Some time ago I was a serious contributor to the MinnowBooster White list and was actively seeking out abusers. For a while now I have not been that active as I have been busy with my own projects. Since that time I have seen the White List drifting away from its initial quality level and I have been thinking on how we could battle that.
The main thing that needs to be changed is to shift the voter reward towards a structure where reviews get a part of the vote reward. Right now 1% of the vote value goes to the inviter and 1.25% to the accept voters. I propose to shift a part of this towards a review structure where each upvote is reviewed by a group of selected reviewers.
These reviewers have 3 options:
- The post is of sufficient quality and deserves the full White List bonus.
- The post does not meet all requirements and deserves 50% of the White List bonus.
- The post is a shit post and deserves no white list bonus at all.
In order for this to work the upvote should be split in 2 parts. First the user receives the standard upvote and after reviewing he or she gets a 2nd upvote which is the White List bonus. This also means that the bonus for quality posts can be higher than it is now, since a higher payout is compensated by lower payouts for average posts and no payout for shit posts.
This will also stimulate users to improve the quality, especially if there is some form of feedback on the bonus.
Users who receive too many bad reviews get a warning and if they don’t show improvement can lose their White List status.
At the moment there are a lot of people invited who do not belong on the list and too many of those receive enough accept votes and are admitted to the White List. I have invited some clear examples of shit posters recently to see what would happen and I was shocked to see that they were accepted. This means that some of the active voters are only interested in the vote value rewards and not so much in creating a place for quality authors, which was the idea behind the White List.
In order to avoid similar behaviour by the reviewers I strongly suggest that only serious users, who have shown their commitment are chosen as reviewers.
By shifting the rewards towards a system of continuous reviewing you reward those who are willing to put their effort in and weed out low quality users.
I would be more than happy to think along on how such a system should look like and how to implement it.