This rule will only punish first-time users that carefully tried to contribute something useful. The reward leecher will know the rules in and out to optimize their rewards vs time spent.
If you want to grow you need to take special care of new users.
If it is because of the workload of moderators then the rule could apply to members with more then 5+ contribution.. by then they should have understood or are just too stupid too do.
This rule is specifically aimed against 70% of our contributors which are abusers trying to steal rewards from legit users. Dealing with them takes too much time, and that time would only grow as the time goes on. Every time a contribution is rejected, a moderator will provide a good explanation to why that was so they can improve in the future.
Any refusal of the moderator will force the author to drop his hands. The author will think, and where is the guarantee that my next contribution will not be rejected? Why would I work so that the moderator put everything in the basket? So you lose a lot of authors and among them there can be very good authors. Because - once again I repeat - creativity and tedious design have nothing in common - these are two opposites.
How do we define "abusers" in this context? That's not to say that I don't believe that you're telling the truth about the number of people who are attempting to get their hands in your pie; I absolutely believe that at least 70% of the submissions to Utopian are intended to do the bare minimum of effort to qualify with whatever rules are in place – but how does Utopian define "abusers?"
That's kind of an important question, because there is a difference between people submitting low quality content because that's what they have to offer or that's what they think the project needs, and people deliberately submitting low quality content just to try to slide by the moderators. The first group can be rehabilitated; they have good intent. The second group is absent good intent and have no interest in being rehabilitated.
If Utopian has discovered means by which you can distinguish these two, given that they have identical content, I would be very interested in discovering this mechanism.
"Abusers" in this case would be, mostly Indonesian, users submitting copy-pasted google translate submissions, google translated submissions with some words changed, users stealing tutorials, assets. Basically anything that goes against our rules that isn't just low quality content.
We actively try to find a way to find these without damaging the experience of other users, but as of now, this is the best choice we believe we could make moving forward. This decision could easily be revoked in the future if the situation presents itself.
I would definitely say that those fall into the category of people that I would refer to as "abusers."
But, I note carefully, it's not against the rules to submit low quality content – the rules simply define what will be accepted. The current change in rules doesn't really affect this kind of abuser, except to require that they submit a longer section of Google translated text. Continuing to steal tutorials from other sites (I assume, because stealing from other Utopian users would be hideously obvious – though I suppose I should allow for that possibility, too) and the like will not be affected at all.
And the moderators will still have to comb through it to recognize that there is a problem.
I'm on board with recognizing that the current state of affairs need not be permanent, and allowing for that is good. But I'm not sure that the current solutions really address the problem.
Like I said, it's not my problem to solve – for which I am thankful. But as an interested user of the platform in general, I have some tiny stake in seeing that it's done well and some interest in my own work, which in theory falls within the Balla wick of things that Utopian is traditionally supposed to support, actually being supported by Utopian.
I hope that is a relatively reasonable position to state.
I agree with the analysis of the problem . But this rule will not hurt the "Abusers" it will hurt mostly the first time users. People that contribute the first or seconed time. Those new users that might be very valuble to the growth in the furture. "Abusers" likly know the rules and also how to bend them to there advantage.
scrolling through this thread just describes my condition right now with an utopian contribution