Velocity

HaramDingo-INGHaramDingo-ING Posts: 1,725 ✭✭✭✭✭

In the December AMA, the 2023 roadmap was revealed, with this period focused on the following, to:

Increase Wayspot decision velocity

While there might be very loose strategies and solutions to implement such as putting on hold all nominations before December 2021 for additional edit and releasing them off hold, there are still some particularly awful bugbears and systems in place that heavily hinder decision velocity and our ability to review to our heart's content.

Sometimes my friends and I will have inspirations or bouts of submitting many nominations and together reviewing. It doesn't happen very often these days. But when any of us haven't reviewed for x amount of months and we're told that we've already exhausted our review queues with false dichotomies such as "All done for now." or "Good exploring." with just a measly handful of reviews, when we are absolutely aware Sydney queues have slowed down to a crawl and the queues are chock full, the system is currently configured to slow us down.

Examples of some statements over the last couple of months:

Got a cooldown cos of a bunch of beach edits. Stupid system.

Well that didn't take long at alll... *pasts screenshot of "Good exploring." cooldown*

Hey Dingo do you get these..? *posts photo of 6 hour cooldown* Feel like I do every time I review, and it's never speedy because I have the submit delay

6 hour cooldown...But why

Was only like 10 reviews, sad *posts Superb job!*

What the....6 hours!? For what!?

Additional reference:

Causes

The barrage of title/description/photo edits

At the exhaustion of someone's review queues, the bottom of the allocated barrel will start to only surface edit reviews. Particularly in Sydney, it is specifically these types of edits:

  • Title edits to remove a fullstop, e.g. "Concord Oval Playground." to "Concord Oval Playground" or something in Cherrybrook
  • Capitalisation fixes or adding fullstops at the end of descriptions
  • A quazillion location edits down south in the Illawarra which are clearly S2 cell moves
  • Clearly obvious photo acceptances/rejections

These are very easy to just review through, but it's still a given that one should take their time or risk getting a cooldown for processing these too fast. Similarly with clear coal nominations, they do not need more than twelve or even twenty seconds to make a full or clear analysis. The system easily penalises for swiftness. In addition, this also impacts on a Wayfinder's rating as well.

Suggestion: Add more emphasis on erroneous acceptances/rejections, or do away with speed penalties. It is very easy to get a cooldown for speed as previously tested.

Captchas

These are flaring up even more as of recent. About every 5-8 reviews, I am consistently bombarded with captchas. If I have to continuously spend additional time identifying cells or even tiny fragments of cells that the system might count for containing a fire hydrant, crosswalk or traffic light, this will turn me off from reviewing for the day. You might not have control over this, but thought you should know.

Allocation of reviews

Research over time has come out that a lot of people's review queues are at times predetermined. If you access the backend vault, you can see the current nomination that you are/will be reviewing, as well as the next nomination. One particular experiment's results were as follows:

  1. The backend shows Nomination A, the one that will appear in someone's review page. The next, call this Nomination B will be shown. It will also show whether you're approaching a cooldown, with the word "exhausted" appearing in the vault status.
  2. The submitter of Nomination B will put it on hold provided it hasn't already been reviewed once, but before Nomination A is reviewed.
  3. After submitting Nomination A, Nomination B will appear in review. Technically this should not happen. Refreshing the review page will route you a different nomination to review instead because it should not happen.

Additionally, after every cooldown, you can come back to review after refreshing about 15 minutes after getting the queue end message and you can continue reviewing for a while, until it exhausts again. This just means that the hopper (or distributor... whatever you'd like to call it) is sluggish and does not route fast enough to people on the verge of exhausting their queues. There are still lots of edits and things that need to be reviewed that are simply not being routed to reviewers.

Suggestion: This process must be improved and robust. The queue is never truly exhausted. When a reviewer's queue is looking thin, the system should work to collect and provide further nominations to the queue, not falter to give a misled break to the reviewer.

Now you might be waiting until Q3 when you advised that you would change and/or improve the Wayfarer App flow. You should look into what you told us you would investigate almost a year ago. The queue is never exhausted.

Comments

  • Hosette-INGHosette-ING Posts: 3,471 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I am 100% with you on useless edits. I am so tired of useless edits for punctuation or capitalization. I would love it if Niantic would do a comparison to see if text edits have substance and if not push them to the very bottom of the queue. I'm also really tired of wasting my time on fakes and blatant coal.

    My personal pet peeve right now is that there's someone spamming description edits. They're either adding "A nice (thing) in the area" or, "A nice (thing)". They're technically not doing anything wrong with this, but it's a waste of reviewers' time. (I also suspect I know who it is, and if so it's someone who just likes leaving his mark on zillions of wayspots.)

    Isn't "No more to review" a soft cooldown rather than having exhausted the queue? I haven't seen one for many months, though. I do get the occasional captcha.

  • Elijustrying-INGElijustrying-ING Posts: 5,515 Ambassador

    Interesting points.

    Rolls eyes at pernickity text edits, especially those hard to spot.

    I review so sporadically and slowly I don’t think I have ever had this issue. It does shine a light on the utter mess that the review flow is in.

    There are so many ways it gets blocked it needs sorting.

    The bottom line is that flow problems make for a poor reviewing experience and that is a disincentive and it makes the whole situation worse.

    It also means submissions take longer to resolve. So another negative wayfinder experience.

    it is really important that this is really picked apart and solutions found.

  • tp235-INGtp235-ING Posts: 1,383 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Editing of titles and descriptions is not something that should be reviewed, but is most appropriately edited on the application, like Wikipedia, with a clear indication of who edited it.

    This way, motivated Wayfinders will write appropriate titles and descriptions one after another.

    If any of them are found to be inappropriate for editing, we can simply revoke that Wayfinder's editing privileges.


    Now that we have the Wayfarer application, I would prefer to consolidate the editing of existing wayspots here.

    Location information could also be aggregated in the same way, but in that case, countermeasures against abuse would need to be established.

    Therefore, I think it is appropriate to put the editing of location information under review for the time being.

  • Hosette-INGHosette-ING Posts: 3,471 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited February 2023

    @tp235-ING I like that on paper. In practice I think it would lead to a lot of abuse, including some where the cat couldn't be put back in the bag easily. Imagine when half the wayspot titles in a town got changed to "Player is (Realname) Phone (Number)" and the description is them offering certain adult services, or that they were criminals of a certain class, or something equally offensive. Throwaway accounts wouldn't care if they lost privileges.

    For the less offensive edits there would be a lot more work for Niantic to deal with, and we know they're already really bad at handling other wayfarer abuse (e.g. large sets of fake wayspots.)

  • tp235-INGtp235-ING Posts: 1,383 ✭✭✭✭✭

    @Hosette-ING

    Of course, there is that concern.

    However, to put those concerns into perspective, it is equally possible to do so with the current nominations and editing.

    At least 40 abuses each are possible.

    And I would venture to say that we see them more extensively in the reviews we do than we do in actual gameplay.

    If you use upgrades in nominations, you will see abuse throughout that country or region.

    For example, in abusive nominations, there are nominations like this one


    https://community.wayfarer.nianticlabs.com/discussion/33278/malicious-nomination


    We can't eliminate the abuse in this area at all, but we can reduce it by taking into account the overall level of account access and the rate of reviews and nominations, including the Throwaway account issue that has been discussed several times on the forum, including the issue you mention. I think it is possible.

    And we should also consider including Niantic IDs in these matters.

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