Some plans for communities

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I think it's about time to share some plans for our near future.

As you know, some time ago we've launched the point system on read.cash along with the read.cash fund. This was a really cool development for us, because suddenly there was a big influx of new users. You can easily guess where the point system went live:

Though it solved one problem (stagnation of read.cash), it brought a new problem: the spam....

Obviously, when you tell people "Hey, we're going to pay you for articles", all that some people can hear is: "Hey, they're paying for letters, let's just find a good source of letters to copy from". So, they start producing trash content at a break-neck pace.

Well, we've tried building a system that detects if an article (or rather its parts) appears somewhere on the Web. That definitely solved the problem with copied content, but also that led to unending string of fights with authors (public here on read.cash, on Reddit and in our inbox, Twitter, everywhere) who wanted to publish their content in many places at the same time. (I don't really see the point in that, but OK)

One proposed solution was to leave only the "OC" (Original Content) mark if the content is detected as exclusive and do nothing if content is not original. We thought about it, but it didn't seem like a solution at all. I mean that won't stop any spammers.

You have to understand that these people aren't bad per se, they just want to earn money and don't know of any better way, so they copy articles or comments in hopes of getting paid.

Our big goal of course is to channel their energy into something more productive, but so far the only thing we can try to do is to stop them, because spam prevents read.cash fund from growing (no, seriously, that's not a guess or something, we know for sure that it can be bigger, but not with that amount of spam).

So, that got us thinking.

Removing the point system didn't seem right at all, since we strongly believe that authors should be rewarded and the previous system where only those who write about Bitcoin Cash get tips from other users of Bitcoin Cash didn't seem to do it (which is what all our predecessors like yours.org and honest.cash did... and they aren't going anywhere, frankly).

The point system and the fund solve that well, but they also have an unintended consequence of financing the spammers.

We've thought long and hard. We threw away hundreds of ideas on how to stop it. We can't of course personally moderate all of read.cash ourselves - we're a very small team (just a few guys) and we can't possibly read 1,000+ comments and 250+ articles each day.

Sometimes it's not even possible even if we had unlimited time - I don't speak Bengali and I can't verify the claims about some Bengali articles being copy-pasted from somewhere...

Looks surely beautiful, but is it spam?..

Sure, we can use Google Translate, but then there are claims about content being of poor quality and how would you judge that?

Then we remembered that we do have something called "Communities", which many of you haven't even noticed up until now.

Communities have admins and moderators and actually some of them are keeping pretty clean pages right now, without any pay. (More on the pay for moderators later)

We should use their power for good and we should stimulate them, we decided. Then came a lot of days when we went back and forth thinking about the way communities can help us in reaching our goals.

(Just in case you missed it - our goal is to make as many people use Bitcoin Cash as possible)

Finally, about a week ago a plan crystallized that should become "the read.cash of the future".

Our plan

Step 1: we'll upgrade communities to first class citizens on read.cash, meaning that you'll see us actively promoting communities on the main page.

A sneak peek into the future homepage

As you can see, there's "Crypto and tech (c20c)" community staring you right in the face, between two articles that weren't as active in communities.

During this first step if an article receives an upvote or a tip on a community page (as opposed to via the article itself) it would get a blue community link on the main page (hint to moderators: upvote good stuff on your community page). We might even add some direct links to interesting communities on the homepage too.

Step 2: we'll turn off points for non-community-submitted articles. So, only if you have submitted your article to a community and your submission was approved you'll get the points.

That should really stimulate people to submit articles to communities and use them more.

Comments will also bring points only if you write them to articles inside of communities.

Cherry on top: moderators of communities will be getting 20% of points accumulated by authors/commenters via posts in their community. Authors will get the same amount of points, 20% goes on top.

Note though that only first approved submission will be bringing the points to users and moderators (to avoid the situation where a user submits to one hundred of his own communities and gets 100 times the points).

Step 3: we'll develop the guidelines for what we consider a good community. It won't be anything too complex, mostly it'll be about the fact that the community moderators should keep their communities clean from illegally copy-pasted useless articles and from useless comments (especially copied from other comments), also keeping the approval times reasonable.

At this stage we'll also redirect spam reports to community admins and moderators.

By the way there will be an option to make community pre-moderated (like now), post-moderated (everything is allowed, but something might be removed later) and pre-moderated, but only for first few posts of a new author or commenter.

Step 4: we'll start assigning a "featured" status to communities that uphold the high standards from the previous step.

Only postings to these featured communities will be getting points.

In other words only first approved submission to a featured community will be given points.

(Remember though, that you can always create your own community easily! Even if its just a community for you only)

The future

Hopefully, by this step we'll see spam in total decline, because it will be in community moderators best interests to keep spam at bay.

Any featured communities where the quality will decline will be stripped of the "featured" status with ability to re-apply later, of course.

We will, of course, give moderators a whole arsenal to help them (such as full feeds of everything that happens in community, results of our own internal "copy-paste" detection, abilities to mute users for certain periods for rules violation or even block users from participating in communities, detailed history of users' rules violations and previous punishments).

But all of these tools need to be developed, because they don't exist yet.

We really hope that it will solve the problem about the fact that we can't moderate 1,000+ comments per day (and growing daily), but an army of moderators with good tools can.

Commercial appeal

There will probably be one more slightly unpleasant thing. Some communities will be giving more points to authors than others, despite being equal in quality.

It really depends on commercial appeal of the community.

The majority of our fund will come from advertising on read.cash and of course there are much more companies willing to advertise on some specific communities close to their business than on any generic "My life" community.

It doesn't mean that "My life" is bad... it's just the law of supply and demand. If there's demand for advertising on certain communities, it's in everybody's interest to promote that community (because that money will also finance other, less commercially appealing communities).

Why is it so slow?

So, these are our plans for some upcoming weeks. Maybe even months. It's really hard to change read.cash right now, because we need to test everything rigorously to make sure we don't break something and lose some precious data in the process. That's why we can't move faster - because even at this pace, something like this happens. We should note thought, that despite the fact that communities looked messed up in the process - nothing was lost.

In the early days of read.cash we could just scrap something and build it from scratch. That's why we could move much faster, but right now we need to be really careful.

Topic explosion

We really think that this change would bring read.cash to a new level, because right now we have two big problems: one is about the spam and people hunting for easy money without any regard to how much trash they produce along the way, and the second one is about topic explosion.

When you visit read.cash homepage right now, you'll get overwhelmed with information. There are articles about everything. That's good. But it also creates overload. Maybe you aren't that interested in cryptocurrencies or sports or gaming, yet you are very interested in startups. There should be a way to make read.cash much more personal, much more about you and your interests.

Personalization

That's where subscriptions to communities come into play. Our home page will feature your subscribed communities much more than others and you'll have an easy way to hide content from communities that you aren't that much interested in.

Along with our new quick registration system (it's less than 20 seconds now probably, and we're not done optimizing the process yet), it should become pretty easy to personalize the homepage to your tastes.

Though, as with everything, we have our plans, but life has something else up its sleeves. We are always surprised by how our plans are destroyed by reality after we roll something out.

Let's see how this one goes.

In the meantime, we have crossed 3,500 users on read.cash. Thanks to Bitcoin Cash low fees, almost everyone gets to try Bitcoin Cash, even if its just a few cents.

SpaceX might be launching some rockets, but we seem to be heading into space too.

Thanks to all of our users, writers and commenters!

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Sponsors of Read.Cash
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Comments

Thank you read.cash; this seems a very positive and useful development. Looking forward to it......

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4 years ago

Well this is what I call a good decision from the Team👏I was away for some time from read.cash and when I come back I really saw a good development with a lot of posts but also a lot of non quality and too much spam in the comments only with purpose to get points to benefit from the Fund! The next steps the team have taken a good ones and I have a community and I approve only quality articles and until now I had success with this incentive the platform will have much success💪 and I will be here to help the team!

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4 years ago

It's a turn around restructuring of read.cash for better future. The present situation is like "garbage in, garbage out"- poor quality articles and comments in, poor rating by potential sponsors of read.cash outside there. It's high time we addressed this situation

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4 years ago

Please don't copy comments from other people - this is a warning, next time - ban.

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4 years ago

i dont understand at all what kind of powers are the moderators of a community going to have over my articles. Is it the first submitted community going to have more powers? Is the experience for an article going to be different based on from which community i opened it?

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4 years ago

Moderators would be able to hide some comments and each submission to each community will have it's own discussion (just like it is on Reddit, for example), however all hidden comments will be loadable by clicking "Show hidden comments" and it will be possible to load all other discussions from other submissions too with a click of a button.

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4 years ago

This is a really good idea, hopefully things will be OK on this platform not seeing some unnecessary comments and all.

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4 years ago

Well, it looks like it's time to find the best community to join in! Luckily, things are becoming better already. I can feel it. @Monolith, will you guys make a community for #PoweredByMonolith posts?

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4 years ago

Doesn't the Patreon model lend itself more to cryptocurrency and smart contracting?

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4 years ago

Could you clarify what you mean? I don't quite understand it.

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4 years ago

I'm suggesting a system which could used for pledging coins by the followers for 'commissioning work' etc.. E.g. many vloggers are very popular but don't have the free time to create more than 1 vid a month so some fans are willing to donate money to encourage the content they prefer to be created.

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4 years ago

Oh, that, yeah, we do have plans to extend our sponsors feature with many Patreon-like features (i.e. goals, levels, minimal pledges, communications with sponsors, etc...), but right now the issue of spam in articles and comments is far more pressing.

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4 years ago

When will these decisions be activated? Right now or planned for the next few days?

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4 years ago

Next few weeks.

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4 years ago

Fair enough. This looks like a good solution. Hopefully none can use the rules for his advantage now.

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4 years ago

Oh somebody will, somebody will. We never get tired of discovering how can people abuse any rules :)

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4 years ago

You are right for sure. We can only wait and see how will they abuse the new rules. I wish you good luck with what you are planning for the future.

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4 years ago

So if I got this right, you will only be able to monetize and earn points if any community mod approves your post?

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4 years ago

I like the idea of tying points to community, because it clarifies different roles of the money voting system (global vote with global cash) and the points voting system (local vote within the community). Probably good to explicitly indicate the relation between points and community in the user interface. Keep up the good work.

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4 years ago

Absolutely. I too think we need to better communicate the expectations - how much points can a user expect for their actions.

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4 years ago

I think its time i create a community for poetry and fiction. Nice idea with the plan to make me see only post from communities i subscribed to because i was drowning in the sea of unrelated articles to my interest. Its time to read great poetry. Cheers

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4 years ago

But I see that you write a lot about cryptocurrencies, so I do not understand that one topic has to do with another, or are poems about cryptocurrencies?

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4 years ago

I never said i didnt like articles about crypto currency. What i meant about unrelated articles are articles that do not satisfy my interest. If you check my bio then you know what interest me and thats poetry, fiction and crypto. Cheers

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4 years ago

I do admit, I am a little worried. How will communities allow the posts to get paid well and equal? Does it come from the personalized payout system? What would it mean then if the spammers create a community just exactly for spamming?

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4 years ago

What would it mean then if the spammers create a community just exactly for spamming?

See step 4. Communities that allow spam won't be featured, so they won't be given any points.

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4 years ago

I never get tired reading this article. Becasue thise are the thing we all are waiting for . Thakd for such a nice upgrate

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4 years ago

Thank you read cash for describing the plan well. Day by day users are increasing. Hopefully it will become a large platform.

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4 years ago

Good explanation and changes in the coming weeks or months, however I think it does not fail to echo the fact that we cannot publish the articles we post here in other places or how that may affect us in any way! Anyway the general idea looks quite interesting and promising, I feel like there might even be some healthy competition between communities that could be quite fun...

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4 years ago

I understand all that you wrote about on the upcoming features at read.cash, but my concern is that will the community moderators be readily available to approve articles on time. This is similar to the way bitlanders are operating and it can get frustrated sometimes when you have to wait for about a week or two before your article can be approved even if your article is world class.

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4 years ago

Great point! The thing is that the first approval gives you the point. So if you submit to community A and community B and community B approves you faster - community B moderators get the points and you get the points. So, both groups have in their best interest to approve you fast enough. You can submit to as many as you want any time you want. So if both of these communities take their time - you can submit to community C. Frankly, I don't think communities that don't approve articles on time would survive. Does it sound like a plan?

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4 years ago

Yes this is a good plan, but what if i decided to create a community for my articles what will i get, will others join my community?

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4 years ago

If you can uphold the quality standards for submissions to your own community - sure, you can get it featured too and get points for your own submissions too. Would people join it? That depends on a lot of factors - how interesting is your topic, how active you are in promoting it on read.cash and outside. Frankly, promotion of communities is beyond the scope of what we can offer for now - too many other things to do :) But surely some interesting topic is bound to get some attention from users.

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4 years ago

Am writing on love and relationship and would love to have my article collection in a community hopefully others will join. Am a practising marriage and relationship counselor and have much to write about love and relationship

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4 years ago

You are totally free to create your community or communities at any time: https://read.cash/communities just click the button.

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4 years ago

I am a new author in the read.cash community. My first experience with this community has been very compelling, before now I never had a BCH wallet but when I joined this community it became clear that I had to acquire one of which I did and I earned that same day. I really commend the effort of the read.cash team in trying to build a better community around BCH. I sure would comply with all rules as best I can. Thanks for the heads up. Then again I wanted to ask is there a specific point value for each activity or those it vary.

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4 years ago

Welcome!

The point price depends on how many points people earn per day - each day the fund distributes 0.5% of the total amount and it is divided by all the points earned that day. It is also personalized - if you provide high quality content you can get higher price per point, while if you are spamming - you'd get lower pay than average.

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4 years ago
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4 years ago

I like the idea of decentralizing the moderation of read.cash. Hope this works well, but I'm still of the opinion that points for comments should be lower or just go away altogether as it seems like comment spam is the real problem.

Also, how does one stop being a moderator? I created the "writing" community but I'm not sure I want to continue as there are just way too many articles that get submitted. I tried to leave but it says as the only moderator I can't leave.

$ 0.10
4 years ago

The comment spam will be communities moderators' problem too, because they will be responsible for cleaning up the comment section of their submission. Basically it'll work like Reddit's comments: each time you submit a link you get a new set of comments and community mods are responsible for keeping it clean. Unlike Reddit, there will be a button to load all comments from all submissions of this article.

Regarding "Writing", yeah, we'll need to figure out what to do with such communities. Should we make them as abandoned? Delete them? Give them out to anyone willing.. Any ideas?

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4 years ago

Also, it's really hard sometimes to tell if something is a spam comment so I'd imagine moderators will have trouble identifying which comments are genuine versus which ones are just trying to earn some points. But yes, nothing wrong with someone trying to get their hands on BCH either, so I guess it's a question of where you draw the line and what you consider to be helping your overall goal versus hurting it. Interesting stuff. Glad it sounds like you guys have been doing the deep thinking needed to figure it all out. Hope you're having as much fun with your site as I am =)

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4 years ago

That definitely is. But that's the idea. When you have a more tightly knit community - you can surely have some local accepted standards of what quality of discussion is OK and what is not, so that you can hide low-quality comments according to your local standards. I imagine the level of speakers in some third-country community will be generally lower due to lower education standards, for example, which would be acceptable. However a community something like "Nobel laureates in literature" would have a much lower tolerance towards poor quality comments :)

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4 years ago

Think I'm understanding a little better now. As far as "writing", I think it would be fine for a moderator to have the option to delete or hand over moderation of a community to someone else. I think it would be fine to just delete the writing one and someone else can create a new one if they wish. I didn't realize how many people would tag their posts as writing but I guess every post on read.cash could be tagged as writing lol.

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4 years ago

Yeah, that's the problem with "Writing" section too. It was created specifically for writing advice, but almost anything goes there :)

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4 years ago

As for the communities - yeah, we'll add a button to delete it. I think it's a necessary one.

$ 0.50
4 years ago

Be very careful: introducing advertisement breaks the expectations for the platform to be paid-for by users. I will not stay on read.cash if it shifts revenue from fee-for-service to revenue from advertisement.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

I'll have to respond to that with an article :) stay tuned.

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4 years ago

That's an interesting idea to moderate all the spam but there is one thing you mentioned that I don't like. Advertisements. I don't know, the platform's point was (to me, at least) that it's all funded by the users themselves, so bringing in additional revenue from advertisements kinda goes against that.

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4 years ago

I'll have to respond to that with an article :) stay tuned.

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4 years ago

The fact is I still did not figure out how to report spam. Not private, not as a community. I think it's good we all give a hand here.

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4 years ago

I have enjoyed very much writing and reading the articles here on read.cash and so anything that encourages authors to post their articles and protects them is valuable and worth doing. Thank you.

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4 years ago

That's very nice of you read.cash I'm so impressed ready this write up we are moving higher

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4 years ago

Wow this is very great

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4 years ago

It's really one of the great initiatives to help the platform grow.

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4 years ago

The meaning of the bengali sentence that you have provided in your article is "When your ex-girfriend is your boss" Firstly I want to clear that I dont support spam. I Just want to clear something as I was the one who requested to add Bengali language on this platform. Bengali is a mixed language with english,urdu,Hindi,Arabic and many other languages.Sometimes google translator makes it difficult to translate also. I have brought about 20 to 30 Bengali people on this platfrom. As per my knowledge everyone is doing their best. But you have taken a great decision for communities.I support it and respect it.I hope you won't face more problem again!

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4 years ago

Yeah, I ran the phrase through Google Translate first to make sure I don't paste something offensive. The point is that - personally I don't understand most of the languages on read.cash, so I can't be a moderator of who's doing something good and who's just spamming. It's not specific to Bengali, but to any language that we don't understand. That's why we need communities of native speakers to be the deciders of what's good and what's bad.

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4 years ago

I check the bengali personally that is provided in my community! Here are some people who loves their own language! And I made them moderator also so that no one can do the spam with my mother tongue.In case f this,I can assure you because we have got some well knowed doctor,some blogger of our country in this platform! So we will not let spammer to ruin our dignity by using our language.Thank you.

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4 years ago

Very interesting the article that good that every day work for the better the platform and the guidelines so that everything goes as it should be.

$ 0.00
4 years ago

This is a turn around restructuring of read.cash for better future. The present situation is like "garbage in, garbage out"- poor quality articles and comments in, poor rating by potential sponsors of read.cash outside there. It's high time we addressed this situation. Thanks.

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4 years ago

Good list here from Readcash, its high time things comes to normal. I will only advice you increase the point for article more than 500 words.

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4 years ago

i want to mention a thing as you highlight a bangla article.. if it goes copy paste protection then delete it. i have no problem in it. But i want to tell you that google translator can't translate bangla well.believe me. Bangla is my mother tongue. i can write article in bangla well but i don't write because of google translator and views.as i know if i write article in bangla, maximum people will not understand and I don't believe in google translator also.it's too funny. in facebook comment when i translate different language it shows something funny as it doesn't mean so.Thank you for reading this.

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4 years ago
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4 years ago