You know in high diving, how they discount the highest two and lowest two scores?
Something like that (for non registered users grading stories) might help regulate the scores.
Like I dunno what shit people are smoking but the occasionally “1” among otherwise 4’s and 5s really kill the effort you might put into making a story good, and when it’s only one or two it’s clearly some nut job trying to troll.
This is already implemented since about a week 
That’s why there’s now a “weighted” rating (visible to the author) which is used to calculate which icons to show. The percentile (a percentile of “5 %” means, that your story is in the top 5% for that rating) is directly dependent on that weighted rating.
20%: simple icon
5%: silver icon
1.25%: gold icon
See also the discussion here which lead to this implementation:
I’‘m so frustrated by the incidental negative comments I read on honestly good stories and and my own personal experience with ratings of 1 and 2 stars. Yes, there are (15) 4.5’ s and only one negative but as a novice and old, it’s terribly dissuasive. I shouldnt have come out of retirement from my writings. It’s not worth the negative feelings I get from seeing these scores.
Martin, Please disable my account. I’ll keep on reading but not contributing. You can keep my stories on there if you’d like.
Cheers
Stroppy Author
I’m sorry to see you go, I’ve always considered you as one of our signature writers.
For what it’s worth, there’s still the feature on my list to allow an author to lock the tags. I think I’ll also add another option to disable rating for a story, if the author prefers that. And to disable comments, too. But I can’t promise when these will get implemented.
I understand your frustration as I felt it when I returned to writing a few stories after 17 years. I really hated to get a 1 from some anonymous users when I knew my story was not perfect but did not deserve a 1. I got a lot of votes that drowned the 1s, but I got them too. Martin added a new way of averaging that makes them less impactful. From what I could guess, they either come from trolls or from people who just dislike the fetish you write about and decide that because it includes something they hate, it’s badly written or it’s not hot. Disabling the ratings would help.
Don’t stop writing because of one or two anonymous misguided people, man! You write great stories, and I’ve enjoyed them a lot. Please reoonsider, @Stroppy_Author.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not jumping off a wall or anything. I’m in my thord bout of cancer. This last one was a tumour on the brain. gone now but I’m left with an unstable mood. I know it’s chemical but the experience is real non the less.
Single comments are devastating to me. Shouldn’t be. Especially after 38 years of being a Fire Medic. I should be stronger. But I’m not.
Rather than being the delicate hurt blossom, and maybe if I can’t be here for myself, I can be here for others.