There are stories that are getting 8,9,9 or 9,9,9 when they are technically utter garbage and the plot is a huge yawner from start to finish with nothing innovative in it at all.

The average story on SoL should be getting 5,5,5. When you’d see something get 9,9,9 you should darn near wet yourself in your eagerness to read it.

Unfortunately, these days, anything that is mostly legible is scoring in the 8′s or 9′s at least, making the score only useful for weeding out the worst of the worst which scores less than that.

Overinflated scoring is bad for everyone. The writer doesn’t get the proper signals sent to him (ie, “practice more, you write like a drugged chimp”) and goes around thinking he’s Shakespeare reincarnated, and the readers have to wade hip-deep through dreck to find the few nuggets of gold buried in the pile of high scorers.

Not sure if there is any good solution for that, but it’s still a pain.

/Croft

I personally preferred the simpler voting system.

I genuinely like both sites for different reasons. As a newbie, I just wanted to point out my experience with the new system.

I really like that I can update scores as I read subsequent chapters. I sometimes misunderstand where an author is going with a story and am overenthusiastic initially. Thus, I am more likely to uppdate the score I give to a story to lower scores than higher. On the other hand, I am much more willing to score a story with only a few chapters posted.

A story can be very high in grammar (T), but be an uninspiring and dull plot(P) and have little personal appeal (A). A story like that may have a vote like 9,5,5.

I think many voters are giving the same score for each category regardless of what each category means, so they vote 5,5,5 instead.
There is nothing one can do about it except hope more voters think before clicking submit.