I have reviewed over 93,000 nominations. (Roughly, 43,000 of those reviews were in the past year.) I used to use my upgrades religiously prior to the last Wayfarer Challenge where the US was featured. Now, I could naturally get a decision on my nomination between 1 to 2 months compared to 6 months+ beforehand. Now for the past month, most of my nominations are getting decisions via Machine Learning. I have 75 upgrades available. I know Niantic wants the community to still manually review nominations, but personally, I do not have as much motivation to review now. Upgrades are literally the only reason to review, and now, upgrades are somewhat useless to me. For years, Niantic have been saying they were going to address this issue and have not addressed this issue.
I have long thought we needed better rewards for reviewing. I can’t say I’ve “lost” my motivation to do it. I still find the concept rewarding and needful, but I also don’t manage to do nearly as many reviews as others. I’ve done less than 10K reviews, but I am making it a goal to do more this year!
Niantic thought they were doing us a favor by using their ML to deal with all the “no-brainer” submissions and leaving all the more complicated submissions to be reviewed by players. However, this only means that we’re getting hit non-stop with iffy, borderline reviews that take more time and energy to review. For me, I enjoy reviewing the really awesome submissions AND the really awful submissions. Those are what motivate me to review. With ML filters taking those out of the mix, I really don’t know how much longer I’ll be motivated to review
I appreciate Machine Learning is approving a bunch of nominations for the community, but I have similar concerns like you have. The “tricky” nominations are some of my least favorite to review, because I have to spend so much time on them. Easy acceptable nominations and coals does not take much time.
Do you have any suggestions for what Niantic could do about it?
I agree, that the tricky nominations take the most mental energy. I sometimes skip, or let them time out rather than deal with them. Particularly when I don’t really agree with my understanding of criteria clarifications.
For example, I haven’t been excited about shopping plazas as wayspots. I’m slowly getting on board with it, but I had been skipping them til recently. Disc Golf courses is another. I, bluntly, feel that disc golf holes, when they have unique signs located at the throwing spot and are along nice trails, would make pretty good wayspots. But I know that Niantic has said not to accept them in the past and most reviewers I know, don’t like them. I want to see them pass, but I also don’t want to hurt my agreement rate shrug
7875 on OPR, currently platinum. Will retire once get Onyx. Current review flow still better than the old one but i still struggle to stay motivated for the last 5 years while theres other things i prefer to be doing while at home ie watching anime…
For motivators, I think they should add an ability to trade upgrades for appeals, ability to earn more nominations, more meaningful in game rewards, and potentially irl swag. There is probably a bunch of other things they can do, but those are what came to mind.
As far as the issue with having to review more complex nominations, that is a bit of a difficult one. I do not think there is necessarily a good solution to, but I do believe humans should review those type of nominations but they take a lot more mental capacity. I think better motivations would help slightly with that, but it is still going to be a more frustrating experience for reviewers in my opinion.
I don’t intend to resume the review as long as the Wayfarer review situation continues to be nothing but coal instead of shiny diamonds.
I might participate if the Wayfarer team cleaned up the debris they scattered around the world.
I made a promise to review more and I’ve been doing ~50-60 per day on average for the past month. I “enjoy” the iffy ones and the gray areas. However, I wish more of my personal nominations would get picked up by eMiLy!! I guess I’m still riding that borderline with my submissions! #cheers
I think with ML decisions, there is objectively less need for quickly reviewing many nominations, and fewer needs for upgrades. So perhaps the “motivation to review and accept/reject” should translate into “motivation to review posts about nominations rejected by AI and help people understand why,” or into “motivation to provide valuable input to ML and teach it to accept good nominations and reject bad ones.” So, one option for the poll could be - have you found motivation to do different things?
Another option for the poll - as already commented, burnout might be caused by too many grey areas/mediocre/uninteresting nominations, and not directly by a lack of motivation.
I’m reviewing more, I find that the reviews I’m getting require more thought and investigation and aren’t just mind numbing insta-accept/reject because they are either well-done slam dunks or absolute dumpster fires for nominations. I appreciate the nominations that make me think, that require a bit of investigation to determine the nuance or whatever.
Upgrades have never been a carrot for me, I’ve never really needed to use them. I do think that the general Wayfarer community would probably need some more of a reward based system to review so I’m not opposed to it but it’s not necessary for me. It’s more about doing my part to contribute to the community.
The dips in reviewing I’ve had lately have more to do with my own personal time than anything else. I do understand that I’m not the norm though.
I keep enjoying the review process. I don’t have the necessity of do it, I have like 120 upgrades and I don’t use so many of them. Just for example this past weekend I reviewed like 1400 noms just for fun because we have the bonus location jumping. I consider that with all this related to ML, AI or Nia Voting it can be make you to have less motivation to review so maybe better rewards could fight against this.
You are quite correct. It is easy to see the effects of Emily to be on “objects” such as nominations which is easy to analyse in terms of numbers.
But I too am concerned about these impacts on people - fellow Wayfinders some are clearly positive, some are negative and some are very nuanced. This is not easy to evaluate as it is subjective. However it’s critical that these are viewed as an equal part of the impact of Emily.
I’m still waiting on the in game Wayfarer swag that was once put forward as an idea. I’m sure they are just putting the final touches to it so that we get something worthwhile.