A Bittersweet Penalty for Content Spinners Trying to Milk Utopian.io's Popularity and Submitting Trash or Drivel
Recently my attention was pulled to a contribution made via @Utopian-io. I only knew the latter because I saw the Utopian.io URL.
What pulled my attention was the title which I found weird for an Utopian contribution, thus I clicked. True enough, upon reading the article, it was your average I'm going to milk this popular category drivel content spinner article of minor quality but yet just acceptable enough to exist content.
Basically a cheap tutorial by your average low rate copywriter/online content producer.
Stooopid is st0000000pid
Was it bad? No, it was formal and all in all the post was OK. Not mind-blowing but OK. Just about OK.
It could work at About.com or Wisegeek. Sites written to milk both Google SERP popularity and/or social media following. Noise but not totally useless noise.
Utopian is a rewarding project, an amazing one, and the team over at Utopian does make sure that only quality contributions are admitted.
Which is even more important now given today's Utopian upvote bot update.
Thus as I came at the end of the post I was more than happy to see an Utopian moderator had rejected it. As such the post wasn't shown on Utopian.io and also didn't get to benefit any extra popularity from the (still) rather meta Utopian community.
Or any upvote by the bot.
While this doesn't remove the posts from the Steem blockchain, no extra popularity was benefitted.
There's More to It.
When submitting drivel poor content, or generally unrelated content to Utopian, there's a double whammy effect at work.
Not only does the content creator not get to benefit from any Utopian community perks (upvotes and Utopian.io bot upvote), but the author is also hit with an additional penalty and loses 15 20-22% of their possible article rewards just for posting through the Utopian interface.
Edit: Utopian shares around 20-22% with its sponsors and moderators, who are added as beneficiaries. Not 15% as previously stated.
While most likely not envisaged by @elear to function as a penalty, I find this a bittersweet bonus for those who try to milk the platform, the Steem mechanism in general.
As they say in proper English... me likey.
Hopefully, when communities launch soon similar will be possible and community admins and moderators will have the same capabilities to hide content from popular channel/communities.
Last we want is communities to be as crap a submission platforms as many a popular Crackbook group.
You know what would be cool? If @minnowbooster and other such services did the same. Punish spammers and shitposters who attempt to use these services to promote garbage. Hmm... I might actually suggest that to the gang over the MB.
Another solution for this issue which works both for utopian and boosted posts is just to downvote them. If bad posts get downvoted regularly - especially ones that paid to get boosted - the abuse will stop pretty quick I think.
I recently got a pretty major delegation from a shy friendly whale. I plan to use it to clean this place up to the best of my ability, while promoting worthy content creators. Let's do this, people!
That's awesome! I'm sure you will put it to good use!
It's the necessary evil to fight spam we have right now. But it also comes at a cost and carries a risk with itself. As I always say, I like to think Medium has its reasons for upvoting/likes/claps only.
Not even wanting to go into the debate around how is it correct to be both judge and executer, I think we need something smarter. I have a post brewing in my head already. Since days basically, even weeks, but I feel it's coming closer to at the very least becoming a draft.
btw. the steemcleaners are paying reporters. Not much. But I still found it interesting when I got a few cents just for reporting spammers that posted meaningless comments to MY FUCKING POSTS!!!!
Ahem...
To be honest, I don't think it was designed with that functionality in mind but it just happens to be a nice bonus for those who want to play the system and fail at it.
MB does penalize by not refunding when caught. Now the question is should MB have a mderation queue as well?
That's a good question. I don't know, but worth thinking about it, I guess.
Ah, I like this sweet post and the existence of a penalty for shitposts. That's what my program says.
Don't you love an accidental bonus. I wonder how long it will take most before they even realise.
I like this observation. Posts are coming up with virtually nothing on it just to take a shot at the utopian's reward.
Always having accepted guet post submissions on my former sites, I feel for the moderation team, @greenrun. They do a stellar job at spotting crap and keeping gamification minimal.
I agree, the moderators do an amazing job.
I read this and thought yes, it sounds like someone is trying to take drivel out of the action. Then I looked up Utopian-io and saw that's it's really the backroom boys who keep this thing going, so I bow out gracefully. However as a fellow Steemian, fairly new, I always wonder how I spend hours getting my act together, OK, no flashy videos just a bit of writing and stuff, and others just put up something they obviously got from elsewhere. I just don't know what's acceptable. So I'll wend my happy way in Steemit, feel gratitude for the few friends I have and the few little debates that keep going with me, and hope that one day things will be right. Unfortunately, it take all sorts, so we'll meanwhile have to put up with drivel. Among which, is some of the most wonderful stories, photos, posts and whatever, all on Steemit. I'm happy.