Drawing The (guide)lines part 2: How To Judge A Blog Post

This is the second part of my series about creating the new guidelines for Utopian's Blog category. In the first part, I talked about what makes a steemit post a "real" blog post. Now, it's time for the heart of the matter: How do we judge blog posts?

The Art Of Being Judgy

There are several types of content that we accept, and will continue to accept, in the Blog category. Project owners get to write posts that are less editorial and opinion based, because we're a platform to promote open source projects. We still judge the writing and the content, but we're more lenient. For all posts, the goal of moderation is - as I have stated before - making future posts better. And for that, we need to judge them.

We judge posts on two separate, but related, axes: Content and presentation.

Content

This is where we look at what the poster is saying. Is it original? Is it unique? Does it have a personal and/or editorial point of view? We are working towards a future where we have such a volume of posts that only the best will be rewarded. We want to reward excellence, and our work on Utopian V2 and the new guidelines is all about fascilitating that future.

Your content. Image credit: Wokandapix on Pixabay
The new guidelines will be built so that there will be general guidelines, and category specific guidelines. Much of the content stuff will be covered in the general guidelines. Things like originality, quality, and thoughtfulness are all basic principles that will be valid for every contribution on Utopian.

For Blog, it's all about the point of view. Bloggers on the platform are expected to bring their personality, their point of view, their opinions and feelings to the posts. Not every one of those is applicable to every post, of course. A review can include the poster's feelings, but it doesn't have to. But it's always gotta have a unique perspective.

Presentation

There's a lot of subjectivity in the judging of content, and we will be giving moderators quite a bit of free reign in doing so. There's a lot less when it comes to the presentation.

Your presentation. Image credit: manfredrichter in Pixabay
If a post is full of grammar and style errors, that makes it harder to read. If it is harder to read for technical reasons, it is not as good a post.

If a post has no images, or entirely irrelevant images, or images that have super low resolution, it is not as good a post.

If a post is poorly aligned, poorly organized, poorly constructed, it is not as good a post. Posters don't have to use our templates, or any templates, but they have to have a care in the way their content is presented.

Tying It All Together

Most categories in Utopian contain content that is relevant to a fairly narrow, clearly defined audience. This is not the case for posts in the Blog category. These posts should be accessible to a wide range of readers. Even if the topic is technical, the way it is presented should make it interesting to as many people as possible. We're here to promote and incentivise open source projects. We can't do that it our posts aren't attractive to readers.

It all works together. Image credit: stevepb on pixabay
However, moderators need to have a care in presenting that critique. We want contibutors to be able to take the criticism on board. Sometimes posts make moderators angry. I get that. I've felt that. But the moderation comment is not the place to vent that anger. This is another topic I've already written about, and stuff from that post will probably get baked into the guidelines as well.

Your Thoughts

Once again, I want to hear from the community on this. Many of you have received Utopian moderation posts. What did you like? What did you find ineffective, problematic, or harmful? Please don't use this as an opportunity to single out specific moderators for negative or positive reasons. We have a ticketing system for that, which is linked on every moderation comment. But I would be very interested in reading about specific things moderators have written to you that you feel have made your future posts better, as well as those that have dampened your enthusiasm for contributing to Utopian. Much like the guidelines aim to improve contributions, I hope this process can help improve our moderation. We're all in this together, after all. Working as a community to help open source software reach amazing new heights.