What would you tell the Wayfarer Community Specialist? Coming Soon™️
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
Please take promises seriously.
When you say you'll "circle back," actually do so instead of ghosting threads and never following through with update promises. If you can't commit to a timeline, don't arbitrarily say "it should be ready next week" and then allow months to slip by without comment.
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
Sadly i cannot see that this will get any better. There are dozens of things that we were promised, and as @Gendgi-PGO said, we are still circling in circles. maybe it is an 8 instead of a circle.
I would say: "You're very brave"
It takes courage to get into the current mess of Wayfarer.
"consistent guidance in a cohesive voice" is so important for me. we need an authority we can ask and get answers from for the current criteria.
i wrote a wall of text and shrank it down to that.
Let's get the wayfarer team and users together in real life and have a nomination event.
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).
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.
Oh no, we need to clear the backlog, not contribute to it.
Your first point was adressed in the latest road map.
this cannot be:
Submitted: 22.07.2021, Portal review complete: 28.07.2021
5 km down the road:
Don't copy and paste responses, actually read the posts, come up with own answers as expalin where possible
Your top priority is the user experience. There's a lot of noise in the forums, and a lot of axes being ground to an exquisite edge, there is also a strong message that is coming through very clearly-- both submitters and reviewers are extremely frustrated by the status quo. Both camps are frustrated by the lack of clarity around guidelines for candidates, education for both submitters and reviewers, and the lack of clear, consistent, centralized communication from Niantic. Submitters are frustrated by what they consider to be invalid rejections-- some percentage of those are legit rejections where submitters were unfamiliar with the criteria, some were legit candidates that were presented so poorly that reviewers couldn't understand them, and some were quality submissions that should have been approved. Reviewers are frustrated by the high percentage of garbage in the queues, regular and capricious-seeming cooldowns, and a poor understanding of how the rating system works. Everyone is frustrated by the enormous backlog of candidates and edits, and the glacial speed at which things move through the system.
To be blunt, user experience and operational excellence have never been Niantic's strong suits. This is a statement of tough love, not negativity. I've loved Ingress for the last 7.5 years, I've played PoGo since the beta, and I played HPWU until time constraints (and boredom) pushed it below the cut line for me. I can't even begin to count the number of times that I've seen Niantic fail its customers in some spectacular way, or in some fairly minor way that shows that the company doesn't understand the user experience. When they do they often fail to recover gracefully. Please do better.
Your second priority is curbing abuse. There are tons of completely bogus wayspots in the games right now. Local groups band together to approve everything, to create artificial clusters, and to push through blatant fakes. We constantly hear about photos stolen and used for other wayspots, people reviewing with several different accounts, people moving pins to manipulate the position for one specific game, fake photospheres, and other malfeasance. There are areas where reviewers make up their own rules for what should be accepted, and areas where nothing submitted by people outside the local cabal will be approved. The system needs to be fair to everyone, and it should be architected in such a way that both individual and collaborative abuse are difficult to achieve.
Your third priority is communication and education. Reviewers and submitters should not need to have a JD in Niantic Law and a full-time research assistant to keep up with the criteria for acceptance and rejection. People can't be expected to dig through layers of criteria and amendments, AMAs, clarifications buried in forum threads, and skywriting over San Francisco to understand what is and isn't valid. Centralize the criteria, ideally in a way that's integrated into both the submission and the review workflows so that people don't need to memorize the criteria and apply mental diffs to them when rules change. Communicate clearly to everyone when things change. Communicate when there are problems, and keep communicating until the situation is fully resolved. Communicate good things that happen as well as bad. Ensure that everyone who is speaking for Niantic is singing from the same songbook so that we don't get conflicting statements from different people.
That's my message. I can certainly find quibbles with my own ordering but I don't think the order really matters-- I see those as the three big meta-issues for Wayfarer.
One of the biggest problems I can see happening with a new Community Specialist/Manager is the community expecting the Manager to be able to fix all the problems with Wayfarer, or bring these issues to the Wayfarer team to have them fixed as if they haven't known about them already. A good community manager isn't going to be able to fix all the problems recently with Wayfarer, they're just one member of a team who is very visible (albeit very important).
Some things I'd tell them:
There's a lot of frustration and animosity in the Wayfarer community right now, and you'll probably & unfairly being bearing the brunt of it since you'll be the main point of contact for a lot of players. And of course, there will always be people that are just going to **** and yell thinking it will get them what they want (anyone who's worked retail or customer service can tell you that). There are more people here willing to help and provide help/feedback if they feel like they're being listened to. Don't let the toxic side of the playerbase get you down or effect your judgement, but understand you'll be taking on what is a pessimistic and frustrated community. It will help a lot and make people a lot happier if we see active engagement and communication rather than canned PR responses and empty statements. Many of us want to provide help and feedback, but boy do we currently feel it just leads nowhere.
The Wayfarer Criteria is one of the most touchy subjects in Wayfarer. There's a balancing act between having too much/unsearchable criteria clarifications, and having it be too vague and open to interpretation. Before the 'criteria refresh' we had many AMAs which answered a lot of questions, but could seem overwhelming and intimidating to the casual reviewer. The playerbase took it upon themselves to organize, categorize, and make easily searchable versions of these answers, but understandably, Niantic chose to 'refresh' the criteria to make it easier. Unfortunatly, this has turned the current criteria extremely vague and open to interpretation and has lead to a lot of debate (sometimes on good faith, but often in bad faith) as to how certain things fit the criteria. We understand the criteria needs to be easily understandable for reviewers, but having a few concrete examples of common confusing submissions (Pools, Neighborhood subdivision entrances, playgrounds, etc) on the wayfarer site as well as active Niantic staff in the criteria clarifications section of the forum would do wonders. Especially with how much flip flopping there's been in the past by Niantic's staff themselves about things like artistic grave stones and fast food playgrounds.
The active amount of people engaged with Wayfarer on social media channels has dropped. While online group numbers for facebook, reddit, discord, etc maybe keep going up, it's easy to click follow and ignore the community. People asking questions and being engaged are way down. The first AMA on this forum had HUNDREDS of people voting for questions asked. After the rather lackluster answers from it, the next AMA had less then a third of people interested, and it only went down from there. We haven't even had an AMA in 8 months. To get people more engaged with Wayfarer, there needs to be concrete meaningful answers to AMA questions, active engagement with community members on the forum, and a demonstration that you actually use an are interested in the product you're using. I've talked with people who had serious doubts that any niantic staff on the forum has spent more than an hour actually reviewing anything in wayfarer. Having someone who is more "one of us" in terms of using wayfarer, understanding our frustrations, and knowing what kinds of meaningful answers we want to question and criticisms will go far so us users don't feel like we're just dealing with Niantic's PR wall.
While this forum is the central hub for the Wayfarer community, it is by far the least visible. There are more people using Facebook, Reddit, Discord, Youtube, and other social media outlets than on here. And the community leaders in these groups can have a huge amount of influence on wayfarer. When wayfarer first launched, every Poketuber made a video about reviewing, despite never reviewing anything before, and WOW did they get a lot of stuff wrong. People scrambled to local and international groups to ask questions, and there was a lot of conflicting and onctradictory information, and many people took advantage of the confusion to lie about criteria for their own agendas. Niantic having actual staff being active on social media outlets would help a lot to curb this behavior and make the community feel alive and engaged with.
This is the big one I think a lot of people have an opinion about. There's been a lot of people talking about this earlier, so I'll try not to tread on what others have said. But the big thing is, while people can read and understand the criteria, there's a lot of confusion about how to apply the criteria. It's like learning math in school. The teacher will explain a complicated math thing, and you'll kind of get it. And then the teacher goes to the example problem, and then you understand it better cause something just clicks. There's no wayfarer equivalent of the example problem. Something like a weekly/monthly youtube series of just having a Niantic staff member reviewing certain things in wayfarer, or showing off a good nomination of something vs a bad nomination of something would do wonders for reviewers understanding how to actually review.
For example, a video could show the difference between a good playground candidate (in a park, apartment complex, etc) vs a bad one (individual equipment in a larger playground area, at a k-12 school, etc). Or showing a good nomination memorial plaque of a notable local individual vs a bad nomination of one. Having the examples of applying the criteria can help make the criteria "click" while having an easy to consume format like a video would increase education a LOT.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.