I just want to put my two cents here, not to be negative but only to put out my concern. Maybe something the judges will consider when ever they are judging an article, story or a post.
Quality (of the Posts)
Value (for the reader - given through the Posts)
Uniqueness (of the Posts)
Motivation (of the User)
Effort (from the User)
How do we properly measure all these if we are looking at someone who is posting an article not arts or drawings?
A non english speaking people will be at dis advantage
The quality and value might suffer for those people even if the message they are trying to convey is that exciting or interesting.
Motivation - what are we trying to measure here, the persons motive in posting the article? Whether that person only posted that article to tell a story or just to earn money?
Effort - it is not easy for a non english speaking background person to create a post. It takes hours especially if that person is trying to meet the requirement of the quality and value.
I tell you an example. I am a from a non english speaking background.
When I make an article I spend hours to it going back and forth creating drafts after drafts trying to see if grammars and spellings are correct.
Then after I post it I still get criticized that my post is very low value. Man that is devastating, especially to a person who tried so hard and pour his/her heart out creating that article.
It maybe low value due to the grammars and spelling but the story is unique, the motivation is there which is to tell a story or convey a message, the effort is definitely there because that person took hours to make that article. And the quality? The person that wrote that article will think it is high quality because he/she put so much effort in making it a good quality if a person reading that article says otherwise then that's his/her opinion only.
Remember we are not all writers, we are not all english speakers. Most of the people here are not blogger and probably come from facebook or instagram who are not used to making long articles, who did not worry about grammars and spelling or did not worry about getting slammed due to the quality of their articles.
You make some very valid points here. I was curious about the smartscore system as well, and I think perhaps like the Google Search algorithm it needs refinement from humans to help improve or modify the algorithm accordingly. Things like motivation and uniqueness could be measured by doing some analytics, but other things can be very context sensitive (quality and effort come to mind). Still, a step in the right direction I think :)
Right now, engagement is mostly measured by 1.) how much the user is engaging in discussions, commenting and replying and how much of that is unique instead of copy/paste comments like: 'nice post'.
And through motivation we rate how much the user is trying to change a cause that is higher then himself. For example: while @michaelcj 's posts are good but not great, he still delievers by helping a cause that is bigger than simply earning steem/sbd for himself.
You make some very valid points once again. This is actually something we find very difficult to rate right now. How do you draw the line between 1.) well written posts and 2.) motivated steemians?
I, @therealwolf, would have never guessed that it is so difficult to rate users and their content. Sometimes you really like the person but their content is simply not good enough.
@artbunny is reworking the score-matrix right now to make it easier and more reliable to rate.
Perhaps summarizing the issues that @webcoop has raised, I think it is important to give more weightings to objective measures that are not influenced by individual preferences or subjectivity (because it is impossible to create a 'fair' algorithm based on it). As someone who has worked in user experience design, half of the challenge with the job is to try and work out something that is intangible (what is the thing that someone 'experiences') and translate that into something tangible (i.e. a button that they want to push). More on that in my next post...