynx watching her vote, the same way you're watching yours. Suppose she's got nine votes and her average score is 4.67. That means she's probably gotten six 5s and three 4s - not bad. But when your one-bomb shows up on her screen, her score will drop to 4.30 - no little red H for RauchyMynx! And now it'll take her four more votes at minimum to get her red H. That's right: the next four voters have got to cast 5s before her average creeps up to 4.5 again. She'll have to get a lot more 5s than that before she gets back to 4.67. You can almost hear her head explode, all the way from Dallas. It feels so damn fine.

Of course you know you aren't doing her any permanent damage. If enough readers vote, her story will recover from your one-bomb. And the Lit gurus seem to have clever algorithms for figuring out which votes were cast for strategic reasons like yours: in a few days they may very well detect your one-bomb and delete it. But you've slowed her down during those critical first hours of her story's life. And while her score is recovering, readers who aren't already her fans are just as likely to savor the delights of Trixie's butt as they are to read about that pissing girl. You'll probably get at least some of the time that readers might have given to her.

In a couple of weeks, long after both your stories have cycled off the Fetish hub, you may notice that she's back, down there in the "Hall of Fame" section of the page. That means she's gotten at least a hundred votes and has one of the highest scoring recent stories. Back on the hub, her story will be getting lots of views, unlike yours, which will be languishing largely unread in the vast Lit archive.

"Bitch!" you'll snarl, and one-bomb her again. Let's look at the effect of the one-bomb now. Say she had an average score of 4.85 with 110 votes. Now her score will be 4.82. If that drop isn't enough to knock her out of the Hall of Fame, just one-bomb her again, and that will take her down to 4.78. She'll still have her red H, but in most categories the Hall of Fame will be out of the question. And because your one-bomb is still a statistical outlier and another 5 vote is not, it will take quite a while for the damage to be repaired. With one more 5, she's still at 4.78; with two, she's just climbed to 4.79; with a third, she still hasn't broken 4.80.

A statistician like yourself could suggest ways to mitigate the effects of statistical outliers in an online voting system like the one at Literotica. But you're not going to volunteer that information, now, are you? That would take away a lot of your power. The fact is, the best defense against the one-bomb is a high vote count. The more readers vote, the more accurate a story's score will be as a reflection of the judgment of the Lit readership.