Today I'm going to suggest a feature I named "Read.Cash Reputation", which aims to solve a lot of the problems the platform currently has.
Note that this is a suggestion from me to the community and the developers only, and I don't have any ties to the development team so it's only an idea.
Here are some of the things this new feature would do:
Decrease Spam Content;
Increase the Website's Reach;
Attract More Traffic;
Increase BCH Adoption Rates;
Stop Plagiarism;
Reward Valuable Users, Punish Bad Users or Leeches;
Decrease Trash and Clutter on the Platform;
Give people an objective way to see if a user is credible or not.
...among some other things, I'll explain throughout this article.
This is a feature I see bringing tons of benefits to the platform and to the BCH blockchain while having no side effects that I can think of.
So, let me explain how this would work.
The Read.Cash Reputation System: Here's How it Would Work!
The system would work by grading authors from 0 to 100. The image above shows an example of what this would look like.
I took the idea for the design from the design of reputation score from the Steem blockchain, but that's where the similarities end as the score has nothing to do with the score you can see on STEEM or Hive.
So, basically, you'd see a number from 0 to 100 next to a user's name. This would make it easy for you to detect good authoritative users, and credible sources, from trash, plagiarists, and spammers.
Not only that, but this number would also take into account the work you put in the platform and your contributions to it.
But then how would this score be calculated?
It would be an algorithm weighing the following factors:
The current algorithm being used by @TheRandomRewarder to detect quality and authority; (current system)
The tips and upvotes the users' content get on average or in total;
The downvotes the user receives;
The amount of traffic the users' articles bring in from Google or other external sources (rewarding people who bring traffic and attention to Read.Cash and BCH);
The active referrals with reputation over a certain limit (rewarding people who onboard people who actually produce value and stay onboard);
The amount of engagement promoted by the user (both the user engaging with the community and the community engaging with the user).
The amount of BCH being used to Tip and Boost Content (rewarding those who put BCH back into the system)
These are my initial suggestions, but of course, the system can be adjusted.
Now, let's analyze how this system could benefit Read.Cash
Decrease Spam Content: How Does the System Help?
Since I created the Bitcoin Cash Hub(0cd1), me and my mods @Pantera , @JonicaBradley, and @CryptoBabe have seen a lot of spam.
Not only that, but some SPAM really disguises itself as quality content - the bot sometimes analyzes it as exclusive content, it gets tipped, but the article itself upon human analysis shows itself to be trash.
Me and my mods can easily detect this, as can other humans, and that's the power of manual curation... however, spammers spam because the system isn't harsh enough.
With the new reputation system, the spammy users will have a visible low reputation score, and the low score will have a lot of implications that help isolate the spammer:
Through a visible reputation score on the low digits, even if the article looks good people will be extra critical of it and plagiarists won't get away with it like they do now.
Articles that are just trash filler content or promotional stuff that can avoid spam classification from the bot and people most of the time don't bother to report it, a low rep score can mean that user gets his posts isolated much like the "low rating" feature on spammer's comments
A visible low reputation score discourages people from doing spammy stuff or misbehaving with fear of hurting their rep.
Bad posts won't get tipped as much as good posts, so people who consistently make low-quality posts will have low average tips, therefore increasing overall quality.
Among other psychological variables related to having a visible rep score.
Increase the Website's Reach: Attracting More Traffic
By rewarding both active reputed referrals and the amount of traffic users' articles bring in from Google and external sources, we're promoting expansion and rewarding those who work hard to promote the platform and therefore the BCH blockchain with it.
We should try to make Read.Cash one of the main content platforms for Crypto, and that has to pass through dominating the search engines as far as crypto is concerned.
This reputation system can increase the work being done to expand the platform, and get more people onboard BitcoinCash, which helps the community and everyone involved with BCH.
Grade Users: Reward Valuable User, Punish Bad Users, Leeches, and Giving People a Way to See if a User is Valuable or Not!
With this new system, people will be able to distinguish between a user that gives back to the platform or that just leeches from it.
One person who promotes the platform, tips generously, puts money back by boosting, curates content, and engages with the community in a meaningful way will have a drastically different score from a person who doesn't do these things but has the same amount of tips, for example.
Another common problem is that plagiarists often get huge tips even though the content isn't theirs because people don't bother scanning the content for plagiarism - and the user looks like just another user.
With a visible Reputation Score, if people see a great article under a 0 Reputation Score writer, they will automatically be suspicious and are much less prone to being tricked.
This will also give people extra incentive to be invested into the blockchain and into the Read.Cash project, as having a higher credibility and authority score will give the writers' words more weight and influence.
What About Tips, Will Reputation Score Influence That?
My initial answer is that reputation score should not give you extra tipping benefits, it should be all about your reputation and showing your authority, credibility, and investment in the project.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't be surprised if the developers would decide that the highest the reputation of a user inside the platform, the more generous Rusty would get with that author - I wouldn't oppose this course of action either.
I think this reputation score could bring a lot of benefits not only to the platform but to the blockchain and token in general, plus it accommodates for expansion through external traffic and onboarding which is a nice plus.
The two people I know are highly involved in the development of Read.Cash as a project are @Read.Cash, of course, and @MarcDeMesel , so this time I'm tagging them both - who knows, they may find this suggestion valuable... I think we would collectively gain from this strategy, but I'm open to debate too.
Of course, it's just an idea from someone who doesn't know programming, so I don't know how complex this would be in terms of keyboard mashing, but the implications seem worth it.
Finally, I would also encourage you - the community - to discuss below as to what else should be considered with a system like this being implemented (just know that for now, it's a simple idea I've been playing with, with no ties whatsoever with the development team).
Would greatly appreciate the opinion of @Pantera and @JonicaBradley as well.
Cheers!
@MicroReylatos , @zekecuba , A-Coin, Thank you!
Hi! What can you suggest about my case, I have been marked as spam for 3 weeks already. Though i assure everything I publish is not plagiarized. I do not personally know what happened and why I am marked as spam. I am trying to recover it since I still have a lot of works to publish but it seems like it is not visible to other readers and to the random rewarder as well. Hope you could help me. Thank you!