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RE: Utopian Rules Update #7 - Biggest Quality Enforcement Ever
This is impossible if utopian wants to continue growing. We can't hold the hands of our users anymore. Not understanding the rules is not an excuse just like not understanding law is not an excuse. The users are welcome to ask questions before they contribute.
If a contribution is rejected can the contributor just post it again with the corrections? If so won't this just lead to the same thing being submitted multiple times?
I don't really see how that solves anything except to have more clutter on the steemit.com blogs of utopian users...
Hey @yabapmatt, we cannot contribute to Steem Bot Tracker Project anymore.
Please check my last contribution out. The moderator thinks that repository does not follow the utopian rules (README.md, and license)
Yes I've just been notified of these new rules, sorry about that! I've just added a readme and license to the project so hopefully it's good to go now. I really like your suggestion btw!
Thank you for your quick response. I am glad you like it.
No, they can't. You get to submit your contribution once, and if there's any major mistakes, the post will be rejected forever.
This would be less of a problem if new submissions went into a moderation queue and weren't immediately posted to the blockchain, largely obviating any advantage that might be accrued through moderation.
After all, what we really have here is not a question about publishing well reviewed material, it's about whether or not Utopian will pay you for it.
And while I accept that is a different kettle of fish, it's not how Utopian is generally portrayed.
If it were up to me, I would shift the architecture to one where articles are submitted and not immediately posted until they're reviewed, and if they're rejected one could resubmit some number of times for another pass before Utopian signs off on posting it, and thus being at least somewhat responsible for its quality. One assumes that would also come with rules which govern how long Utopian can hold onto it before a writer could just publish it themselves without that invalidating the possibility of Utopian voting it up.
But that makes assumptions about intent which are not supported by observable actions.
What we do know is that Utopian is swamped with kind of crappy submissions which are already tagged with Utopian and the moderators are pretty well beat up trying to filter out the crap, just so they can decide who to throw money at. In the meantime, quite a lot of that crappy content is still being seen by everyone else on the blockchain and raising questions about quality control – which, to be fair, are completely outside the control of Utopian.io.
The architecture as a whole is becoming a problem for the good aims of the project, at least as it's been communicated to me. As a result, they are narrowing their focus, seriously constraining what they intend mods to be responsible for, and abdicating a lot of the space in "open source projects" that previously was implicitly something that they wanted to support.
It's sad to see it happen, and it's doubly sad to see it happen this way, but at some point they simply ended up being responsible for too much money that other people want to get at for attempts at exploitation not to balloon to most of the things they deal with.
There's a bit of baby with the bathwater going on here, but I suppose that's not my problem.
wow @lextenebris !
If it were up to me, I would shift the architecture to one where articles are submitted and not immediately posted until they're reviewed (...)^^^ That is totally doable and a cool approach! We could make it into a 5-step process:
-1- submit your contribution (only to the Utopian local database),
-2- moderate (reject / approve),
-3- if approved, send a Utopian message to the contributor (via another locally run application, or send emails, or just ask contributors to log back in),
-4- allow the contributor to log back in to Utopian.io and only then let them have their post button
-5- upvote after the contribution was posted
It's pretty much the basis of how scientific journals work in the real world and have for – damn, is it centuries now? Centuries, in the case of certain academic publications.
You can even mandate, if you have the manpower and time, two additional things that are very important:
3.5: If not approved, send a notice to the submitter with a list of issues, and allow them to submit up to two more times. If the piece is not up to the standards of submission after three tries, reject the piece – gently – but allow the submitter to post without the Utopian branding or rewards.
3.7: If after a week the submission still has not been moderated and accepted or rejected, allow the submitter to post via Utopian with the tag but without rewards.
(The latter is designed to provide an incentive for the Utopian side of things to press through submissions in a reasonable amount of time. The specific timeframe can be adjusted to suit, but it should be relatively short. If the moderators miss their window, the organization isn't out money but their reputation may take a hit if the piece is truly not up to their quality. That seems like a sufficient threat.)
But yes, overall – I think this is a far superior interface if you want to run a purely moderated organization which wants to both maintain a strong public reputation for quality and have incentives on both sides to follow the rules in a timely and intelligent manner.
This is definitely something that we want to consider moving forward, although as Utopian V2 is already in development, such change to our core mechanisms seems pointless, as it would need to be redone anyway for our already coming update.
The situation is not black and white and the decision is actively discussed by all community members and all members of our team to find the best solutions. We are not afraid of admitting our mistakes, and if this turns out to be one, you'll definitely hear about it. Either way, thank you for your concern, we at Utopian value constructive criticism and opinions of our community members a lot.
I agree with you about to shift the architecture. That is more wise technicaly, but as consequencies more works to do.
My name is rizal irawan i live in banda aceh, and i am a newcomer in steemit.
Please to my steemian friends to support me.☺
Because I'm new and still a lot I do not understand from the steemit operating system .
You have been given the wrong answer. If a user submits a post that cannot be accepted, then that post will be rejected. However, there is nothing stopping someone from resubmitting the same project again as a new post.
EDIT: I was thinking in the context of translations. Looks like we have a grey area.
That is not true @dutch, we do not allow the same contribution again. This is why the Never submitted before rule is in place. This would also defeat the purpose of this change.
Source: I'm an Utopian supervisor... And consulted this with other supervisors just right now to make sure.
This rule will only punish first-time users that carefully tried to contribute something useful. The reward leecher will know the rules in and out to optimize their rewards vs time spent.
If you want to grow you need to take special care of new users.
If it is because of the workload of moderators then the rule could apply to members with more then 5+ contribution.. by then they should have understood or are just too stupid too do.
This rule is specifically aimed against 70% of our contributors which are abusers trying to steal rewards from legit users. Dealing with them takes too much time, and that time would only grow as the time goes on. Every time a contribution is rejected, a moderator will provide a good explanation to why that was so they can improve in the future.
Any refusal of the moderator will force the author to drop his hands. The author will think, and where is the guarantee that my next contribution will not be rejected? Why would I work so that the moderator put everything in the basket? So you lose a lot of authors and among them there can be very good authors. Because - once again I repeat - creativity and tedious design have nothing in common - these are two opposites.
How do we define "abusers" in this context? That's not to say that I don't believe that you're telling the truth about the number of people who are attempting to get their hands in your pie; I absolutely believe that at least 70% of the submissions to Utopian are intended to do the bare minimum of effort to qualify with whatever rules are in place – but how does Utopian define "abusers?"
That's kind of an important question, because there is a difference between people submitting low quality content because that's what they have to offer or that's what they think the project needs, and people deliberately submitting low quality content just to try to slide by the moderators. The first group can be rehabilitated; they have good intent. The second group is absent good intent and have no interest in being rehabilitated.
If Utopian has discovered means by which you can distinguish these two, given that they have identical content, I would be very interested in discovering this mechanism.
"Abusers" in this case would be, mostly Indonesian, users submitting copy-pasted google translate submissions, google translated submissions with some words changed, users stealing tutorials, assets. Basically anything that goes against our rules that isn't just low quality content.
We actively try to find a way to find these without damaging the experience of other users, but as of now, this is the best choice we believe we could make moving forward. This decision could easily be revoked in the future if the situation presents itself.
I would definitely say that those fall into the category of people that I would refer to as "abusers."
But, I note carefully, it's not against the rules to submit low quality content – the rules simply define what will be accepted. The current change in rules doesn't really affect this kind of abuser, except to require that they submit a longer section of Google translated text. Continuing to steal tutorials from other sites (I assume, because stealing from other Utopian users would be hideously obvious – though I suppose I should allow for that possibility, too) and the like will not be affected at all.
And the moderators will still have to comb through it to recognize that there is a problem.
I'm on board with recognizing that the current state of affairs need not be permanent, and allowing for that is good. But I'm not sure that the current solutions really address the problem.
Like I said, it's not my problem to solve – for which I am thankful. But as an interested user of the platform in general, I have some tiny stake in seeing that it's done well and some interest in my own work, which in theory falls within the Balla wick of things that Utopian is traditionally supposed to support, actually being supported by Utopian.
I hope that is a relatively reasonable position to state.
I agree with the analysis of the problem . But this rule will not hurt the "Abusers" it will hurt mostly the first time users. People that contribute the first or seconed time. Those new users that might be very valuble to the growth in the furture. "Abusers" likly know the rules and also how to bend them to there advantage.
scrolling through this thread just describes my condition right now with an utopian contribution