Trigger Word to Niantic Voting = Free Upgrade
cyndiepooh-ING
Posts: 870 ✭✭✭✭✭
People have discovered that certain words (I won't mention specific ones) send their nominations directly into Niantic voting for a fast decision. If you are wondering why the Niantic reviewers can't get to the appeals, I would bet this has something to do with it. Trigger words should send a nomination to be looked at then returned to regular voting, not reward with a fast decision.
Comments
If only Niantic cared enough to fix this bug, or send these that have been intentionally done back to the regular queue.
If Niantic is incapable of marking a nomination as checked and okay for voting, the least they could do is put these trigger pulls in the back of the line in FIFO order along with the appeals. And I don't know who to tag on this since Niantic folks keep disappearing.
In fairness, some of the trigger words are also innocent names of place, I wont mention which words as cyndie said above, but an entire town I used to frequent is now 'filtered' so any submission from that town using the town name will trigger instant Niantic-voting.
On one hand, that's completely unreasonable, I don't need Niantic-voting on my stuff, I can upgrade them myself. On the other hand, Niantic essentially 'blackhole' the town because of its name, so just by subbing stuff normally, not abusing it at all, I can throw every single sub from that place into Niantic-voting? that's just dumb.
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What's funny about this is that I know the one of the town names that is causing trouble. Yet it doesn't appear (yet) that this town name is a trigger. As a town name, it should not be, but as a regular word...yeah, it would be a problem.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cumming,+GA/@34.2035662,-84.1481391,14z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x88f58523717bebd7:0x1f85f06242e1c19d!8m2!3d34.2073196!4d-84.1401926
Anyone remember one of my nominations that has been in queue for 2 years?
Well, actually someone in this forum posted one of trigger words. I've tried myself by adding that trigger word to supporting information and boom, this email was sent to me this morning:
My gratitude to Niantic for them to actually helped clearing the backlog by themshelves.., by triggering them instead of their own initiative.
I had a similar thing happen. I updated an 18 month old nomination with new information about a photosphere someone had added incorrectly, and the trigger word was already in the supporting, so I got the acceptance within a week of hitting "Done" on the edit.
To be clear, mine was not an intentional insertion of this word. But same effect.
Now you know why people exploit this bug. If it's active long enough I might think this is a feature...unless Niantic says otherwise. Which they haven't as of now.
Does anyone here live in Tw4tt, Sh*tterton or C0ckermouth?
It took like two months to fix the daily appeals and they didn't say anything at all the whole time.
Don't forget, the Wayfarer process is still littered with a ton of bugs (especially the location accuracy scroll at the start of each). It is an absolute feature now.
I know one person who got more Wayspots accepted in 3 weeks of using this bug than 3 years of Wayfaring. We are talking over 100 accepted nominations in three weeks. This bug exploit is absolutely broken
idk man... that sounds like a fix to me.
This made me laugh way harder than it should have. I can imagine the conversation already:
Patsu: Hey Niantic your system is broken, my sub has been im voting for two years.
Nia: Nah brah system is fine, you just need to Gitgud or something.
Patsu: *uses forbidden jutsu: trigger word*
Nia: Sup brah, your sub's been taken care of, we told you the system was fine.
Patsu: Yeah... About that... *explains Forbidden Jutsu*. So, clearly the system is broken.
Nia: Right you are. Players shouldn't be exploiting the carefully crafted system we've created. We will fix said exploit and then system will be back to being fine.
Patsu: That only proves my point that the system is broken....
Nia: Yo dawg we heard you like to nominate stuff so how about you go do some AR scans and maybe we'l give you a snickers wrapper as a reward?
I can tell you already that if this becomes more widespread, it will be fixed, because it's both more convenient and efficient to the player and more work for Niantic.
A whole Snickers wrapper? Woah woah. Don’t go too far.
What are the trigger words?
Yeah, I'd like to know this trick word, I've gotnseveral things sitting in queue for over 6 months lol
At least if a nomination is in voting there is still hope.
Triggering your submission into being reviewed by Niantic, whatever that means, can only lead to disappointment.
The word is “sponsored”
i don't think there is a problem.
Niantic and we are doing this activity to increase the number of proper wayspots.
It is true that many candidates have not been screened due to the insufficient number of screenings we have.
I think it would be useful for them to review specific words in order to be more efficient with fewer people and more efficient review.
As long as their review does not interfere with our review, I support this activity.
huh?
..have you not had anything reviewed by niantic in the past couple months?
Funnily enough, I did, had 2 appeals. Bith rejected, but for crao reasons, like photo quality which was wrong, and generic sign when I was submitting a city initiative bike hire (I was pushing my luck with that one), which again, wasn't the correct reason to reject, just seemed like both reviewed were lazy look at picture then reject lol
I don't know :)
I'm just pointing out that speeding up your review isn't a guarantee that your nomination will be reviewed at a higher level than by 'normal' reviewers.
Still not fixed. I'm starting to believe this is an intended feature. 4 1/2 months already... 🤡
Me too. I believe Niantic has been working on Machine Learning (ML) for Artificial Intelligence (AI).
For ML, you feed it 80% of a million or more input/result sets (nomination/accept or reject). Then you use 10% to test what it learned. There were probably some keywords that confused the AI. So they're collecting nominations with those keywords, resolving them, feeding 80% to the ML. Next they'll test with 10% of these fast-tracked examples, plus some of the 10% remaining from the initial set.
Don't worry - once the AI is up and running, it will take nominations and give its accept/fail with a level of confidence. To start, Niantic would probably only let AI be the deciding vote if it's, say 99% confident.
Then they can see if our votes match AI, for how deep. For example, they may find that if AI is 90-98% confident it's an accept, we accept it too. But if AI is only 95-98% confident it's a reject, we reject it too. It would be some fun studying, IMO.
If you've ever studied traffic flow (roads or computers), you know that when there's a logjam, it helps a lot to remove even just a little of the traffic. So if AI could eventually resolve, say 10% of nominations -- it might get rid of the backlog situation!
...ain't using AI is just like, using reviewing bots (just like what happened in Germany) but smarter?
No because Niantic's AI would be better trained, and wayfarers will still be reviewing the majority of nominations.
The difference is that Niantic AI would try to follow the criteria, while other review bots have other purposes.
A well trained AI would be fast, acurate and biasless, so it doesn't make sense to state that most of the reviews would still be performed by wayfarers that have been shown over and over again that are approving bad nominations and rejecting good candidates due to their bias. A performing AI at Wayfarer should check all the nominations as soon as they are proposed and reject those that are clearly invalid right away and use humans to verify the potentlally valid ones.
Building an AI to check if a photo has a watermark, or other similar basic task should be trivial for anyone learning how to work with AI and ML, an advanced AI that really performs full evaluation of a candidate is certainly harder as there are lots of variables to check, but Niantic hasn't deployed such a basic pre-filter for the nominations so stating that they are doing anything advanced is totally far fetched. It's cheaper for them to keep using free labor.
AI returns a result with a confidence level. In a good IT shop, the low confidence decisions are manually reviewed (and perhaps the AI tweaked).
Checking a photo for a watermark is just a decision tree, no need for expensive AI.