We’ve been keeping an eye on it in Boston and found that the ML system was doing some work, but the quality of that has been inconsistent as users around the globe will attest. That was speeding a majority of nominations through, but still making it impossible for local users to vote on local nominations.
From my conversations with the local community it seems overwhelmingly like users would prefer to have a system that rewards local nominators/reviewers and empowers them to curate the Lightship database accurately. We’re still not getting local reviews.
Since we haven’t been getting local reviews, I believe every single person that participated in our challenge except perhaps yourself @TheYattOG has stopped reviewing entirely.
So things really did get better? We had what feñt like dozens of people complaining about Boston through all the different medias… but no one ever went back anywhere to give any type of update.
@NianticAaron thank you for responding and taking an interest! In early August, the system was working beautifully, and I had a number of contributions decided by the community quickly:
Town Way to the Water Marker
Public Way Marker
L Pier: Wellfleet Harbor
Blackfish Creek Sanctuary: SE Entrance
In late August things seemed to slow down:
Pier’s End: L Pier (I see why this one could divide the community, so I wasn’t surprised it took longer and didn’t consider a problem)
Since 8/20, nothing has been decided by the community:
Arlington Reservoir Dam
Mill Brook Footbridge
Paolo Parravano Memorial Bench
Hurd Perimeter Meadow Trail
Covenant Church Playground
Martin Square
Looking back at the data, I see I was premature to say we’re back to the “black hole” but there does seem to be a clear “before and after” sometime in late August or early September.
Again, thanks for taking an interest in this topic, I appreciate it!
Yes, things were really great for a few months (in terms of the time required to receive community decisions on my submissions), and got me back into Wayfarer after effectively quitting in frustration. However, it seems that there has been another change, this time for the worse.
I see that all but one of these submissions were submitted this month. Some of them are already in voting and have received votes. I don’t see anything wrong with these nominations.
As a general note, the time of this process may vary depending on numerous factors such as the volume of submissions or the level of submission detail, number of active reviewers in the locality, performance of each individual Wayfinder etc.
I’m sorry, if you’re calling things submitted in August that have not been completed yet a “black hole,” you need to really adjust that perception.
Do you realize that the term “black hole” in Wayfarer was historically applied to a place where submissions took up to 2 years to reach a decision? And many of those places wouldn’t even reach a natural decision because at the 2 year mark, Niantic started jumping in to do those reviews.
I have had conversations with Wayfarer Ambassadors who have told me that
discussions happened in Ambassador meetings about this, but Niantic would update us if they changed anything. I noted that we’re getting a lot more ML reviews (again, of varying quality) which has increased the speed of decisions, but we’re still not getting votes on submissions or local nominations in our review queues. I am unclear if information from my personal conversations with Wayfarer Ambassadors was relayed to Niantic, but did not presume it would be.
If you look at the impetus of this thread, I put my own personal time/effort/money into providing that the queue in Boston was broken as people had been saying for years and some people have asked me to run another challenge. I won’t, because I have not seen significant evidence that improvement has taken place, and I am poor.
The bad thing about the review queue remaining broken (prioritizing reviews in Mississippi and Texas over local area nominations) is that while 82% of participants in May/June said they’d be eager to continue reviewing, all of the participants, including the ones I know were truly keen on it gave up because they realized Wayfarer was not empowering them to have any positive impact on the local map, while low-quality submissions breeze through ML.
We’ve proven that Boston is a city in which reviews historically take over 19 months to reach resolution and has been referred to as a black hole by other Ambassadors, but not one which got as much attention as Los Angeles or other areas.
While I haven’t personally seen evidence of Boston re-becoming a “black hole” and believe much more data would be necessary, I think that given the history and frustration people have been through here it is understandable that local users would be fearful about it reverting to one and would encourage empathy rather than pedantry.
I don’t mean to come off as pedantic. But i feel like presenting something as a black hole is a big deal. I’m in a city that used to have a bad black hole. We are now back to about a month wait time for comminity reviews for some things. Some things get rejected really quickly by the community. It just depends on what has been submitted.
Here’s the thing. Boston got attention from other wayfinders. People chose to help by setting their bonus location there. And to hear that “it’s still broken” makes those people feel like their contributions didn’t help. But then to hear that it’s not actually broken, it’s just performing the same way it does in other big cities, makes it feel like they were kinda tricked into spending time and effort on Boston.
I just want the people in Boston to realize that they aren’t being targeted. In fact, lots of people responded but now the local community is quiting because they don’t like how the system works? That’s not a good look.
As for people quiting, do you really mean to say that your locals would rather manually review than allow ML to handle reviewing? Most of the wayfinders in my area have 90%+ acceptance rate from ML and would never give that up. If y’all are struggling to get ML to accept your submissions, that is a conversation i think is worth having. Lets see if we can improve your submissions. (“Your” meaning the community as a whole.)
The reason I ask is Im hearing people got their backlogs cleared up and up to date… at least for a moment. But no one ever said that anywhere that I saw… I know several people set their locations in Boston in an effort to help you all… but they never got any confirmation that their efforts helped, at all.
If that’s the case, then that’s a major deviation from the intended functionality that had been communicated previously in addition to being an extremely poorly-designed feature that’s caused people to stop reviewing.
Doing reviews in heavily-populated areas 2,500km away does nothing to incentivize people or provide them with any sense of ownership over their local area. There are plenty of people in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas metro area to perform reviews for their own local area without siphoning reviewers from Boston while our reviews that don’t get Emily’d (poorly) languish. Either ML handles everything, nobody reviews, “and that’s that” or the system needs to be improved.
I and others were in contact with a good deal of those people via Discord. The timely resolutions we got were all done via ML, not while others were reviewing (ie. after they moved their bonus location) and oftentimes very wrong. ML simply doesn’t understand nuance, historical value, supporting documentation, etc.
Furthermore, what good is it for people to set their bonus location to Boston when people with their home location and play areas in Boston cannot get local reviews in their queues?
It’s been referred to as a “black hole” by great community members such as tehstone and others. I’m not willing to delve into the nuance of it, but we proved that it was taking between 18-24 months to get natural resolutions with dozens of local reviewers and several others with their bonus locations there. At one point just before the spring’s Global Wayfarer Challenge someone even shared a picture of a 25mo resolution. You can call that whatever you want to call it, but the only way to reach resolutions in Boston was to get Upgrades and the system was completely broken.
This has been brought on the forums years before I joined, and discussed at length by others on your Discord so the accusation that we’ve somehow attempted to swindle folks after I put my own effort and money towards solving this doesn’t sit right with me.
I’ve been in contact with a number of folks who set their bonus locations to Boston and didn’t make a dent. If others did and didn’t @ myself or other active Wayfarers in Boston I’m not sure what we could have done if we didn’t see a human difference.
Some ML nominations are a breeze. It does a great job accepting additional photos on POIs and makes life easier. It also fails to understand nuance, historical significance, context, and more. It accepts a lot of extremely low-quality POIs and rejects others that have been on the Massachusetts Registry of Historic Places on public property with a great level of documentation. It’s accepted staircases, but not functional halls. It’s been great at approving playgrounds, but it’s rejected churches. It’s accepted chain restaurants and rejected local restaurants. It’s accepted things with the wrong name and rejected edits to correct.
Of course you and I understand that the individuals’ submissions may vary in quality and just because someone said “I submitted that POI and they rejected it!” could still mean “I submitted the POI with an upside down photo, put the description in the title and misspelled everything,” so I’m on the fence as to whether or not ML has been more than 50% positive.
What I want is for when I open the Wayfarer queue, I get nominations from my regional area and my bonus area. Then I get some from the Upgrade queue. Then I get 10% or less from random parts of the country. I don’t want to review the misspelled ramblings of someone in Mississippi, and I don’t want them reviewing about how public art somehow doesn’t qualify because they don’t have it where they’re from.
FWIW, two of the POI’s listed in my Sep 13 post are still in voting. I wasn’t here for the bad old days of 24 mo resolution, but from my perspective it seems odd that it takes months to resolve voting in a major metropolitan area.
When we review, we rarely see any nominations from the greater Boston area, at all. We’re much more likely to see things from more than six hundred miles away, and see some from Western Mass, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, etc., but it’s very rare to see anything from the 40-80 cities and towns that make up the local metropolitan area.
When we nominate there’s a chance of Machine or Niantic voting right away, but if that doesn’t happen things stall for a year or two.
It just seems like other reviewers live in 1:1 or 5:1 areas, whereas we would need to review a thousand nominations in order for one of ours to reach the community.