Utopian Rules Update #7 - Biggest Quality Enforcement Ever
Quality as The First Priority!
In Utopian.io we have a dream, to be the first moderated Steem platform that enforces TOP quality contributions. We worked hard every day to get there and today we are going to propose the biggest rule update we have ever done.. This update will have an impact for all the Utopian contributors, we strongly suggest to review all the new rules before contributing.
All the posts submitted before this announcement will be reviewed as per the old rules, all the new posts will have to bind to the new rules.
The Translations Category is now opened again. You can submit new contributions in that category as long as they bind to the new rules https://utopian.io/rules
Editor Templates
When creating a new contribution or task request, now the Editor will propose predefined templates for each category that contributors should follow.
Example: Sample Template for Video Tutorials
What Will I Learn?
Write here briefly the details of what the user is going to learn in a bullet list.
- You will learn Example A
- You will learn Example B
- You will learn Example C
Requirements
Write here a bullet list of the requirements for the user in order to follow this tutorial.
- Example Requirement A
- Example Requirement B
- Example Requirement C
Difficulty
Either choose between the following options:
- Basic
- Intermediate
- Advanced
Tutorial Contents
A full description of the topics of this video tutorial, plus the contents of the tutorial itself.
Curriculum
Place here a list of related tutorials you have already shared on Utopian that make up a Course Curriculum, if applicable.
Immediate Rejection
We proposed to reduce the waiting period after a moderator requests for a change to 24 hours, but then realised there should be no waiting period at all. Contributors are enforced to read all the rules before contributing. They won't have a chance to edit, the contribution will be either accepted or rejected.
Significant Rules Changes
- Translations minimum 1000 words.
- Translations must have been done no longer than a week before the contribution. The same for code contributions.
- Tutorials and Video Tutorials can be now only about highly technical how-tos that have coding implications.
- If your account on an external platform does not match the Steem/Utopian account you must either change it or use another field to show you are the author. Screenshots of you logged in other platforms won't be accepted any longer.
Other significant rules have been changed. Review them all on https://utopian.io/rules
On The Horizon
Moderation Editing Functionalities
Soon moderators will be able to change category, repository and tags on behalf of the contributor since It is there where we have the biggest amount of mistakes.
Moderation Questionnaire and Quality Slider
Soon moderators will have to fill a short questionnaire and assign a quality to each reviewed contribution. The Utopian Bot will mainly take into consideration the quality assigned as a factor to decide the voting weight.
Utopian Community-Driven Witness
We are made of developers, system administrators, entrepreneurs, artists, content creators, thinkers. We embrace every nationality, mindset and belief.
Utopian.io is the first Community-Driven Witness. Every decision will be taken as per the consensus of the entire community using our public Discord server and soon via a public voting system.
- Go here Steem Witnesses
- Scroll to the bottom
- Write utopian-io and vote or set utopian-io as a proxy
- Use Steem Connect for Voting Utopian as a Witness
- Or Use Steem Connect for proxying your vote to Utopian Witness
Now slowly and steadily utopian-io is getting more polished and getting better and better and with these new rules, the contribution would look more better definitely.
Thank you to the team & Have a great day.
I do really like the idea of a templated project request. That seems like it will be a lot more clear, and it will allow for easier rejections.
It will be particularly nice if Utopian.io pre-populates the submission with any applicable templates in Markdown for the user to simply fill out as part of creating the post.
That should be a Simple Matter of Programming (TM) (C).
It is already like that @lextenebris
Great team. Great product. No hype. All action.
Great work 👍🏽
good update~
Immediate Rejection? This sounds to me a bit harsh. I know you have a lot of work with the moderation. I also agree that they should read the rules beforehand. But reading is not equal to understanding it...and mistakes are part of every human also for moderators :)...so having a second chance should be part of the system.
I support this opinion.
And the scary thing from my point of view is that it gets unnoticed because many of those new users will just leave when they fail the first time.
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
Great updates as usual. I have one question though:
My account name on GitHub does not match my Steem/Utopian account name. I would really prefer not to change my GitHub account name because I have been using it for a long time and I can't change my Steem account name, obviously.
How can I use "another field" to show I am the author? Also, since I have connected my GitHub account with Utopian, shouldn't you be able to know that my Steem/Utopian account has access to that GitHub account?
Please let me know how I can handle this, I would like to make sure my contributions are submitted correctly going forward.
On Discord @deathwing said that putting your Steemit/Utopian username in the
README.meof the GitHub repository can serve as proof.Thanks @amosbastian, would like to get confirmation of this from someone at Utopian. This seems like an odd way to go about this since as i mentioned they should already know if you have access to a particular github account if you connect it with their site.
Yes true @yabapmatt. For github specifically this is more a fast patch until we can implement a way to recognise the user on the frontend directly, while fro crowdin is harder since there is no crowdin connect.
That seems like a pain - if I contribute to some random open source project will I have to ask them to add my steemit username to their readme? I can't imagine too many maintainers would be ok with that
thnx for the update @elear now moderators have more work to do ;) and contributors should be more professional when writing the contributions .
can you add the link to this post with a message so every contributor can read it .
Nice improvements but i am strongly against that immediate rejection rule after all we are humans and making a mistake is a common thing, it sounds like if we make a little mistake while making a contribution then all of our hard work demolished in a split second.
That is my point, they make it sound as if utopian mods are robots that can't also make slight mistakes of judgment.
This is Amazing. Good Job guys... But, no chance of edit is kind of harsh. Immediate rejection for silly mistakes would be very painful.
Yes, upvote you.
I agree! Excellent changes, however maybe a second opportunity to fix a silly mistake is apporpriate to avoid snowballing aggravation.
harsh rules will often lead to harsh criticism from users and new users being reluctant to contribute.
This is an amazing update to the rules of utopian. But, maybe there will a propose format to all category so that every contributor can get an idea how to write and design their contribution.
For example, in translation category. It is best if there is a propose format to follow especially in words counting or verifying the works.
I believe there is a format now, you will find it when you try to contribute in the translation category.