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Stemming the potential flood of dirge
I realise it's a bit of a can of worms, but have you been doing any thinking around the quality of submissions? Speaking for myself, since I discovered the game there's been a temptation to take a picture of any old rubbish just to get as many ten pointers as I can. I've no idea what the metric would be, and I'm not suggesting any kind of voting system (digg etc, eurgh, please don't do that), but perhaps there's a way to incorporate the viewed/favourited/comments data?
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What Tom said. When we began the beta, the people playing were roughly doing what we hoped they'd do, and it was all turning out OK; now that it's open, a lot of people are uploading noticings without really thinking about the quality threshold that much. See also what Tom said about bulk uploads.
But that's OK: it's a design in progress. I think placing more emphasis on the images, and less on the scores - especially on that front page - might help emphasises the quality issue. We certainly know we've got some serious visual design to work on, and I'm planning to make that a priority in the coming weeks.
Rest assured: we're working on this. And thanks for the interest. In the meantime: the best way to help stem any "dirge" that might set in is to upload really "good" noticings; play the game in a gentlemanly manner, even if that means not getting as many points as you'd like.
I’m on it.
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Inappropriate?Hi Garrett,
You're right - it's an issue. I don't think we're describing very well what noticings are and aren't, and so people feel they don't know where the line is. I think *I* know where the line is, but it's difficult to describe.
We also need to stem big bulk uploads of pretty much the same thing - perhaps some kind of falloff in points after x noticing per day might work.
We're going to introduce the ability to sign into Noticings soon, using your Flickr account, so that'll give us scope to do a personal dashboard and to perhaps change the front page to a better description of what Noticings is.
Cheers,
Tom
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Inappropriate?What Tom said. When we began the beta, the people playing were roughly doing what we hoped they'd do, and it was all turning out OK; now that it's open, a lot of people are uploading noticings without really thinking about the quality threshold that much. See also what Tom said about bulk uploads.
But that's OK: it's a design in progress. I think placing more emphasis on the images, and less on the scores - especially on that front page - might help emphasises the quality issue. We certainly know we've got some serious visual design to work on, and I'm planning to make that a priority in the coming weeks.
Rest assured: we're working on this. And thanks for the interest. In the meantime: the best way to help stem any "dirge" that might set in is to upload really "good" noticings; play the game in a gentlemanly manner, even if that means not getting as many points as you'd like.
I’m on it.
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Inappropriate?I've been thinking about quality too, and my first idea was to limit submissions for each person to 1 per neighborhood per day, or 3 submissions total per day — or something like that, to encourage people to post their best noticings rather than all of them.
Another idea is to build off of Flickr's quiet reward system where you get more "views" for more interesting pictures. Noticings could keep track of clicks too, maybe silently (without displaying counts to users), and give a 5-point bonus for often-clicked pictures. -
Inappropriate?Emphasising the photos sounds like a good step, but I don't think the gentlemanly social pressure is going to be strong enough, as the site gets busier. Some people won't check in often enough to be embarrassed when their bad picture gets centre stage, and some people won't care so long as they get 100 points every time they add the "noticings" tag to a batch of uploads.
Letting site visitors vote noticings up or down might be okay - it doesn't take it too far away from the metadata, so long as it's purely for making the front page gallery good and clear, rather than awarding any points. (There could also be a little polite-coughing reminder element to it, if the down votes are all presented as reasons why the voter doesn't count it as a noticing: "Sad face: This is marked in the wrong location, so I wouldn't be able to find it.", "Sad face: This looks very transient, surely it isn't still there to find today?") -
Inappropriate?I think you're right: in the long term, peer pressure won't work. But I think we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
I'm interested in some kind of way of picking the 'best of' for the front page. I'm not sure whether voting is the right answer, but it's definitely worth exploring. I like the idea of reminding people of the rules of the game within that, in some manner.
Thankfully, for the moment, it seems to be OK. We'll keep an eye on it.
Cheers,
Tom -
Inappropriate?Actually, a simpler way to weight "good" photos on the front page might be just to add a "this person is a good noticer!" toggle button on everyone's profile. If someone's playing well, you can go and pat them on the back for it, and (without giving any sort of visible score) this bumps up the prominence of their photos on the front page. But with enough random noise to stop it from being an endless feedback loop that a new user can never break into. (Maybe votes slowly expire, and the button is worded as "this person is playing well this month".)
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I'd rather have a button for "I like this photo" rather than "this person is good", since all of us have contributions of varying quality. I think a quiet "like" could be nice, where more of those votes would increase the size of that photo's thumbnail a little but aren't otherwise displayed. -
Fair point - players shouldn't be allowed to become blasé about photo quality, once they had enough support behind them. It'd be useful to have a predetemined metric to decide how to rank a new day's photos, before anyone had seen them, but that could just be the average ranking of the photographers other noticings, to date.
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Something I mentioned to Tom Armitage at one point was that marking a picture as a favourite on Flickr could become meaningful. It has its own issues, but I like the idea of reusing features that already exist.
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Inappropriate?For what it's worth, I think the "just contacts" view has entirely fixed the dirge problem for me (which was beginning to drain my enthusiasm for the game). It's frustrating when strangers can easily outscore you simply by having a lower quality threshold, but if it's a friend then you can call them out on it in a casual Flickr comment, or just decide to skim past them on the high scores. Nice addition.
I’m dirgeless.
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