Niantic tries to educate reviewers... and fails
Xmacke7x-ING
Posts: 220 ✭✭✭✭
On reddit someone posted that he got an e-mail from Niantic which informed him that he has been reviewing nominations incorrectly. the gave him the advice to look at the criteria again.
How should this vague E-mail should help. If you assume that a reviewer is doing his best effort to review correctly and got something wrong. He won't know what he did wrong. Nantic does not need him to tell that he was wrong. They have to tell hi exactly what nomination he got wrong. Educating would be something like this.
Hey Wayfinder,
you have rejected cycling trails in the past. But those nominations where within our criteria you should have accepted those trail markers.
Niantic has got to tell the reviewers what exactly they dd wrong. Unless this E-Mail is just useless
Comments
I've had three trail markers declined for temporary/seasonal display despite being a verified trail on google maps.
I know for a fact it's because of spite voting from the town up north. Tons of people from Glace Bay NS/Sydney NS submit fake stops or their homes. Nearly half of my very strong submissions are declined for hilarious reasons.
To avoid getting these useless emails, I suggest setting your home location to Toronto ON, and bonus location to New York USA. I was fortunate enough to have a free edit location on my home/bonus after my first 100 reviews more than half were fake submissions and they were getting accepted. Since moving my location my ratio has sky rocketed and I have a good review score and rarely see eevee photos in people's homes going "it's cute thx 4 upvoting"
Half rant aside if you think the company is ever going to admit fault here or comment on the situation... not gonna happen, they will avoid this like the plague.
The amount of review cooldowns I get for literally opening wayfarer with a coffee first thing in the morning to do some reviews and get "abnormal activity" on the first review is astounding lmfao.
Not surprised if this was caused by this rant below:
At this point even more people will turn away from Wayfarer.
Note: that redditor and some other commenters got their messages on May 26, 2022, just shortly after Giffard@NianticGiffard took action against 67 reviewers.
Here in Germany most people still reject falsely, and Niantic has to correct that in Nia Review.
Sadly there is no change because Niantic doesn't tell these people that they re-reviewed the contribution.
Personally I would rather see that Niantic does inform everyone that is reviewing incorrectly AND bans these reviewers if they continue that way (Ie 5 strikes)
Wouldn't it be nice if Niantic could let all reviewers know what the issues / reasons were for their "incorrect" reviews. My "correct" percentage is currently around 67% and has been for years - I'd like to improve this, but I don't know exactly where I am going wrong.
This is just a general issue from niantic
"We are giving warning/suspension/bam to your wayfarer/ingress/pokemon go account for vague reason, please read criteria/tos. We won't tell you what you've done wrong, work that out yourself"
I would guess, accept gr5, gr6, er 7 (think its 7 and 8?) post boxes, I know you won't like it, but as most casual reviewers accept these, you will have been getting hit there
All those "Edward the Second" boxes refused probably.......
Funnily enough, I had to reject one called Elizabeth the second because it was actually an Edward the 7th
to improve your percentage those bad actors that do fake reviews for various reasons should leave wayfarer.
67% is a good value in my opinion if you keep in mind that many of your reviews might not even been reviewed by a proper amount of people and thus are in the waiting line.
I think everyone is in favor of reviewer education. The problem is Niantic actively tries to avoid educating reviewers. They seem to have two reasons for this. 1) People can't learn the exact rules and use thus the information to somehow cheat. 2) Communities can decide for themselves exactly what should or shouldn't be eligible using their own local or cultural knowledge.
Okay, cool, it's their game so sure. The problem is that now they want to issue warnings or possibly even consequences for going against "rules" that they don't explicitly state. Moreover, those rules likely don't even exist based the random outcomes of appeals where two identical things result in one appeal success and one appeal failure. On top of that, they want reviewers to use their own judgement, but then penalize them for doing so.
Threatening or punishing people without telling them what they've done "wrong" makes no sense. It makes even less sense when there's ample evidence hard rules don't even exist in the first place.
@rodensteiner-ING I absolutely understand that there are issues with malicious reviewers in some parts of Germany.
In the general case, though, not everything that is approved on appeal was incorrectly rejected. It is entirely possible for reviewers to correctly reject a candidate and also for it to be correctly accepted on appeal. There is often a significant time lag between the two events, and the data available to reviewers can change dramatically. For example, I've reviewed things like statues, playgrounds, and sports fields that were in the middle of empty fields. Even with all of the information available to me (main and supporting photo, description and supporting text, street view, satellite view, web searches, and ... ugh .. . Bing maps) it was impossible to know if the submission was legitimate or not. If I was reviewing it a few months later the situation might well be different.
In fairness, you skipped the other possibility that the reviewers were correct and niantic appeal was wrong. And I don't even mean that as insult, I mean that as in human nature. There are good reviewers who pay attention to criteria, faqs that are probably better than Niantic's appeal reviewers.
To use a military analogy. The young rookie lieutenant (Niantic appeal reviewers) still outranks the grizzled enlisted sergeant (wayfarer reviewers) , but sometimes the lieutenants orders are just wrong.
Well given that I see many actual fakes as well as huge numbers of ineligible wayspots live in game, I'd say you're probably reviewing correctly and not getting agreements because other reviewers aren't.
With regard to your point 2, that really is the crux of the matter. The local community decided that those waypoints in the other thread were ineligible, and that should be that.
@Cowyn2016-PGO You are absolutely correct.
There's a common refrain here and in other forums that when an appeal is accepted then everyone who voted to reject it should be punished for bad reviewing. My goal in posting that was to point out that it's possible for both a reviewer-rejection and an appeal-acceptance to be correct, but it's also possible for the reviewer-rejection to be correct and the appeal-acceptance to be wrong. I've seen some egregious things accepted on appeal. (Not my own... it's been so long since I've had a rejection that I have noting to appeal.)
and again for @ all here - this isnt rocket science. This isnt something you can eat when you starve, and it probly wouldnt help much to people that are at war.
There is no need to reject a wandering path sign because it is glued onto something, or painted on the tree - it is there so mark a Walking Path / several walking paths that can be looked up quickly.
There is no need to reject something that wasnt photographed ideally.
There is no need at all to have never-ending discussions about wether Niantic isnt doing something right, is isnt doing anything at all.
It is what it is.
Just hit resubmit and have a great day.
Niantic has weighted the risk of
(a) giving detailed info to someone who doesn't understand what Niantic wants Waypoints to be, AND giving that same info to cheaters who make bots.
vs
(b) NOT giving detailed info to someone who doesn't understand what Niantic wants (likely losing that reviewer), AND NOT giving that same info to cheaters who make bots.
They choose option a.
I received this email earlier this evening from Kyne (today is June 1). I don't know how this would be relevant to anything. Left me gobsmacked after not reviewing for about a month. And without even being told WHAT exactly that I'm "incorrectly reviewing nominations", I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.
Attempting to tell someone who has reviewed over 54k wayspots that they are incorrectly reviewing, and then talking about "high-quality nominations" is not education.
What am I doing wrong?
I think I'm a fair reviewer, remaining on Great status and taking my time to review things as a whole. If you don't tell me, I'll never know. But since I haven't been reviewing for a month, I can probably just stop indefinitely. It was meant to be a break until the end of June like I said! But out of the blue you've decided "hey, you actually suck at reviewing nominations", but actually not say exactly what I'm doing wrong, I can just do the reverse of everything above.
Be that stupid silent company like you always seem to be, that's the best thing you're good at. But actually be silent for once and try not sending me this idiotic email?
I'm also going to chime in and say that I also received this email about incorrectly reviewing nominations, whatever the hell that means.
Without any evidence or an example, that means absolutely nothing to me. I only logged on to the forums after about six weeks to complain about this because I haven't been reviewing for about a month since I wanted to take a break from Wayfarer.
So in other words, Niantic's attempt to "re-educate me" by alleging that I am "incorrectly reviewing nominations" means I will do the opposite of everything that I've known in the past to their dismay.
Stop censoring me Niantic by holding off all my posts for moderation! Many don't even have images on there! You're the one causing this mess.
P.S. I'm from Australia, and I've only ever really changed my bonus location twice: in the Philippines and now currently in Tonga. I've never reviewed anything from Sun City AZ or anywhere in the United States so the email is definitely not from there.
W: Niantic, please teach people how to review nominations!
Niantic: k
*serves people emails that say they're incorrectly reviewing nominations*
Wayfarer: *pikachu shock face*
This is not teaching. It is literally re-education via slavery.
Talking with niantic is always like this
hi customer, you did something wrong
hi niantic what did i do wrong?
hi customer, you did something wrong and i wont tell you because its top secret info kappa copium combined, cya
tell me if i am wrong
Earlier today, I received this email. I have not reviewed for about a month and a bit now.
Are you using wayfarer+, iitc, or any other app to influence your reviews? (Pin placement, title edits, etc?)
And they are relevant how, exactly?
Why did Niantic decide after 54k reviews to all of a sudden backflip and say "you're doing it all wrong?"
I look at every particular review that I get by its own merit, whether they are riddled with spelling mistakes or beyond the clearly obvious low quality photo, and whether I used [REDACTED] to enhance my reviewing experience is isolated to my actual reviewing. Is the pin in the middle of the road or the building? Is the title correction something like "LYPTUS WAY PLAYGROUND." instead of Lyptus Way Playground?
Why would you question me? If you are attempting to theorise my methods when you know very well that I've advocated for action on abuse, reported abusive nominations and have been reviewing MUUUUCH more than you have (likely), it's extremely unlikely it's about any established methods that I've used and gotten used to over the years, only for them to backflip now.
Whoever is moderating my posts beyond my own recognition, STOP. It is beyond tiring now. Give me an actual answer instead of sitting on corn chips and editing away all my questions. What am I allegedly "incorrectly reviewing?" Or was it because I accepted a nomination because there was a recognisable
facehead?Germany has had problems with bots rejecting stuff which Niantic was looking in to.
By your comments in the forum it's easy to work out that you could improve your rating by not rejecting things that should be accepted like you say you do ;)
Seen more than a few wrongly identified ones. Also some fake ones where they can't be confirmed with streetview.
I find the fake ones entertaining and make voting less monotonous digging them out
As I said at the start when we could do appeals, Niantic should have given a reason why they accepted an appeal when it was overturned and an email sent to everyone who rejected that submission with the submission and a acceptance reason.
Maybe they thought it would be to much spam in the inbox of the serial rejectors here.
Simple email that could be automated (if wayfarer voted should this be a wayspot =<3, then send email with $reason; else if /null
$reason = The Description Niantic give to educate people why it was accepted
@RandomExploit-ING There are many, many other things I'd want on Lightship's "to do" list - ahead of sending emails to everyone who rejected my 2018 nominations that are now accepted in 2022.
Wouldnt know if you had told us here :)
While there are many things I would like to see in lightship, i'm not sure any of them come above educating the serial rejectors (and those who simply made a mistake) so that I dont have to resubmit something five times and then go to appeal, waiting a year to get a valid submission through. I need 4 times the amount of appeals we get a month at least as well, so always going to be a backlog.
If voters get educated by appeal acceptence reason emails, it saves all that hassle on future submissions. If they still reject it can then be considered malice and action can be taken.
POI database grows, less people's time wasted in submitting and voting, everyone's happy except the serial rejectors who's happiness I couldn't care less about.