Utopian Rewarding Open-Source ... err I mean random stuff
Who would win for getting a reward on Utopian.io open-source platform:
Improvement of Steemit front-page for non-english languages
OR
If you guessed #1 you're wrong.
Utopian.io all comes down to the moderators and politics game. Are you part of the club? Or are you rejected and disliked by the others?
At the end of the day it's a social club. So you better learn to run your "discord game".
It's not that I think my contribution was so amazing. It's just that I look at other contributions that get upvoted by the their account and many are simply reporting a bug (which is great). Or they are articles not related to open-source in anyway (ok fine). But they don't have the Steem Power to spare a $5 upvote on someone who spent 3-4 hours improving the main interface for the platform?
Had some ok rewards in the past but I did work hard on them and always on popular sites on the steem blockchain.
I feel many of the big delegations given out by Steem Inc are political in nature. If Steem upvotes something directly as way to give someone money everyone notices. Instead delegations are made to organizations and then the political game begins. Not to mention the whole political game of how they give out delegations.
Anyways I have another submission in the waiting line so I guess I'm supposed to watch what I say about them but you know what ... I don't care.
I'd rather tell the truth how I see it. I don't have time to brown-nose whales on steem.
As @trumpman says, utopian are simply following our trail at @steemstem in a partnership of promoting quality content.
What this means is that a totally separate team is curating posts that go with different standards: One for open source contributions, and one for STEM-related posts. These may sometimes overlap, too.
Yours clearly has a comment saying:
According to their standards, your post doesn't fit the bill. Likewise, trumpmans doesn't qualify for a utopian vote, but it does qualify for a steemSTEM upvote, which just happens to be trailed by utopian, but also curie, steempress and more.
The post you use as an example, though comedic, encourages science communication, writes about research and papers and fits with our quality standards regarding copyright etc.
To clear any misunderstanding, my post was first voted by @steemstem. It just happens that the votes of steemstem are automatically followed by utopian-io. So, in other words the vote in this case by utopian-io was totally automated and there were no "politics" from their side. You would know that if you actually bothered to read the comment the bot left on my post.
Here's a post from @utopian-io mentioning some other trails they follow: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@utopian-io/utopian-io-is-giving-you-more-innovation-trail-and-higher-maximum-rewards
Instead of publically complaining about your post, why don't you visit their discord channel to find out why your post(s) wasn't approved? Maybe they missed it? Maybe you didn't follow some of their requirements? Maybe whatever? You will never know if you don't ask!
Thanks for the mention
Agreed, @utopian-io seems to have become more of a game about knowing how to please specific moderators than anything else. The decisions they make in terms of rules feel elitist and clique-ish. They delete comments on Discord they don't like. Etc. Feels weird.
I hope to see the situation improve because I love the idea behind the project.
Thanks @cahlen glad to know I'm not the only one who feels this way.
There was a ton of instances that "just felt weird" like you say.
I was already making contributions on to projects on Github before I ever heard of Utopian.
The more I started trying to submit to Utopian the more I felt like I had to change how I worked. Instead of just doing what I had always done, documenting that and submitting.
What is worse I feel like I let their rejections hurt my feelings in some way that made me less likely to contribute. I had the plan to try to help clean up the Github issues page for steemit.com. I figured, hey I could do a ton of small things for the main steemit.com website.
But getting the rejections just through me off it in a way where I didn't want to contribute to the main steemit site for the last month. Reason being I was associating Utopian with Steemit and the feeling of rejection.
Why do you think this?
I have never seen this happen before, could you give any examples?
Hi @amosbastian! The first is just a feeling I get, an amalgamation of my experience writing, moderating and reviewing the moderation of hundreds of bugs over a period of time. I can't point to any one example, but can say I slowly felt more and more discouraged about making submissions to the point that I almost never do anymore.
I've seen comments deleted on several occasions. I'm surprised to hear you haven't seen it, since it felt like a regular occurrence to me. The most recent incidence was someone thanking me for sticking up for them and when I came back the next day a supervisor had responded to the comment sarcastically and deleted the note of thanks.
It would be highly appreciated if you (and anybody else) could come to Discord and talk to us instead of spreading (in my opinion) false information. What comments are you talking about? If there is any problem, let our Community Manager know about it and they will go through it with you.
Hello @espoem! Please refer to my response to @amosbastian under the same parent here for the answer to your question about comment deletes.
I do not think there is anything wrong with discussing our experiences with Utopian in public rather than behind closed doors. I'm not trying to have any specific instances addressed by the folks at Utopian, I'm just sharing feelings after extensive experience with the platform in response to a friend doing the same.
Overall I think the platform is amazing, but things have been feeling 'off' enough for me that I haven't participated much lately.
Still, I struggle to actually understand what you mean. You share the feelings but you are not able to give specific cases or names so it is difficult for us to actually see the problem.
I can think of only a few reasons why a message could disappear in Discord. A user may have submitted inappropriate messages or they ignored a warning about behaving in the Discord. We have had some cases in which users were obviously impolite, forced themselves in the private messages even though chatting in public channels is prefered unless specified otherwise among all parties, and even some users started sending messages through personal communication channels that were not related to Utopian.
I believe that in this case, you have in mind, a user was banned from the Discord server and their messages may have been removed with that.
As I said, I'm not trying to address any specific instances, I'm sharing my general experience.
Banned users and other understandable deletions are possibly a portion or even all of what I experienced, though it seems unlikely to me that they make up a majority of what I saw.
I'm glad to hear that both you and @amosbastian haven't seen this occur. Perhaps my experience was an anomaly.
@cahlen this is part of how they work. When I first heard about Utopian I wasn't even on Discord.
I used Github and Steem blockchain. I didn't get why they kept saying I had to sign up for some random closed source chat application and talk to them in private.
They don't want to have things out in the open, which is exactly what open-source is about.
Really? Are you saying that we do not want to talk to you? Of course, you do not have join Discord but it is the fastest and most straightforward communication channel we have. And as far as I know, you both are there.
What politics game are you talking about? I believe you completely misunderstood the process. Unfortunately, your whole post feels rude.
Anyway, if you have a question, I will try to answer. But I believe that the only reason you published this post was to make Utopian look bad.
@espoem, accusing someone of writing an entire post simply to make Utopian look bad is a perfect example of the type of things that give the project that 'weird' feeling we're talking about.
@kirkins clearly supports and wants to participate in Utopian and is writing a post in hopes that it helps bring awareness to and create discussion around a situation so that it can be improved, yet you ignore that and accuse him of slander.
As you shared your feelings, I gave my observations on this post. Please tell me then why the post has been edited and some parts removed and why the author pointed out aspects that are little related to the current situation in Utopian?
Please enlighten me because Utopian regularly announces updates on the moderation and scoring systems, as well as Amos explained the "minimum votes".
I re-read and edit all my posts. The last edit I made was changing a period to a question mark.
I stand by what is there. I constantly try to improve writing and format of all my posts.
Are you suggesting I have something to hide?
@espoem like @cahlen said you are very accusatory.
I am not suggesting anything. I am only stating that the post is missing parts that were included when I wrote the first comment. It is your post and your thoughts.
I did not know the post was edited, and I cannot speak to why.
The issue that I'm trying to point out is that in this thread alone both your and @amosbastion comments are combative and defensive. You see Utopian as being attacked and you attack back.
Even in cases where a person is attacking an organization like Utopian (which I don't believe is happening here), the people who represent the project should be trying to learn something from it by engaging in polite inquisitive dialog. Members representing an organization should publicly present themselves with a higher standard than their users.
I simply refuted his claim that "Utopian.io all comes down to the moderators and politics game.", explained why his contribution wasn't rewarded and what will happen to similar contributions in the future.
His reply to that made it clear to me he was operating under a misunderstanding, so I explained it even further. Not exactly sure where I attacked him or am being combatitive?
I really did not intend to attack anyone. However, it seemed to me that you wanted us to solve a problem that we are not able to see without further information and that is why I asked you to provide them and I tried to explain the reasons which may have affected some of your observations.
I can't speak for central utopian but if you want to know the guidelines on why @steemSTEM posts get upvoted (which the above dildo post adheres to), we have a special channel dedicated to that on our server - utopian only follows our trail like many others do
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It has nothing to do with this - we review each and every single contribution by looking at its quality and value, not who posted it. It's ridiculous to claim otherwise, especially without any form of proof.
The contribution that you are referencing was simply not enough work to be rewarded. In combination with the fact that we were using a linear system with a minimum score, so the minimum reward for a development contribution used to be quite high (~$20), we felt it was hard to justify rewarding contributions like yours, especially when comparing them to other ones. Recently we have switched to an exponential scoring system and improved our questionnaire, so contributions like that will more than likely be rewarded more often and easily from now on.
No need to worry about this as this is once again just a baseless assumption.
No there was no minimum reward at the time I posted this. I already complained to you directly about the minimum reward on Discord 2 months ago. Then shortly after that Utopian posted a blog saying there was no minimum.
My contribution was made well after you released the blog post above.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@utopian-io/welcome-the-new-voting-distribution-for-the-utopian-bot-and-moderation-rewards
We have a minimum score for contributions to be rewarded -> a minimum vote that differs per category (since it's a percentage of the max vote of a category). Since it was linear before, if you received a score of e.g. 20, you would receive a 0.2 * MAX_CATEGORY_VOTE upvote, but this has changed recently.
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@utopian-io/utopian-now-contributions-are-welcome