Literotica Numbers

by Owlwhisper©

Introduction

If you've published stories or poems on Literotica, you've probably had your works commented and voted upon. Comments, while often more meaningful than votes, are generally difficult to obtain. The result is that most authors rely on a work's vote average to judge its acceptance.

It's difficult to use vote averages in this way, however. Aside from the Hot threshold of 4.5, there are no guides to the interpretation of a work's vote average.

Other factors make comparisons even more difficult. It has long been recognized that some story categories have higher vote averages than others. Some people have suggested that voter approval has changed over the years. And subtle changes in the voting procedure are suspected to have changed voting patterns.

The purpose of this article is to give you a better basis for comparing your works to the vast body of stories and poems in the Literotica collection. It will do this by laying out some simple statistics based on a survey of the over 200,000 works now on Literotica. While not strictly a "How To" guide, I hope you'll find it useful.

How the Numbers Were Gathered

Literotica divides works by category. Each category has a collection of index pages, and each index page lists up to 75 of the works in that category. Listed for each work are its title, description, author, date of publication, vote average, and icons that indicate if the work is new, Hot, an Editor's Choice, or a contest winner.

A computer program was written that polled the index pages of each category and parsed them for publication date, vote average, and icons. These data were collected, sorted, and analyzed. The program was run on 5 February 2009, so the results include only stories that were present on Literotica on that date. Only English-language works were analyzed.

This simple study was undertaken without the knowledge or approval of Literotica, and the results should not be considered "official." Likewise, the opinions expressed here are my own, not those of Literotica. No personal data were collected.

Counts

The most basic statistic is count. The following table lists the numbers of works approved, those that have been voted upon, and those for which vote averages are not available:



The column marked "Number of Works" has the same numbers that you would have seen on Literotica's main Story Index page on 5 February 2009.

Two points stand out: The great range in the category counts, and the large numbers of poems not open for voting. Approximately one in six poems do not allow readers to vote on them, compared to roughly one in fifty non-poems that are closed to voting. Because poems generally get far fewer votes than stories, it's possible many authors disable voting in order to avoid having their poems trashed by a single troll vote.

The eight categories with the smallest counts all incorporate media other than text or are not what might be considered "conventional" story formats.

The number of works by year is listed in the next table:



After its start-up growth in the early part of the decade, the number of works approved each year has become rather steady. A decline in approved works that occurred in 2006 and 2007 was followed by an increase in 2008. Indeed, the most approved works were added in 2008.

There were only eleven works listed for 1999 (not shown). Because that's a very small number compared to the number of approved works in later years, I have excluded 1999 numbers from this and subsequent by-year tables.

Voting Statistics

The next table provides the basic voting statistics, with the categories sorted according to their average votes:



The median is the vote for which half the works are higher and half are lower. It's a useful statistic because votes are highly skewed toward the high end of their distribution. Instead of being normal distributions or "bell curves" as they are sometimes called, votes tend to be concentrated between 4.0 and 5.0. There are relatively few works with votes below 4.0, but because those are spread from 1.0 to 4.0 they have a large effect on the category average vote.

The result of this is that there are fewer stories below the average than above it. An "average" story is actually worse off (in terms of voter approval) than over half the stories in its category. When measuring a work's voter rating against the ratings of others, it is better to use the median.

Have voter ratings changed over the years? Here are the average and median by year, averaged over all categories:



As you can see, both the mean and median voter ratings increased from 2000 through 2005, then dropped slightly in 2006, and finally assumed a large downward trend in 2007 and 2008. The 2008 numbers are well below their 2005 highs.

Hot Stories

The next table lists the categories in order of the percent of their works that are voted Hot:



To be voted hot, a story must have at least ten votes and the average of those votes must be 4.5 or greater.

There are many stories rated higher than 4.5 that are not Hot because they have fewer than ten votes. This is most prevalent in Non-Erotic Poetry; it has over nine thousand works that are rated 4.5 or above and are not Hot. Erotic Poetry also manifests this "hidden-Hotness."

Yearly values of the percent of works voted Hot, again averaged over all categories, are listed in the next table:



The percent of works voted Hot grew until 2005 (with a minor dip in 2001), then began a decline that continues through 2008. The number of Hot works in 2008 was less than two thirds of what it was in 2005. As might be expected, this decline qualitatively matches the declines in average and median votes.

The way in which votes were cast was changed in January 2008. Both the mechanics of voting and the wording that explained what each numeric vote meant were altered. At the time there was speculation that the change, and in particular the new wording, would drive down vote averages. Some comments have been made suggesting that the drop has been observed.

The data are ambiguous about this. Hot stories were already in decline (2.7% in 2006, 3.2% in 2007), but the fall was much larger in 2008 (10.7%). On the other hand, the mean and median vote averages fell more in 2007 (0.10 and 0.09, respectively) than in 2008 (0.06 and 0.04). One interpretation could be that the decline was already occurring before the voting changes. The perception that the voting changes caused the decline may have been the result of the increased attention paid to the voting as a result of the changes.

Editor's Choice (EC)

Here is a table listing the categories in the order of their percent of works that are designated ECs:



The EC is a relatively rare award; only one work in 200 earns it, compared to roughly one in three that is Hot.

Why are there considerable differences between the categories? Perhaps editors favor certain categories. Perhaps some categories have numbers of editors that are out of proportion to the number of submissions. Perhaps some categories lend themselves to the qualities of writing favored by editors. Or perhaps the best writers gravitate to certain categories. The numbers give no answer.

A question that can be better addressed is: Do the criteria that editors use to award the EC match the criteria used by Literotica readers to determine their votes? If editors and readers use the same criteria, we should expect almost all ECs to also be voted Hot. This turns out not to be the case, as shown in the table's third column. Summing across all the categories, only 46% of ECs were also Hot.

The Literotica FAQ suggests that ECs are awarded only on the basis of personal likes. Given the fact that less than half of all ECs are also Hot, it's evident that editors' personal likes differ somewhat from those of readers. Therefore if you're aiming to capture one of these awards for yourself, you should read many past winners to discern what qualities the editors favor.

It's also possible that there's an entirely different explanation for the EC/Hot disconnect. Perhaps the EC icon acts on trolls much like a red cape infuriates bulls. If this is true and ECs suffer more from trolls, their chances of being voted Hot are reduced.

Contests

The next table shows the categories sorted by percent of works that won a contest:



I have included the actual number of winners for each category so that you can see which categories win the most contests.

The above table is based upon the appearance of the "W" icon in the category indexes. Literotica often identifies runners-up with the "W" icon, so the above table includes more works than just first-place winners. That aside, an examination of the by-category Winners table reveals some potentially useful information.

Consider the Fetish category. Over the lifetime of Literotica, Fetish has had nine contest winners. Eight of these were for annual Fetish category winners, leaving only one story that won a contest outside of its category. That is one general winner out of 5,027 Fetish entries for which votes were cast; the odds of a Fetish story winning outside its category are therefore about one in 5,000.

Compare this to a similar look at the Romance category. Removing the nine annual category award winners leaves 68 winners of general contests. There were 7,720 voted stories in Romance, so the odds of a Romance story winning outside its category are about one in 114. These odds are over forty times better than the Fetish category odds.

All other things being equal (which they seldom are), a contest hopeful choosing between Romance and Fetish should opt for the former. Generally speaking, a submission's chances are better in those categories having larger entries in the above table's "Number of Contest Winners" column.

(I haven't considered the odds of a Fetish or Romance story winning their own categories. They're quite similar, roughly one in 625 for Fetish and one in 860 for Romance. Because these odds are about the same, they don't help a writer decide which category to enter.)

Highs and Lows

A large number of stories have been voted perfect 5.0s. Here are the top five categories in that regard:



It is impossible to tell from the story listings how many votes these got, but the suspicion is: Not many. It's quite possible that these represent cases where the author voted 5 and no one else voted.

Just as there are "perfect" works, there are cosmically damaged ones. These are pieces that earn the lowest possible rating of 1.0. Here are the top five categories for that dreadful dishonor:



Again poetry leads the way with a relatively large number of bombed submissions. There are also 87 stories in the Literotica non-poetry listings that have scored the voting equivalent of absolute zero.

If you would like a challenge, try to find as many of these doomed works as you can. Judge for yourself if they are really as bad as their 1.0 rating would indicate. If they're not all that bad, do the authors a favor and cast decent votes for them. You might just be extending lifelines of hope to those languishing in Writer Depression Hell. Lifting a story from abysmal to simply bad isn't exactly a grand gesture, but it's something.

Conclusion

I've written this to satisfy our curiosity about how our works compare to the works of others. Don't think for a moment that I am encouraging the idea that a work's worth is set by the voting average it attains. Quite the contrary. Please use the voting numbers reported here wisely, if at all. Have fun with them -- but don't take them too seriously. As one Literotica author suggested in a forum posting, it's possible the best stories are actually the ones with voting averages between 4 and 4.5. Ponder that opinion the next time one of your works settles into that range.

Remember that the true measure of your writing is not a number between one and five. The true measure of your writing is its power to transform your own life and the lives of others.

Those of you who know better about the workings of Literotica are invited to comment. I'll try to correct errors that are identified.

Thank you for reading this.

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