Implement a Contributor Timeout Function instead of Manual Bans to Utopian.io

in utopian-io •  7 years ago  (edited)

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Implement a Contributor Timeout Function instead of Manual Bans to Utopian.io

Since its introduction and receiving hefty amounts of delegated SteemPower (SP), @utopian-io has attracted already lots of contributors that are interested in contributing and getting high monetary upvotes from @utopian-io in return. @Utopian-io is a really powerful concept to support Open Source software and reward their contributors, and it has already been able to create (almost) 10,000 approved contributions in just about two months time.

In order to separate the wheat from the chaff, Utopian uses a moderator system, where moderator "volunteers" (well, not entirely voluntary: some rewards are given to moderators but those are "peanuts" compared to the contributor rewards) review each and every contribution manually and in case a contribution doesn't meet the category ruleset (yet) contributors are either given a task to improve their contribution or it gets rejected when there's no real probability the contribution could be improved and eventually approved for.

Quantity over Quality, so it seems?

A lot of genuine contributors always remain respectful to moderators, are willing to learn and self-improve, and understand that the moderation is indeed needed to let the Utopian Ecosystem function properly and at the same time moderators spend a lot of time helping contributors as well. Sometimes that help is really appreciated, but in other times it's clear the contribution wasn't given any attention at all. Especially in the "graphics" and "translation" categories, it sometimes feels as if contributors don't at all care about their own contributions, yet they simply want to contribute as many contributions as possible - some will get approved, others not, but the ones that do get that stong upvote. All contributions still need to be moderated, which costs a lot of moderator capacity.

Loud-mouthing your way to fortune, maybe?

There are also a number of contributors who just won't accept 'No' for an answer, and seem willing to do just about anything to get their post approved, just to get that strong upvote. In some cases, moderators are tempted into accepting bribery (like "I'll pay you 2 SBD if you'll approve my post!"), sometimes moderators are insulted or get "attacked" in the Discord chats in an agressive and utterly inappropriate fashion. Of course, agressive contributor behavior cannot be tolerated, and therefore Utopian has already implemented a "banning system": when a moderator reports an incident to a supervisor, the supervisor can "punish" the agressive contributor with a "Ban Time Penalty" (ranging from several hours to months of not being allowed to contribute to Utopian for a while). And again reviewing whether an incident should or should not be punished with a Contributor Ban costs even more of the already scarce moderator time.

Solution: Implement an Automatic Contributor Timeout Function

I hereby suggest to start using the following metric, which applies only and exactly at the moment when a moderator rejects a Utopian contribution:

var contributorTimeout = multiplier * (numRejectedFromAuthor / numTotalReviewedFromAuthor)

What this means, is this:

  • any author gets an automatic contribution time-out, meaning the author can't post for some time (could be a very big or small time-span) at the moment a moderator rejects the author's contribution;
  • this forces any author to properly think about submitting their contributions before doing so, and this shifts responsibility from moderators to the authors themselves, which is fair, because in case the contribution will be approved it's the author who profits from the Utopian upvote, not the moderator reviewing the contribution;
  • in case an author tries to circumvent the Timeout function by creating a new Steem account, they risk a hefty time-out period in case their new account contributes an article that gets rejected;
  • the multiplier variable could be a number, but it could also be a function that incorporates thresholds for valid new contributors, thereby limiting the timeout effect for "unknowing" new authors;
  • the multiplier variable, as a function, could also incorporate an additional penalty in case a contributor has a banning history;
  • the more approved contributions from an author, the smaller the timeout in case of an incidental rejection;
  • hopefully this will lead to a behavioral perception shift regarding the importance of content quality amongst authors, but in any case this mechanism effectively and efficiently deals with SPAM and helps to sanitize the moderation capacity so the average moderation review time decreases as well.

@scipio



Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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Thx @scipio a very good proposal. Hope to see a lot more from you in 2018. For now A happy New Year

good idea and something that is not too hard to implement
100% support from my side

Good idea! You could even implement a post cooldown. Ex; nobody or only some people can post more than twice a day!
canPost = lastpostDate + 24h > now || isEliteMember

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

well... I was just discussing something like this over at Discord. The problem with this is that "spammers" simply create multiple accounts, thereby circumventing a "max cap for posting". And on the other hand, suppose somebody - a quality content producer - would want to make a full-time job of contributing to Open Source / Utopian: as long as their content is good, I see no reason to limit the amount of their contributions.

For your first point, wasn't that supposed to be fixed with UA? For your second point, That was the "elite member"reason.

Partially: UA (I will finish the code) can be used to identify spammers by analyzing their followers. But in a Utopian context, we already have manual reviewers: the moderators, and only manually approved contributions receive an upvote. On top of that UA can be implemented as a metric inside the Utopian bot code as well, analyzing the UA of all manual upvoters as a metric for the weight of the Utopian upvote to post X itself.

And the "elite member" I understood of course, but then the problem becomes "who gets to determine if authorX is or is not an Elite Author"?

I don't know I guess post reward+quantity

Maybe UA itself again :P

This is a really smart solution to shift "responsibility" from moderators back to authors, and on average all contributions will even be reviewed sooner because of - probably - fewer SPAM contributions to review

Yes, I agree: moderators don't "owe" a contributor anything, yet some contributors seem to think different about that ;-)

A very good proposal, but before implementing this competency of moderators also need to be revisited. How the moderators have contributed to open source projects, and their bio would need to be reviewed to make sure, they are at a position where they are justified to be.

Yes that is of utmost importance!

Maybe the exact same function can be used to allow new moderators! For example, in order to become a moderator, you would need at least (for example) 10 approved posts and a "rejection / total ratio" below 0.1 (for example).

I would rather prefer to see how many open source projects they have been involved, their experience in IT industry etc. If yon see the number of contributions in utopian, then most of them are tutorials / suggestions. Having moderators who have vast expertise in open source development would make the moderation more fair and valuable.

Well "tutorials" actually help user-adoption of Open Source projects: the better the users understand how to use it, the more users actually will start using it and eventually even contributing code to it.

But I do agree Utopian could use a higher percentage of development contributions

Thank you for the contribution. It has been approved.

You can contact us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]

Thx Utopian! Bleep! Bleep!

great post @scipio
i like this post,thanks for sharing

I can be wrong but my impression as an outsider of that whole utopian-io thing I've seen so far is that some mods own postings always seem to receive juicy upvotes from the system.

I think you are indeed wrong, because -a- a moderator cannot approve their own posts, -b- the Utopian bot doesn't give a higher upvote to moderators, -c- since moderators know all the rules well, read a lot of contributions, they are simply able to publish better contributions and therefore their posts are approved: because of the contribution quality.

I actually meant that: no separation of powers.

To be paid for moderating and then getting moderated and rewarded in the same system.

Not exactly a neutral system?

I think you are completely thinking in the wrong direction here. If you mean that moderators shouldn't be allowed to publish because they're also moderating, then nobody would moderate anymore and the whole system would collapse.

Moderating costs so much time, it pays about $0.25 per hour. Moderators should be paid far more actually, that's my opinion.

PS: feel free to apply as an aspirant-moderator and donate all your rewards to charity! Would you like me to introduce you?

  ·  7 years ago (edited)

Nah that's okay man, I'd be a bad one at that, I'm already time constraint with browsing my own favourite categories on Steemit and authoring a post once in a while.

It's all good intended that I'm sure of but I'm worried there will be abuse. It's a human nature thing eh, especially when there's money involved :-)

Definitely being a mod has its ups and downs. Reducing the I irrationally hate you moderator factor a little would be cool :)

Hey @scipio I am @utopian-io. I have just upvoted you!

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  • Seems like you contribute quite often. AMAZING!

Suggestions

  • Contribute more often to get higher and higher rewards. I wish to see you often!
  • Work on your followers to increase the votes/rewards. I follow what humans do and my vote is mainly based on that. Good luck!

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  • Did you know project owners can manually vote with their own voting power or by voting power delegated to their projects? Ask the project owner to review your contributions!

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That makes a lot of sense. A submission timeout is a great way to encourage better quality on the first attempt.

@scipio I'm on you in this. ;) this is the best way to avoid those
contributors flooding the feed.