Utopian New Voting Distribution: Sustainability is Key.
As we move toward Utopian v2, sustainability becomes a major focus. We have been testing the voting distribution for over an year. We've seen how it affects the rewards, and therefore the usage behavior, quantity, and quality of the contributions incentivised by Utopian.
It is clear that rewarding everyone is unsustainable, and the new bot, just released yesterday, takes this simple fact into account.
The Issues
- No amount of delegation or stake can guarantee scalability of incentives with the aim of rewarding everyone. Delegation itself is not a sustainable component for an organisation wishing to grow and walk on its own two feet.
- Incentivising each and every contribution does not produce positive competition. Every contributor expects a reward, whatever the quality provided.
- Distributing the rewards to everyone lowers the value available to high quality contributions, making the rewards distribution potentially unfair or insignificant in the long run.
- Focusing solely on Utopian as a source of rewards is against the basic principle of decentralization. The community has to buy into the system to grow their own incentives and those of others, independently from what Utopian can deliver.
- Distributing the rewards across all categories, based on the numbers of contributions received per category, hurts the opportunities categories with lower participation have to grow, as categories with a bigger number of contributions consume the voting power that could have pushed those categories forward.
- Collision between the rewards assigned to Utopian contributions and those followed by the trail, when the queue was growing too fast, often denying the trail the opportunity to catch valuable posts from the trailed communities.
The Solutions
The solutions the new voting bot provides aim to bring to the table a sustainable voting distribution. This distribution is biased toward quality and not quantity, as it should for our long term aims.
Precedence of the score
The Utopian Quality Score is assessed by our moderation teams, comprising over 50 professionals in their respective fields.
The score is what makes the Utopian engine work, reducing abuse and supporting professional quality assurance on the platform.
In the last 2 months, our dedication to moderation processes has been immense. We have collected dozens of materials and publications to create a new version of the guidelines, suitable to assure quality for organisations of all sizes, implementing industry standards across all the categories. A new Utopian quality questionnaire is also in the works. This new questionnaire will guarantee more granular and accurate reviews. Utopian v2 will bring multiple reviews per contribution, which will help our quality assurance become even more professional and fair for everyone.
The new voting bot will give precedence in the queue to contributions with the highest score and will consume the available voting power daily to reward those. We are very proud of this new approach. It incentives positive competition across all contributions, and turns the voting distribution into a sustainable system. In this new system the minimum quality to get an Utopian incentive is dictated by the community itself, and the value it can provide.
Reserved Pools
One of the main issues with our previous voting bot was that categories with higher contributions were consuming most of the incentives that would otherwise be available categories with lower participation. This is why the new voting bot reserves the same amount of voting power pool for each category and dynamically shares the pool between all the categories as demand requires.
If a category goes over the reserved pool assigned, it can share the reserved pool of categories that are not not using theirs up, until those categories grow enough to consume their reserved pools. This change assures each category can grow at its own rate.
The Trail
Utopian incentivises awesome initiatives with which we share vision and effort, such as @SteemStem, @steemmakers, MSP-Waves, and others. Quite often our voting bot hasn't been able to reward these contributions due to the internal queue growing too fast and denying the trailed communities our incentives. To fix that, the new voting bot reserves a pool for the trail as well. Just as it does for our own contributions, the queue will be biased toward the highest quality contributions.
Technical Details
If you wish to learn more about the technical details of the new bot and the story behind it, have a look at https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@amosbastian/developing-the-new-utopian-bot
To sum up
The new voting bot will make sure to prioritise the best of the best. As a ongoing contest, running 24 hours and 7 days a week, only the best contributions will access Utopian's incentives. We hope our community of contributors and project owners will challenge itself to provide the best quality. That is how you can win the Utopian's ongoing contest.
We also believe the new voting bot will sustain the growth of the communities we support outside Utopian, under the same framework Utopian has adopted.
Credits
@Amosbastian is the tireless machine behind the creation of the new voting bot, which can be found here https://github.com/utopian-io/utopian-bot.
We also want to thank:
@scipio
@crokkon
@espoem
@holger80
@miniature-tiger
@nothingismagick
For helping set up the requirements for the bot, spotting issues and providing input to improve the codebase structure and scalability of the bot.
Join the community on Discord: https://discord.gg/azdmM3v
First Time Contributing in Utopian.io?
Learn how to contribute on our website
Wow you guys have done one more spectacular thing.
Now only the best of the best in each category will be able to reap the benefits of this. I know @anthonyadavisii will love the gamification of this.
We had a discussion about the gamification of SFR this morning.
Maybe he was right....
Thanks @amos for the hard work you do at @utopian-io
SFR is being gamed? How?
We're talking about doing the ranks again. Something like using the psychology of gaming and leaderboards to encourage good flagging.
Example of what I mean:
https://steemit.com/abuse/@steemflagrewards/steem-flag-rewards-luckforsale-plagiarizer-network-flag-campaign-1st-post
Sounds good to me, so long as whats defined as the best isn't a moving target without any causality.
When I do post, I dominate the Video Tutorials category mostly because there aren't many others in the running with that kind of frequency. I also feel like that as a result of the frequency of my contributions, I am less likely to receive staff pick (You guys don't want to feature the same person over and over which I understand). I just hope this mentality doesn't spill over into voting priority.
If a new contributor comes and posts a amazing set of video tutorials, then I will gladly try to up my game as a contributor. But if I am just getting lower scores as a result of complacency then that becomes a problem.
I think this problem occurs in many categories.
Probably, though I can't personally add to that sentiment; I have only contributed to Video Tutorials and Development. Over the course of the period that I have worked with Utopian, I have seen radically different biases and trends form with the way my contributions have been moderated.
I just hope this move doesn't cause the platform to feel more centralized. They tried to minimize this problem by giving community members the ability to score other contributions, but that really was an imperfect solution since there is no real incentive to score another contribution unless its a topic that you are extremely interested in.
Moderators are part of the community, not employees. So I don't see how that could be more centralized.
Utopian can only improve the guidelines and the tools to better assess quality, as we constantly do, while trying to lower subjectivity, which is a component you can't and don't want to deny entirely.
I don't mean that the community would actually become more centralized, all I am just suggesting that it would "feel" more centralized.
With the change in how the bot works, moderators have more power then they did before. The more selective the platform becomes; the more sway a moderator's decision has over who gets a vote and who doesn't. If a moderator has a bias against a contributor, then it becomes harder for the contributor to override that bias.
Luckily, there are things like the discord channel and the help channel to combat this potential problem. All that being said, I do understand why the changes were made to the bot and I support these changes. Sometimes though it is worth talking about the potential downsides to a decision so that the proper parties can help mitigate them.
Hi,
Mere downloading esteem app will make me join utopian.io community?
Posted using Partiko Android
With your Steem account, you can start contributing to an open source project via Utopian. To start contributing, consider going through the Utopian guidelines
For more information, please kindly contact me on #help on Utopian Discord server, and you will be attended to as soon as possible.
This is a good initiative.
Posted using Partiko Android
Fantastic, we are all grateful for the support that utopian brings, without a doubt you are the largest and most consolidated community of steemit
Thanks for the compliment. We will keep supporting open source project and we encourage you to support as well by contributing to them. :D
It's the way how the world operates. It's the same in sports, science, finances. Pareto distribution is all around us.
I will not dispute this. However, every contributor is expected to contribute to the category that marches with their expertise. This will for sure increase the chance of you submitting a high-quality contribution.
Utopian is open to many skills (Such as graphics-designers, developers, translators, writers and so much more) and could be used to support the open source communities/projects. All you need to do is identify the category you are most efficient with and start contributing. However, you are always advised to go through the Utopian guidelines.
Utopian value even your "ideas" made to improve an open source project. There is more Utopian has to offer. Please get in touch with us on our discord server to find out more about Utopian.
One of my first contributions (almost a year ago) was related to the bot.
It's amazing how much the algorithm improved.
Congrats Amos and team
Well, this is an excellent initiative. If the old ways of doing things are not effective, it is best another approach to getting it done to be put in place. Bravo team utopian for this excellent method of curation based on excellence.
Thanks for the compliment. Such nice words. Well, Utopian will keep improving and making sure that we reward the best contributions. The team is brainstorming day and night and looking for all sort of solution to potential problems. I must say that the team is indeed populated dedicated minds.
Nice work @amosbastian! :)