Urgently prevent abuse of Utopian reward pool !

Since last two days, I have started moderating for utopian.io. I have noticed that a handful of users are constantly abusing utopian reward pool. They do this by submitting 10 substandard contributions in a day. Since they are not really spam, but micro suggestions, we moderators are faced with the dilemma for either rejecting the contribution (on grounds of being lower in quality) or accepting the substandard contributions. I would not name the accounts as I do not believe in shaming anyone. However, it is up to the utopian community to decide which way to take. How strongly do we want to stand for quality will determine the future course of actions we take

Elear, who founded the utopian.io movement stressed in this post about the importance of quality for the utopian platform and the measures implemented to ensure this.

However, this has proven to be a difficult task for the moderators.

The Problem

The issue at stake here is the genuine open source contributions, for which utopian came into existence are at the receiving end of injustice. They receive fewer awards as the reward pool continuously gets drained by lower quality micro-suggestions.

Translation is another category where it gets really tricky for moderators. Even if the user submits proper links to Crowdin submits proof of work, it is difficult to determine if the user put in real effort to translate or it is just copy paste Google translation.

Other categories which are constantly plagued by lower quality content are tutorials. The tutorials are usually not very detailed and do not indicate real effort from the users. There is an urgent need to codify the rules and make them stringent.

The Solution.

Incentivize moderators for evaluating the contributions holistically.

Creation of a fund for moderation (say, The Tub).

The minnowsupport project has come up with a very https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@shreyasgune/updated-readme-for-busy-s-github-repository way of solving a similar problem. They recently launched mspsteem.com. It's a clone of steemit run by them which provides a 5% beneficiary of all posts back to @minnowsupport. Utopian.io can mandate on similar lines leading to creation of a fund (The Tub) which would reward moderators on the basis of real performance parameters.

Information to be made available to Moderators.

The Moderators should have access to information like:

Did the user's post pass the automatic quality check?. The automatic quality check is a unique feature in the utopian.io editor which informs user if the post passes the quality check. The results of the same are not available with the moderators, leading to uninformed decision making.
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Preventing user from posting 3 times a day.

I am fully aware that users may not like this. However, for maintaining the quality of contributions, I feel that this limit is now necessary. If the handful of users keep reaping the Utopian reward pool, this platform will stray away from its real objectives.

Future course

I will continue to work as a moderator for utopian.io so that I can help to improve the quality of submissions in utopian.io. I am proud to be part of such a beautiful project and would love to see it become mainstream. Complete adoption of utopian.io would indeed hasten the speed of open source development and lead to improvement in lives of many.

Utopian.io has already helped create a space of open source software development. Hundreds of people who never knew what this is, are getting interested and this itself is a big victory for utopian.io.

We have come a long way. But there is a longer and more difficult road ahead.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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