Communities in Chaos - Observations & Suggestions

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Communities are not working as well as one could wish. One reason is that a large number of them approve of whatever rubbish is submitted to them. They are not watching over quality or even plagiarism. Neither are they clearly niched, and that, as I see it, is a pity. For a visitor, it is almost impossible to find an article about a certain topic; clearly niched communities would make that easier.

It is also impossible to find a specific community. They are now so many, that a systematic solution must be found for finding or searching among them. Such searching, however, is hardly possible if the communities are not keeping a relatively strict borderline around their topic or topics. Communities of the type "Everything goes" would fall outside of any attempt to create order. On the other hand, such communities tend to become a trash can for material of inferior quality no one else wants, held open only for the chance to catch points. However, I think read.cash has a plan for a solution to that: the introduction of featured communities. The trash-can-type of community will hardly become featured and then it will lose all its attraction for as well admins/moderators as authors and readers.

For a new member today, finding a community to which he or she can submit his/her writings must be a challenge. The communities are many and it's impossible to find anything among them, at that they are vaguely niched; I understand that new members enter the open doors of the trash-can-like communities. Everything goes; they are received with open arms, even if they would be plagiarists, because the community top gets a chance to share in the author's points.

This is a further reason to initiate some sort of system in the list of communities or an efficient search function. New members must have some tool to find relevant communities in their capacity of authors.

For authors, there are a couple of other problems with communities. With one of the recent changes here, the list of communities in which an article can be found is no longer available. What you see instead, is only a list of the communities to which the author himself has submitted the article. There is no chance, even for the author, to find out in which other communities his articles are! This is weird. It must be made possible.

A second flaw is that only moderators can remove articles from communities. Authors also must be given the ability to remove their own articles from a community. First because communities can go astray, and second, and even more important, anyone can submit an article to any community, even without the author's knowledge. Then, the least one must require, is that the author has a chance to see where his articles are, and that he without any specific effort can remove them, should he so desire.

Another problem with communities is to find something once being inside them. Some of them are so full of material that navigation there is impossible - and that happens rather quickly. Already 25-30 articles there make it messy. The only chance to keep that manageable is to have very few articles there. That is disadvantageous from other points of view, so I suggest the introduction of subsections in communities, and perhaps even sub-subsections. That would eliminate the need of dividing communities into two or more each time they get too full. Just imagine how useful in for instance a community whose topic is history!

Finally, I hope all members are aware that if you open a boosted article, you still come to the dummy article, where comments give no points and views and thumbs up are meaningless for the author. This is also the case if you open an article from the author's profile or from the three links at the bottom of each article. That's why I presently, in the end of my articles, include a reference - in bold text - to the same article inside a community, where all these things count. Just open the article by clicking that link before you comment or give thumbs up.

UPDATE: Read.cash just launched Featured communities. That is changing certain things. https://read.cash/@Read.Cash/featured-community-rules-79af32fb

To be sure to get points for your comments and make thumbs up worthwhile, please open the article via this link: https://read.cash/@Mictorrani/communities-in-chaos-observations-suggestions-a95131ad

Copyright © 2020 Meleonymica/Mictorrani. All Rights Reserved.

(If you liked this, please consider leaving a tip, either here or via CoinTr.ee)

You find all my writings on Read.Cash, sorted by topic, here.

Read also:

Different Versions of Same Articles in Read.Cash

Communities: Announcement & Invitation

How I, as a Moderator, Check for Plagiarism

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Comments

Each articles that is submitted to communities should be sorted by the admins. It is a sore in the eye to see useless or rubbish articles everywhere, not that I'm being judgemental but just stating my opinion.

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3 years ago

You are right. I am doing that in my communities. In fact, I reject most submissions, approve just a few. Too much is worthless.

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3 years ago

Yeah, specially if some have useless contents.

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3 years ago

I totally agree with you on every point. accept about limiting how many articles are in a community. A decent search function and or more options on how to display them should help a lot.

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3 years ago

Yes, that would help, Then it is not all that important to limit the number of articles.

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3 years ago

যখন তোমার ভালোবাসা কেউ বুঝবে না,তখন বুঝবে কেমন লাগে।ভালোবাসা খুব খারাপ মানুষ মূল্যও দিতে পারে না আর এতে আরও মানুষের জীবনটা নষ্ট হয়ে যায়।

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3 years ago

Thank you for giving your comment, but I don't think it has much to do with my article. (Yes, I understand what you write.)

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3 years ago

Thank you

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3 years ago

Your article is nice that makes me more knowledgble. Your writing skill is aslo good. I think you will make it again.

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3 years ago

Just a heads up: for a next few days articles will seem to be in a bit of chaos, but it's a part of the plan to eventually merge all article submissions into one (one discussion, one link, etc...)

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3 years ago

Ok. Good to now in advantage, thank you for the information.

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3 years ago

You wrote that so well you should be working for read.cash! I hope the moderators appreciate this article and pass your suggestions along. I too was frustrated a bit that I couldn’t search for a specific type of community so I ended up with the anything goes type now I’m reconsidering where I put my submissions after reading this

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3 years ago

Read.cash has been appreciative so far, some things I have suggested have come to be. I will take a look at your posts. If I have any suggestion, I'll let you know.

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3 years ago

Thanks a lot sir, you just hit the nail on the head, personally I have been having a lot of issues so far with my community, people keep submitting articles that has no relation to the community and in different languages that I can't verify it's content. Then again I think it would be a good idea of the read.cash team would add more functionality to community moderators so they can keep things in check, like adding the functionality where a moderator can specify how many articles can be submitted per day for each user because I notice one person can submit about 20 articles a day into my community and I would have to go through all 20 while also going through articles submitted by others... Also I think moderators should be able to say who gets to join their community and who gets to post to it, and they should be able to remove users who violate the community rules.

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3 years ago

If one cannot decide who joins the community, after all joining is essentially thought for readers, one should be able to say who gets to post in it. I hope read.cash will turn up here and read your comment; all your suggestions are good.

Do you know you can "mute" users submitting too much rubbish you don't want anyway? There is a button for "mute user" where you approve, reject or skip an article.

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3 years ago

Thanks for the tip. Does muting means for me or the community? In the last case, the other moderators aren't confronted with it either. I am not fond of muting but it might be necessary.

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3 years ago

No, that comment was meant to @phavvy, who wanted to get rid of some posters. (Her long post above) It had nothing at all to do with you. I'm sorry if this message came somehow wrong here.

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3 years ago

Why can't you verify what is written? I translate so you can do the same or change your rules. You can accept only one language if that's easier for you. Daily more communities are born. There's no need to accept everything.

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3 years ago

What you say is right, but it doesn't help to say that you only accept for instance English. They send all sorts of languages anyway. Nobody cares much for the rules. Do they even read them?

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3 years ago

It does help because you can reject straight away. If you accept all languages it means to us: load the post - copy-paste it - translate - comment. With a slow connection like mine this takes a lot of extra time.

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3 years ago

Which is your community?

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3 years ago

I made a list of authors which I divided into probations, pre whitelist, whitelist, blacklist and reasons for everything so that I will remember. I will never accept my blacklist again except if they show improvement on what I want to read, but then they will be under my probation list first which mean I need to do an extra check-up. I use google translation for easier understanding if I need to. As long as the articles are not related, it is a reject but if it is good for me then I will give suggestions for which community to submit to. I believe @read.cash will be giving more functionality over time but now, we can try to be more functional ourself.

I do not mind whoever wants to join in the community as long as the rules follow for the good of all but I would like it if I can remove a user that is confirmed a spammer from the community. I think this one is another level of @read.cash plan. They are still in step 2 now. There is still a long way to go.

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3 years ago

A search function within the community section or seeing yours at the top would already be helpful. It's nearly impossible to find your own communities back if you want to change the settings or moderate.

The high amount of communities, or even three, added make it impossible already to read all replies. If you switch it needs to load again which is annoying with a slow connection. I find it strange a comment or thumb up underneath "article" doesn't count.

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3 years ago

It is impractical to divide comments. All comments should be visible in every place where the article is displayed. It is also not good that thumbs up, views, etc are counted for each version of the article separately. And the dummy (Article) is a special problem - it shouldn't be there at all. That is difficult to change though. As I have understood it after my discussions with read.cash, everything is built on the dummy, which was the only version at first.

You mention something else here I forgot to bring up in the article, that a user should have his own communities easy to find. Just as you say, trying to find them in the list is very tiresome now, and it will just be worse for every day if the present system is kept.

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3 years ago

If we click on the moderation queue, we will be able to find the community we are on but there will be a lot of clicking back and forth just to find one community. Now I just realize that @read.cash has made a separated tab for the community that are featured, joined, abandoned and few more.

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3 years ago

You have well detailed the problems and suggested well thought solutions to them. I personally agree with your suggestions and hope something is done about it or else the community system will be a mess

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3 years ago

Yeah, we will see now what featured communities will lead to. In theory it sounds fine, but theory and practice are sometimes two different things.

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3 years ago

That's true, if it must be implemented it must be practical and enforceable. Have they started the implementation yet?

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3 years ago

It's going on. One of my communities was the first to be featured, I think. But evaluation is going on.

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3 years ago

I got that, i received a notification for my rejected community because of the name that have read.cash as it's root. It is really hard for me to lose that community, so i created a new community and submitted all my articles there. I don't know if that will make it considerable

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3 years ago

Perhaps it does. I don't know exactly how they work. Which community is that?

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3 years ago

This case have been addressed by readcash executives. They've given strict rules and regulations to curb the approval of illicit and posts that parents useful.

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3 years ago

Yes, we will hope it really works as well in practice too. But it sounds promising.

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3 years ago

Indeed. Some community is not active or either they active but not totally checking the articles. And i think read cash should be erased the "create new community", it should be limited community like 10 community.

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3 years ago

I don't think that would resolve anything. It would be too much for those 10 communities to handle.

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3 years ago

I was just planning to break down my communities for easier navigation. It is suggested by one of my moderator. I do not know what will happen next but I hope this work out for me and the community.

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3 years ago

It is very hard to do anything when they change everything every second day. I have myself pushed for some of the changes, but sometimes very profound changes come too sudden. Be aware that the rule that you may have an article in only one community will reduce your number of articles, it can even in one strike make a featured community unfeatured, because the number of articles are reduced to less than 10. It's not reasonable to think that everyone there will choose to keep their articles in just that community. The moderation work later will be less also when people cannot submit an article to dozens of communities, but that is just an advantage. It is more the retroactive effect that might cause trouble, especially with no time to try to handle it in an organised way.

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3 years ago

I have noticed the 10 articles minimum for each community. I tried creating a new community but it seems that it is not allowed anymore. I think I can understand the reason. I have to cut down the community I currently have to just one topic and yet I still am not sure if it will fit into their requirements. I only wish that they remove the unnecessary communities soon, including mine if it does not fit in. At least I can try to work on my post and forget all about moderating. Hanging on until there is a clear picture of what is going on now and then. The updates are indeed fast but if it will lead to a better chance of earning in the future, I will try my best to catch up. If I didn't make it then I would leave quietly and try to find another place where I can belong.

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3 years ago

The minimum of 10 is for a community to be considered for featured status - if it is not featured, I don't think it matters. I am more concerned over that already featured communities will lose that status because they lose too many articles. That wouldn't matter if there were a couple of weeks to reorganise things, but if it comes suddenly it can happen. So, for this step, I think there should be admitted some little time to adjust. It is not always easy to decide where to keep an article either. I don't have mine spread out all that much, but some of them are in a couple of communities, at times taken there by someone else than me, and some consideration is needed to decide what should stay where.

Yes, if things change in a way where I don't feel I can work satisfactorily, then I'll not hesitate to leave. But that's not actual now. I think this site has potential, if it is just not destroyed by abuse - or by that measures against abuse make it too difficult to handle.

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3 years ago

I think it would be good to combine Topics and Communities. So you get communities suggested to submit, based on the topics you setup. Something along the lines.

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3 years ago

Yes, perhaps that would be a way to go.

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3 years ago

I just finished to read your post ; I should have done it before posting my suggestion about communities merging.

I better understand your view, and with answers to my post I agree with you : subsection as subreddit in communities may be able to solve this problem.

Let's see what's going on in future.

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3 years ago

It's okay. The heavy influx of new articles all the time makes it is easy to miss something. Yes, I think subsections would be great, I even think they are necessary if the communities shall be able to serve their purpose in the future.

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3 years ago