What would you tell the Wayfarer Community Specialist? Coming Soon™️

PkmnTrainerJ-INGPkmnTrainerJ-ING Posts: 5,125 Ambassador

As a frequent user of the Ingress forums, I can tell you how much the community there has improved since we got NianticThia as the Ingress Community Specialist.

They’ve been great. Taken on Community feedback, participated in live events and everything. We have had event calendars, clear communications, it’s been fantastic.

Way back before their appointment to the role I posted this thread


for them to read through, and to their credit, they did.

This allowed the community a focal point to voice what they wanted from the new Community Specialist and air any grievances.

I thought the same thing may be helpful for the future Wayfarer equivalent given that the job posting has now closed. Please be aware that it took about 4 months for NianticThia to be appointed after the Ingress job you posting closed so don’t expect it to be super quick.

I’ve put what the Wayfarer Community Specialist role entails from the LinkedIn job posting below:

  • Build trust and motivate engagement in the Wayfarer community
  • Identify, amplify, and support the creation of high-quality user generated content
  • Work with the support team to provide consistent guidance in a cohesive voice across all platforms
  • Measure, monitor and build detailed qualitative and quantitive sentiment reports identifying bugs, feedback trends and highlighting opportunities for improvements
  • Collate feedback from Wayfarer Explorers and represent their voice in meetings with cross-functional partners of varying levels and job functions
  • Perform key tasks including (but not limited to) workflow and process management, issue (bug) tracking and prioritisation, documenting process, writing user-facing content, product support and data analysis
  • Constantly look for solutions to problems and evaluate ways to more efficiently and effectively lead the global support processes
  • Provide support for live Wayfarer events

Comments

  • PkmnTrainerJ-INGPkmnTrainerJ-ING Posts: 5,125 Ambassador

    I am just pasting across my comment here about timings from the posting about the role and the appointing of the Ingress equivalent just so we can have some kind of idea when we may get a Wayfarer Community Specialist

  • Kawhinot-INGKawhinot-ING Posts: 189 ✭✭✭

    Two things to focus on -- Find a way to reduce the **** nominations that are getting worse all the time. So either a test to be able to nominate points of interest or some type of alert that pops up during the nomination process that advises that certain nominations just don't qualify (i.e a school, a tree, a regular street, a big box store, etc.), raising the level in-game for nominators to cut back on less experienced nominators, etc.

    And find a way to ensure that nominations don't vanish into queues or voting streams that never get decisioned. For example, at some point of time, a nomination is auto-upgraded within the system to ensure that it doesn't sit there indefinitely (ie. after a year).

  • ShoopM-INGShoopM-ING Posts: 28 ✭✭✭

    The system needs to adapt to its own meta over time.

    For one example, there are locations that take less than a week for a non-upgraded submission to go through, and some that take over two years. Neither of these is a good thing. Taking too little time encourages clogging the system with the same bad nominations over and over until they pass. For long wait times - besides the obvious frustration - ancient submissions "aren't in the game" and therefore can be submitted over and over by different people, not knowing that others already submitted it (say) 2, 5, 7, 11, 13 and 17 months ago. This also clogs the system. I feel it should prioritize older nominations at the expense of those in fast areas (sorry, folks).

    Next, the meta is maturing. There are fewer and fewer "obvious" things to nominate over time, and people still have nominations to use, so their standards get lower and lower. This fills the queue with borderline nominations, which is frustrating to reviewers. Besides having to review more bad nominations, there are enough questionable ones that perhaps it's harder to get agreements, thereby slowing down upgrades. I'm not sure what to do about this one, though. Maybe everyone gets fewer automatic nominations every 2 weeks, but can earn more with some number of reviewing agreements (in addition to upgrades), and more for their own submissions that are accepted. Maybe someone whose nominations get consistently bad ratings gets a "nomination cooldown." I don't mean rejections at 2.7 stars average, but like 1.3 stars. The really bad ones.

    Speaking of the meta, acknowledge that there is one. Officially, we're not supposed to know about L14/L17 cells, or the 20 meter rule. But not knowing about them really messes with the nomination experience. Someone can spend months (or more) waiting for a nomination to go through, it gets accepted, but doesn't appear in their game. Or worse, they used an upgrade on it. And there's no official explanation why.

    I have lots of other thoughts, but these are top of mind.

  • Rodensteiner-PGORodensteiner-PGO Posts: 1,705 ✭✭✭✭✭

    this cannot be:

    Submitted: 22.07.2021, Portal review complete: 28.07.2021

    5 km down the road:


  • Gazzas89-PGOGazzas89-PGO Posts: 2,619 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Don't copy and paste responses, actually read the posts, come up with own answers as expalin where possible

  • sogNinjaman-INGsogNinjaman-ING Posts: 3,313 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Three things:

    Good luck in your knew role - you will need it.

    Don't get frustrated when those easy, obvious and "good for the community / game" suggestions you pass on to Niantic just sit there gathering dust because they will require Niantic to spend a bit of cash or time and effort implementing them.

    Don't take the trolls and abuse coming your way get you down - remember a) this is supposed to be a fun set of games and b) you can always walk away when you want.

  • MargariteDVille-INGMargariteDVille-ING Posts: 2,848 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I would tell them...

    The 2020 general holistic criteria, and scattered tidbits of more specific guidance - cause way too much angst between nominators and reviewers. The random rejection reasons in nominator's emails also add friction between nominators and reviewers. People get very frustrated - doing something that should be FUN.

    Much of this angst could be relieved by better messaging in the nomination process. For example, in real time for the nominator:

    • Check a map, and give a message if the chosen location seems to be invalid (private property, emergency services, school), with options "Continue nomination" and "Exit nomination".
    • Scan the primary picture for faces or license plates, again giving a message and the option to continue or exit.
    • Spellcheck, of course (not autocorrect).


  • BleedBoss-PGOBleedBoss-PGO Posts: 269 ✭✭✭

    I'd honestly tell him/her to quit the job unless he/she is being very very well paid. Why should anyone have to tank the hatred and animosity that's built in this community due to the incapacity of the official Niantic team? This person would have to answer hundreds of posts, look into them, analyze them, and the worst part is, he/she would probably have no power to change anything because he/she still has to report findings and propose solutions to the higher-ups.


    And we all know how much the higher ups care.

  • JP81SayGo-PGOJP81SayGo-PGO Posts: 180 ✭✭✭

    The goal is to clear the backlog as well.

    In order to clear the backlog, I think we need more reviewers than we have now.

    In order to do that, we first need to get people who haven't experienced it before to touch it.

    If people who didn't do it because they didn't know how to or it looked too difficult could do it while talking to the wayfarer team on the spot, wouldn't they be interested?


    Because people who only do reviews without nominations are pretty unique.


    Of course, if we're going to have an event, I'd be happy to invite influencers from the country of release, as well as journalists from gaming magazines, on the condition that they write about it and introduce it.

  • Rodensteiner-PGORodensteiner-PGO Posts: 1,705 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Niantic doesnt need more reviewers, they need to tread the existing reviewers good, give them incentive to review, and educate them to make proper reviews. Thus, the Criteria has to be outlined much better, that has to be done by people that actually use wayfarer all over the world.

    And here is the problem: The Persons in Charge do not review, and do not submit (on a scale that would needed).

    Also, The Persons in Charge "Upper-Persons-In-Charge" do not even know what the system is, and what their Officials are doing.

    In a Nutshell: Instead of making mediocre changes, the whole system would need a complete rework, and maybe some new personell up higher than the good people that are here at the front-office-desk

  • spiesr-INGspiesr-ING Posts: 313 ✭✭✭✭

    Pitching your personal desires for a rework of the system isn't good advice for a new Community Manager, as they won't have any ability to make a rework happen or direct how one would be done.

  • MargariteDVille-INGMargariteDVille-ING Posts: 2,848 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited July 2021

    Well I was trying to say how Niantic could communicate better. But here's a list of miscommunications / noncommunication, where I don't offer solutions. A communications expert could solve / reduce a lot of these quickly.

    • Niantic doesn't give much information about the Wayfarer process, to prevent bots and other cheats from "gaming the system", and to to protect their code from competitors. However, this non-communication frustrates nominators and reviewers (the people Niantic should want to woo). So Explorers observe the system, make theories on how it works, and eventually these theories are stated as fact (which may or may not be true). For example, guesses why some nominations take months longer than others, "the 20-meter rule", one nomination in voting at a time in a cell, placing pins to get pokestops, upvoting pictures to get gyms, how many reviewers a nomination needs, what causes the "no more to review" or a cooldown. (Does Niantic really want people to just set a 30-second timer?)
    • Niantic naively put out very general holistic criteria, thinking it would make sense to everyone. I think they forget that most Explorers are ONLY trying to make more to play for their own game, preferably in their own area - they don't know or care about the big picture or what kind of database Niantic is trying to build. Others really want to follow the rules, but don't understand them on an individual waypoint level.
    • Back when we were begging for rejection reasons to be put in nominators' emails, Niantic fretted that it could lead to "gaming the system". So we said, how about add a random one here and there - it'll broaden the only education many nominators ever get. Now we have nominators very upset, often hate-filled, against reviewers (sometimes Niantic too).
    • From what I understand, if someone gets an abuse warning or ban, the email doesn't tell them what they did. For example, someone could get banned for moving a pin to make a PokeStop, when they didn't know it was abuse - they were advised it was a good thing, by fellow trainers. There's not even a list anywhere, of ban-able actions.
    • Even the Wayfarer profile page - by not giving us #disagreements or #unresolved (which we've asked for, for years) - encourages guesses and third party apps to fill in the data - and again increases frustration.
    • The list of broken promises is very long. Last year Niantic promised to upload accepted pictures. Two+ years ago, they said they'd add edit agreements to the Recon badge. Even longer than that, they said they'd improve the nomination and review process. Just adding text guidance would have made a difference all these years. (I know they still say an update is coming. Don't be surprised if it isn't in 2021.)

    And also, communicate (remind us) that there are a lot of GOOD things about Wayfarer! We get to explore the world. Learn about history, engineering, culture, art, and more. See satellite view of different parts of the earth. Play hide-and-seek on streetview. Improve the board for lots of games. Make people happy when they get their acceptance email. The location challenges are a nice way to mix things up. (Perhaps even that could be mixed up, like global "park week" or "art week".)

    Also, for a new Wayfarer employee, I suggest: Make a few nominations using Ingress, and a few using PokemonGo. Review a couple hundred nominations using wayfarer.nianticlabs.com. Then install Wayfarer+, and review a couple hundred more. Then you'll have a great frame of reference, for what reviewers are saying.

    Post edited by MargariteDVille-ING on
  • PkmnTrainerJ-INGPkmnTrainerJ-ING Posts: 5,125 Ambassador

    Hi @NianticTintino Welcome to the team! Sorry to give you so much reading to do early doors! Hope you’re settling in well, and getting ready for your first AMA!

  • I think something like realising that those in other countries know their territory / culture etc. more than say, someone in Niantic's office in the USA. I've long thought that a person per major country / region of country as a reference point for Niantic would be useful. It might help explain what's interesting about British mailboxes or red phone boxes for example! Probably a volunteer who Niantic could say, hey, are these submissions popping up in your country X actually valuable? and that person can then explain why that thing is interesting in that country, or why they're absolute bobbins.

    I do wonder if there's something to be done around automating / filtering nominations as well. How were they brought into Ingress originally? Maybe a pause on nominations for a couple of weeks, combined with a drive for reviewing? Could some candidates be automatically accepted, maybe in combination with Google Maps etc? Also definitely +1 the teaching people of what makes a good candidate, and combining all the commentary / AMAs / clarifications into one comprehensive list.

    Supporting rural candidates / low density areas / developing world. Not sure what this looks like, but as we move into a more sustainable future and (hopefully) start tackling the climate crisis better, we need to think about making the games more accessible on a micro level and less dependent on heavy car use. There's also a great opportunity to expand the game into countries with very low levels of portals but increasing access to mobile phones and decent mobile data. A lot of Africa falls into this category.

  • CipherBlakk-PGOCipherBlakk-PGO Posts: 309 ✭✭✭✭

    Niantic needs more informed and better educated reviewers. I just had a friend who I encouraged to give Wayfarer a try to help out her rural area. She failed the test and can't even try again for an entire month??? And seems to be told that next time is her last and final shot and then she's banned forever??? She'd gotten foreign things she couldn't read or understand, didn't know how to translate them because she's brand new, and was penalized severely for it. Now she's left extremely discouraged and will probably never bother again.

    WTF, Niantic. This isn't how you teach or cultivate reviewer talent, or resolve issues for rural players.

    Speaking of rural players, you need to update your criteria to make reviewers understand that it's okay and expected to be more generous in settings that have few stops around them. Everyone should be able to have a decent play experience wherever they're located in the world.

    Additionally, Niantic admins seem to be rather ban-happy based on poor evidence and comprehension. There's a trend of shouting abuse at the slightest provocation, and that needs to end.

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