Literotica Numbers 02

by Owlwhisper©

Introduction

This review's predecessor, Literotica Numbers, provided a summary of selected voting statistics. Literotica Numbers II is intended to further satisfy our numerical curiosity about Literotica. It will address questions that I hope are of interest to authors and readers alike:

How many Literotica authors are there? How many stories do typical authors have on Literotica? Do authors tend to write in one category, or do they spread their stories across many categories?

Does a story's posting date affect the reception it gets from voters?

Do authors' vote averages increase as they post more stories? Do authors' final stories usually get better or poorer votes than their previous ones?

How many authors are "one-Hot wonders," having only one approved story -- and it's Hot. How many authors have every one of their stories voted Hot? Which author is 100% Hot with the most stories?

How big of a voting advantage do multi-part stories enjoy? Which story categories have the greatest concentrations of multi-part stories? Does this account for the voting differences between categories?

How has the number of stories posted by Literotica grown over the years?

I also include lists of the best authors by voting, number of contests won, number of Editor's Choices awarded, and number of stories posted.

This review has some math content, but I've tried to minimize it so as not to bog down your reading. If you would like a further explanation of what I have done, please contact me.

How the Numbers Were Gathered

Data were collected on 14 March 2009 from Literotica's category index pages. A computer program similar to that described in Literotica Numbers was used for this task.

This review examines only English-language stories. Poems have been omitted because they tend to receive far fewer votes and are much more likely to have voting turned off.

I have tried to check all the numbers in this review, but I can't guarantee there are no errors. My data gathering and analysis program is not perfect. Likewise, Literotica's own systems may permit minor errors to appear in the listings. If you notice discrepancies between what is shown here and by Literotica, remember that Literotica will have been updated repeatedly between 14 March 2009 and the time you read this.

Disclaimer: This review 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.

Literotica Authors, Their Stories, and the Categories They Use

There were 36,265 authors with stories posted as of 14 March 2009. This is probably a slight overestimate because some authors have posted under more than one name. Authors who have withdrawn from Literotica no longer appear in the index pages and are not included.

How many stories does a typical Literotica author have? Not very many, as shown by the following table:

This includes stories without regard to whether they are open to voting. The average number of stories by an author is 4.8 and the median is around 1.4. The difference between these two numbers arises because the distribution is highly skewed.

Almost 43% of authors have only one story posted. Some reasons for this may be that they had only one story to tell, they were put off by the voter response to their story, and they are new authors and will eventually produce another story.

The last four rows in the table extend it to the extremes of author productivity. If you're an author and you want to have more stories than 99% of all other authors, you will need to have 46 stories posted. If you want to have more stories than 99.9% of authors, post 153; 603 stories are required to be in the top 0.01%.

The current record holder has a whopping 802 stories, which amounts to almost half a percent -- one in every two hundred -- of all the stories posted on Literotica.

The next chart is for you if you're a math nerd and enjoy a puzzle. If you're not, skip a little ahead to where it says "RESUME HERE."

The above is a log-log chart of the numbers that would be found in an unabridged version of the story count table. What's fascinating to me (an admitted math nerd) is that the relationship between authors and how many stories they produce is nearly a straight line. I suspect this says something fundamental about how we write, but I have no idea what.

RESUME HERE

An author with many stories usually has them posted in more than one Literotica category. The following chart describes how the number of categories in which an author posts relates to the number of stories they have posted:

For example, authors who have posted eight stories have posted them to an average of three categories.

The chart shows that the number of categories generally increases with the number of stories posted. The green line is the mathematical fit to the values. It indicates that there's a very simple rule: The number of categories to which an author has posted is approximately equal to the square root of the number of stories the author has posted.

This might tell us something about the number of Literotica's story categories. Suppose that Literotica had many more categories than it does now, in effect slicing "genre-space" into very narrow pieces. This would encourage, if not force, authors to spread their stories across more categories, and the resulting mathematical fit would be more like a straight line angling steeply up and to the right. On the other hand, if Literotica's categories were fewer in number, an author would probably end up publishing in only one or two categories; the fit would more resemble a flat line.

That the green curve is about halfway between these two possibilities suggests to me that the number of available categories is well matched to the purpose of distinguishing stories by genre. Literotica's categories seem to provide variety without being overly numerous or restrictive.

Does a Story's Vote Depend on When It Was Posted?

When I started submitting stories to Literotica I was concerned that they would be posted at inopportune times -- for example, on days when voters were in the mood to cast low votes. Should I have been worried? To answer that question, we need to look at voting patterns on a variety of time scales. Let's start with the longest time scale, the lifetime of Literotica. Here is how the monthly voting has varied:

This includes the average votes for all stories in all categories (except poetry).

The chart shows that from its birth through 2005 Literotica's vote average underwent a sort of "vote inflation." During that time the average vote rose from around 4.0 to nearly 4.45. Then a reversal began and vote averages dropped quickly. The chart suggests that a story posted in 2005-2006 was likely to do significantly better than a story posted during any other years.

There are multiple ways to explain why such a large swing in voting took place. We might propose that it was caused by changes in the quality of writing. Or we might think that voters were increasingly generous until 2006, at which time they started becoming harsher judges. Yet another explanation would be that Literotica itself was somehow influencing the voting. Which of these ideas is the most plausible?

It seems unlikely to me that many Literotica voters suddenly changed their voting habits in 2006 and began casting lower votes. Likewise, I don't think that there was an influx and then exodus of high-quality writing. (Having arrived here in early 2006, I find this explanation particularly problematic; it would make me part of the incoming wave of low-quality writers.)

My speculation is that vote averages began declining when Literotica made its sweeps more aggressive at eliminating high votes. I'm guessing that the practice of padding a story's vote grew during 2000-2005 as more authors (and their fans) learned that they could work the voting system to their advantage. Once the sweeps began filtering out more of these pad votes the inflation ended; over time, the growing sophistication of the sweeps has brought about a continued decrease in vote averages.

I don't think that the voting changes indicated in the above chart will be explained until Literotica divulges how the sweeps operate. For obvious reasons I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

Let's consider the monthly time scale next. Does it matter in which month a story is posted?

To test this, we could just average all the votes by month and compare. The trouble with this simple averaging is that it would leave in the big year-to-year voting trends we see in the above chart. This would potentially "contaminate" the monthly data and make comparing one month with another difficult. The better way is to remove the yearly variations in the data, leaving what are called deviations. The result is this chart:

I have omitted the data for 2000 and 2001 because they have some odd monthly behaviors.

A voting deviation of zero means that the month is neither better nor worse than what might be expected if all months were equal. As you can see, the monthly values don't stray far from zero. The most "deviant" month is April, where vote averages are a miniscule 0.008 above normal. A reasonable conclusion is that posting month doesn't matter.

What about an even shorter time scale, the day of the week? Most stories get the majority of their views and votes during the week that they are on the "New" pages. The first few days on the "New" list are particularly important, leading one to guess that it might make a difference if a story is posted on, for example, a Monday instead of a Friday. Is this really the case? Here is a chart of the voting average by day of week that a story is posted:

This uses votes from 2002-2008.

The difference between the best and worst posting days is a tiny 0.009, strongly suggesting that posting day of week produces no significant effect.

There's one more period that may worry some authors: The end-of-the-year holidays. To investigate this I looked at the daily vote averages for the period 16 December through 15 January, averaged over 2002-2008. I'll spare you the resulting chart and simply say that there were no significant differences in vote averages over that period.

It appears that an author need not be concerned about when a story is posted. Day of the week doesn't matter, month of year seems unimportant, and even the year-end holidays appear to have little or no effect. On scales of a year or shorter, time does not appear to affect Literotica voting.

One guideline does emerge on the longest time scale. The current downward trend in voting -- if it does reflect a real change in how readers vote -- should prompt authors to submit stories sooner rather than later.

Do Vote Averages Improve as an Author Writes More Stories?

We would like to think that a person's writing improves as he or she writes more stories. Is this true for Literotica authors? Here's a chart showing the average vote for stories in terms of their order of posting:

This chart uses stories from all years of Literotica's existence. The red line indicates the average votes for authors' first stories (1 on the horizontal axis), second stories, and so on up to their 25th stories.

It's probably no surprise that first stories have the lowest average vote. The average first story has a vote of only 4.17, but things improve quickly. By the time an author has reached their fifth story, the average is 4.32. The vote averages continue to improve out to at least the fiftieth story.

We're tempted at this point to conclude that authors do get better votes as they post more stories, but there's a potential hitch. Maybe the red line actually reflects the possibility that authors who publish more stories are better vote-getters. That might cause a line something like what we see above.

The way to compensate for this effect is to separate the authors by the number of stories they have posted:

To see how this chart works, find the thick gray line. This line gives the vote averages for the stories by all authors who have written exactly four stories. We can see that for those authors the first story is their poorest in terms of voting. Their second is an improvement, and the third story gets a higher vote than the second. The fourth story shows a decline in voting.

There are a number of interesting things shown by this chart:

First stories get about the same voter response regardless of the number of stories an author will eventually write. This is shown by the small average vote range of 4.19 to 4.22. There is one exception to this, however, and that's the next observation.

Authors with only one story do very poorly in the voting. Their vote is indicated by the red dot at the chart's lower left corner. A harsh conclusion might be that the writing by one-story authors is significantly worse than the writing by other authors. Or it may suggest that an unusually low voter response to a first story discourages an author from posting a second story.

Authors' final stories display a decline in voter approval. The rightmost point on each of the chart's lines gives the vote average for authors' final stories. As you can see, for seven of the nine cases, the final story's vote is lower than the previous story's. It appears that, on average, authors do not leave Literotica in a blaze of glory; instead, they depart on a down note.

Authors' votes reach their peak when they have posted about one half to two thirds of all the stories they will eventually post. This is most clearly illustrated by the line for authors who have published ten stories. Their vote averages increase through their first four stories, then the line bounces up and down through story seven, and afterward declines. Examine the rest of the lines to judge for yourself how well this holds true for them. What does this mean? Do authors begin to run out of creative energy before they conclude their tenure at Literotica? Do they lose interest in writing erotica? Do they become more experimental over time and lose some voter approval? It's probably a combination of these reasons, and more.

I must mention a caveat to all the above speculations. It's possible that what the lines actually reflect is Literotica's up-and-down voting average over its lifespan. Suppose an author is perfectly average, and posts a story every July. We might expect that their vote average would rise through 2005 and decline thereafter, sort of like what we see in the above chart.

To check the possibility that the changes in Literotica are important, I redid the analysis with the long-term voting behavior removed. The results were virtually unchanged. I don't think the long-term changes in Literotica affect the above observations.

One-Hot Wonders and Beyond

Have you ever wondered how many authors are "one-Hot wonders," having but one posted story -- and the story has been voted Hot? Examine this table:

There are 2,266 one-Hot wonders. Is this an unexpectedly large number? We can compare it to what we might get if the stories had the same chance of being Hot as the Literotica-wide average of 34.8%. Taking 34.8% of how many one-story authors are open to voting (15,287) gives roughly 5,300 Hot stories that might be expected by chance alone. The observed number of 2,266 is less than half of this; it's not a large number at all. The rarity of one-story Hotness reflects what we saw earlier: First stories usually have low vote averages.

What about when the number of stories is two? In this case we take 34.8% of 34.8% of 6,147, the number of authors with two stories. (We must multiply by 34.8% for each additional story.) The table tells us that in this case the number of Hot stories (590) and those expected by chance (740) aren't too far apart.

We've seen that vote averages rise with the number of stories posted by an author. By the time they've posted three stories, the table shows they're Hotter than we should expect from chance. So if you've posted one story and it didn't become Hot, don't give up. Work on your writing and try again -- at least twice.

At the high end of the writing spectrum are the amazing authors who have many stories posted, all of which are Hot. Here are the names and story counts of the top five all-Hot authors: Evil Alpaca (87), bluedragonauthor (72), JohnEvans (54), sacrificedangel (47), and steveswoman (45).

Is There a Multi-Part Story Advantage?

Literotica Numbers showed that there are significant differences in vote average between story categories. It was suggested that the differences were in part caused by multi-part stories that tend to get better votes.

To test this idea, the data gathering program looked for story titles that included the serial indicators "Pt." or "Ch." Some multi-part stories were missed because there are initial chapters that don't include the indicators, and some stories may use other serial indicators. However, it's felt the program correctly discerned the vast majority of multi-part stories.

The following chart lists the categories in order of the percentage of their stories that are multi-part:

As expected, Novels and Novellas and Chain Stories are dominated by multi-part stories. Sci-Fi & Fantasy and Mind Control are both a little over half multi-part stories. The reader is left to speculate why some categories like Toys & Masturbation and Anal have relatively few serialized stories.

The next chart shows the difference between the average votes for multi-part and single stories:

Positive values mean that the multi-part stories have a larger average vote than single-part stories. As you can see, multi-part stories enjoy a significantly higher vote average in most categories, the difference ranging roughly from 0.1 to 0.3. The exceptions are in categories with few multi-part stories (How To and Reviews & Essays) and where multi-part stories are the norm (Novels and Novellas and, to a lesser extent, Chain Stories).

Does this mean that the different percentages of multi-part stories account for the differences in vote average between categories? The data suggest only to a small extent. My calculations show that eliminating the effect of multi-part stories reduces category differences by only a small amount. Those differences must come mainly from other causes.