Head's up: featured communities will be gone
Yes, we're cancelling the features communities experiment.
This means no more points for articles and short posts in featured communities, and for moderation too. So, yes moderation becomes an unpaid work.
The "Featured" tab will be removed and replaced back with the "All" tab.
100% of daily points will be given by the random rewarder.
Affiliates still get 10% for the points their referrals get from the random rewarder and 3% for paid upvotes by their referrals.
There are a few reasons for this.
Communities became the new hideout for low quality content. We tried to make more and more rules, but often we can't even figure out what's up - where do people get this content and whether anyone even needs this content.
The amount of work. People are registering ~30-50 communities per day and that number will only raise. That means each week we'll have to review up to 350 new communities (350 first week, 700 next week, ~1400 at the end of the month, etc...) It takes a lot of time to review one, let alone 1500(!)
Often it's really-really hard to understand whether the community is of any use to anyone.
When we compare the rewards that go to people by the random rewarder to rewards that go for articles in communities - it's just terrible. The random rewarder (which in reality is an artificial intelligence, despite what the name says) really picks up great authors, like really great! Whereas featured communities often have zero views. Like total zero. Why should we sponsor this content?
We have to decline a lot of good communities, because they don't really fit the idea of a "single topic".
It's really-really-really hard for us to judge foreign language communities. Suppose we see some bad articles, but why? Is it Google Translate that is bad or is it just simply bad content?
We think that with the new rule of one submission per community bad communities will go away on their own, just lacking any content.
Why should you submit to a community then?
Because communities have subscribers. Those subscribers see things from communities immediately on their homepage. Which means bigger audience for you.
So, submit for the audience/exposure, not for the points.
Why should you be a moderator then?
If you have to ask, maybe you shouldn't. Being a moderator is hard and it wasn't paying that well either. Good moderators already earn points from their own articles and comments, so they should only do it if they feel like.
Moderators' jobs should be easier now though with the fact that you can only submit to one community and nobody would be submitting just because it's a featured community.
Hopefully, this will start a "survival of the fittest" mechanism for the communities.
Why didn't you tell me this earlier?
Frankly, we didn't know. Our plan was that featured communities will solve all of our spam problems, but in reality they became endless grounds for arguments about whether some community should be approved or not. All this time is better used improving the site. Also, our small experiment with the random rewarder turned out really well.
Is it hard to get rewards from the random rewarder? No, really not, sometimes it takes 7 hours from your first article until the rewarder starts sending points your way... and when you get them, you'll enjoy them!
Right now the random rewarder picked 732 users that are worth supporting and this number grows every day.
Considering the ramdom rewarder already works as a way to earn cash by simply having an audience, this works too. No need to scramble and check which is which.