And this is encouraged by anonymity. I know someone who openly says killing most women and beating the rest into submission is the path to a better future (among other things). However, I've also tricked him into admitting he only declares this behind the anonymity of the internet, never in the real world. And the moment the administrators changed his username to his actual name, he stopped posting with that username. Anonymity is the enemy of courtesy, not the ally.
I think you're skewing a couple of issues here. There's no question that people who use their actual name on the internet tend to be more courteous. However, we're not talking about changing everyone's usernames to their real name. If that was the case, I probably wouldn't even be writing here for fear that a future employer might do some research on my name and find out what I write.
We're talking about putting a username onto criticism. Which on the internet, always has the risk of backlash.
And now they're the ones who can go to the administrators to resolve the situation. Plus, again, the lack of anonymity would discourage users from perpetrating this behavior. Unless of course this is also their first day on the internet and have not yet seen the hellstorm that befalls people who go to war with online critics.
The issue's and situations now are nowhere near as bad as they could be. Imagine a situation where two users went back and forth for months before an admin having to interfere. Then both users says "No, I didn't dislike his story and leave those comments, because he did the same to me. I really believe his story is bad." On top of that, what could have just been a couple of dislikes passing in the night turned into a whole drama. It's unlikely that those two writers will ever work on anything together.
It could be even worse if two popular writers on the site butted heads, because other people may start taking sides and doing things in "support" of their favorite writer and/or against "the other side".
These are all situations have have happened many times in various places all over. The word 'opinion' is a very dangerous weapon on the internet. I have an opinion on someone's story and all of a sudden they have an opinion on mine, or someone else that enjoys that story also has an opinion on me and everybody hides behind their "opinions". Even if it's fairly easy for the admin to work out what happened, users may become so sickened by what happened that they leave the site.
I certainly have left sites where a handful of members of the community become so caustic around opinions. Once I played a game called
Freelancer. However, when I got the game it was already fairly old (5-ish years). I joined an fairly active online community. It probably wasn't any larger than chyoa. They had a site, forums, etc.
The forums for the longest time were restricted to talking about the game only...Until one day they opened a special section where you can talk about general discussion topics. I ended up getting into a rather heated political argument with another member of the community. All of a sudden, I ended up getting targeted in-game by people I have never even had contact with before and It was bad. I couldn't log on without being targeted by someone and it actually prevented me from enjoying the game. So I talked to the server admin who I was actually pretty good friends with. Hell, I think I still have him as a contact on various messaging services. He said that there was nothing that he could really do. They weren't breaking any rules or posting anything bannable in-chat. They were all within the constraints of the rules and he recommended that I play under a different name for awhile. So I decided to play under a different name until things calmed down, but they never did and I left.
I would rather go back to the old like/dislike with no feedback needed system than risk a potential war of opinions between people who all believe they're in the right.
Anonymity or not, Friedman's dealing with the fallout. And ideally, he's nipping it in the bud since, generally, the site is user moderated via the report feature. Losing the anonymity isn't for administrative benefit, it's for user benefit. Let's take our two most notorious troll efforts as example: they made the mistake of posting venomous comments without anonymity (as either comments, threads, or forum posts), and they lost privileges in less than a week because the entire community was calling them on it. Anonymity would have made that impossible had they been better writer; and even if literary fingerprints were the only identifiers, some users simply don't have the time to dust for them. Community moderation is a site's best friend, especially as it grows. Anonymity hinders this. Hiding it where only select users can see it hinders this.
The difference is that was widespread, blatantly venomous comments. A criticism war could occur between two people and nobody else on the site would be any the wiser unless they happened to read all the posts involved which may be an issue if criticism appears on the specific chapter and not the story itself.
For example. Say i disliked one of your chapters because of grammar. Then you take a look at my story and dislike one of the chapters because I didn't use proper capitalization. Then I criticize one of your chapters for punctuation and this continues on ad-infinitum until we either run out of chapters to critique, or things become caustic and the admins need to beat us with a rolled up newspaper. Well, then what? In this example, I truly believed that chapter deserved a dislike because of the grammar and when you looked at my story you truly believed that it deserved a dislike because I didn't capitalize a single word.However, I viewed that as a rebuttal dislike and decided to return the favor. Now, I don't think either of us would do that, but that's just an example of how things could get out of control.
There's another issue...which admittedly is one with any written critique is this: What deserves a dislike?
I, for one, believe that dislikes should only be quality based. You could write about scat, or watersports, or something else that I don't personally enjoy and I won't dislike it. I may not
like it either, but that's another story.
However, there are people who dislike chapters based on their content. To avoid the obvious example that was posted in this very thread(Hi Nemo!). I want to keep my examples strictly hypothetical. Say someone read a story that involved Incest, or Interracial, or Mind Control and disliked it based on that alone. The writer of those chapters may be more critical of that someones' chapters in the future, because they didn't even give it a chance. They saw that it involved something they didn't like and disliked it, left a comment that they don't like those things, and moved on.
Again, this is strictly hypothetical. I think it's fine if someone doesn't like a certain thing. There is definitely things that I have no interest in being a part of. I just disagree that it warrants a dislike that's not based on the quality of the writing at all.
That's because you have a well-received story. Using the figures you threw out in your previous post (and assuming 3,010 was only likes, not total votes), I was able to calculate you also had a total of 3,202 votes, 192 dislikes. and a more accurate approximate rating was 94.003%. I subsequently ran the following calculations for the next vote:
At 3,203 votes via an additional dislike, the average became approximately 93.974% giving the vote a weight of approximately 0.029%
At 3,203 votes via an additional like, the average became approximately 94.005% giving the vote a weight of approximately 0.002%
While this seems to prove your point, let's suppose your story had the same number of votes, but the likes and dislikes were swapped. The approximate rating becomes 5.996% and subsequent hypothetical situations look like this:
At 3,203 votes via an additional like, the average became approximately 6.025% giving the vote a weight of approximately 0.029%
At 3,203 votes via an additional dislike, the average became approximately 5.994% giving the vote a weight of approximately 0.002%
You'll notice, by swapping the likes and dislikes, the weight of the subsequent vote swaps as well. A heavy dislike proves your story is considered good, not that the system is skewed.
I think you misunderstand. The problem isn't how the rating percentage is calculated, or how likes and dislikes factor into that percentage. The problem is how the site determines the most highly rated stories on the site.
Go into the search function and sort it by rating. You'll see the top 10 stories(obviously). this is how the site determines the top stories on the site. By rating. Now, I don't feel like scrolling through 70 pages of ratings looking for my story again. However if you go back far enough, you're going to start noticing the oddities.
Here's an example that I found from a quick look. 99 and 100. Page 10 at the bottom. Restless Sleep and Lisa(
screenshot link in case it changes). Lisa has 173 more likes than Restless Sleep. so why is it ranked 100 while Restless sleep is ranked 99? A disparity of only 3 dislikes. Restless sleep has 3 dislikes and Lisa has 6. Those three dislikes has nearly as much weight as 58(57.6) of the likes on Lisa.
want another example? At the Cabin is one of...if not the most highly rated stories on the site with 8,078 likes. So why is it sitting at 43? Well, above it is another good story X-change at 42. However, it only has 1,297 likes(
another screenshot link). The difference? At the cabin has 188 dislikes. X-change has 70. So a 6,790 like difference between the two and a 118 dislike difference and the dislikes on At the cabin has again...nearly as much weight as 58(57.7) of the likes.
The point that I'm trying to make is that it takes far more likes to overcome a singular dislike than it takes dislikes to overwhelm a singular like. A single person going through and disliking all of your chapters can sink your chances of ever being recognized as one of the top stories on the site for a
very long time. Any story with a huge number of likes....It's obvious that the vast majority of people who have read At the Cabin enjoy it. So why is it being held down by just a comparatively handful of dislikes?
