on 2014 Jun 25 9:46 PM
Dear all
recently I get the impression that the balance between real cheap crap content and high quality stuff falls more often than not to the wrong side.
Examples that I've seen would be posts like these http://scn.sap.com/people/fang%2Cyuan/content where basically just trivialities or parts of the documentation are send back to the readers.
Looking around I don't see a lot of people "down-rating" low quality content. Usually even the worst stuff gets some 5-star ratings from someone and nearly nobody sets low-star ratings.
In my eyes, it's pretty obvious that just by providing ratings and view counts the quality of the content will not be improved.
The whole gamification effort of the past years only seem to have done something to engage new users more. (not sure about others, but personally I am certainly not chasing the next mission badge when I contribute something).
So the question to me is, if SCN still wants to be a place for high quality content or if broad audience appeal and visitor streams are actually the main goal here.
Thinking about this, it appears to me as if currently the 'social' aspect in SCN is far more relevant than technical know-how exchange.
Being popular gets people to win badges and to become mentors and moderators.
Is this the generally accepted direction for SCN?
Is everybody happy with this approach?
Cheers, Lars
Request clarification before answering.
Hello all,
This is another interesting thread about quality with thoughts about marketing content, points, the importance of rating and providing feedback, etc.
I will give my personal thoughts here, and they many not reflect what my other colleagues in the SCN Team think. Yes, SCN has a content strategy but when pure marketing content comes to the site it doesn't mean that it's endorsed by us the SCN team. Education is key, people in marketing who are used to the old "push marketing" way need to understand that value add and dialogue are more interesting - and successful! - today.
Looking at the content that Lars refers to at the beginning of this thread, value add is key in my opinion. Are you bringing something more than what's already out there? If not, you are contributing to the digital landfill. Not everyone thinks about it and the reality is that there are so many new people coming to SCN every day that it's difficult to educate all of them. I wish we had better tools. We are certainly going into the good direction with the concept of activity streams for instance where hopefully the system pushes down content of low value when nobody engages around it. And I will say again that I believe a real reputation system is the next step for SCN: giving people certain rights and weight based on their status, as verified by SAP (i.e. not a status based on points). Then the impact of your 1-star rating, Lars, becomes much more powerful, and it becomes data that we the SCN team can analyze. E.g. if a members gets X 1-star ratings from X trusted members of our community, then a flag needs to be raised or the reputation of the author should be affected accordingly.
As for negative feedback and its impact, it is always something to consider carefully. I've thought about reducing someone's points when they get a 1-star rating on their content and have debated over it several times already. There could be abuse especially when people compete against each other for a spot on the leaderboard or something else such as a Topic Leader recognition. Anonymous 1-star ratings can be dangerous.
Maybe one day with a solid reputation system in place points would no longer be needed. In the meantime we have to continue with what we can do, and by the way unfortunately our gamification platform doesn't give us the ability to deactivate points in certain spaces at the moment.
Yes points have positive and bad effects, but I strongly believe that gamification can be used wisely and positively. We've made design changes recently and they show us that we are in the right direction.
Hovering over Lars' name I see he's a HANA Distinguished Engineer and a Topic Leader from last year (in addition to being an SAP employee and SCN Moderator), and wow that means a lot to me. I hope that others understand what this means, or at least are curious enough to research who Topic Leaders and HANA Distinguished Engineers are. In that sense badges are very powerful, don't you think? It's all about reputation and trust: can I trust this person's content?
Also, I want to remind you, in case you forgot, that the penalty points apply for content that is reported and rejected, not content that is in pre-moderation. This means after people have had the opportunity to learn on SCN (via onboarding missions) and earn a few points - hopefully by authoring content themselves.
Laure
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Perhaps a nice (and quite popular) option would be to (default for new users) to opt out of the idiotic points systems -> focus contribution on the content and not the noisy user ID.
As you can see we are not interested in it.
Some spaces where it makes not sense are exempted from the points system and others which generally support it only apply to those users who opt in for the points accumulation and reporting overviews.
You can also have a black market reporting on points from folks who opted out of the sllly points and compare that to the intended reporting and emergency backdated adjustments to points which are made each year to reach KPIs...
Can we pilot this in the security related areas?
Of course it might take some time to get knowledgable people to come back, but we can ping them.
Hopefully the damage done is not irreparable.
Cheers,
Julius
As you can see we are not interested in it.
I don't think you are the target of the points system. Some people will start trying to help others because of points, since games do increase good (and bad) engagement. The bet is that many will stay and improve over time, while others will just fade away.
And I think we tend to be a little nostalgic and think that before points all was good, no one spammed links or Google canned answers. Although this registry is from 2009 I came from the old SDN and as far as I can recall, it wasn't all good in SDN. People sometimes said stupid things, gave bad advice, it comes with the territory.
Agreed, the point system is not aimed to further engage people who are actively contributing anyway.
The problem is that the behavior that this point system provokes makes me (and I guess from the comments here others too) less happy to be active in SCN.
I don't think that it's about being nostalgic. I do appreciate that there seem to be a lot more active members now than back in the years.
To me it just appears that there is no actual common approach anymore towards quality of content. And indeed, I had the impression that such a consensus was present a few years ago.
*sigh*
I think comment concerning the on-boarding missions and the risks of anonymous votes are spot on. Allowing everybody to downgrade other peoples content without being identifiable obviously is a problem.
How about a system that generally only allows ratings (if we need to keep them) to be made only by users that completed certain missions - one of which would be to get positive feedback/rating from one of the moderators/mentors/"elders"?
Also, it would seem to be fair to "pay" for feedback/rating.
Why not budget the amount of feedback and rating so that overly positive/negative rating gets 'expensive' for the person?
E.g. a user might have 2 votes per earned point. When the both votes sum up to a neutral rating (e.g. one 1-Star rating and one 5-star rating) this won't lead to a deduction of points.
If the rating is biased then the point is deduced from the users points account.
For users with a lot of points this wouldn't change a bit - they would not be impacted by this, even if there is a stretch of really great or bad postings that need to be rated accordingly.
For users with only a few points this might playing point games a bit more annoying and would equally encourage a positive and negative rating.
In addition to this a "rate-comment"-mission could increase the interest to provide ratings in the first place.
All in all - this is a complex topic and I start to believe that Julius might be right.
Either this kind of traffic should be stopped by switching off the points system or we need a much better spam filter for it.
Laure Cetin wrote:
I will give my personal thoughts here, and they many not reflect what my other colleagues in the SCN Team think. Yes, SCN has a content strategy but when pure marketing content comes to the site it doesn't mean that it's endorsed by us the SCN team. Education is key, people in marketing who are used to the old "push marketing" way need to understand that value add and dialogue are more interesting - and successful! - today.
[...]
We've made design changes recently and they show us that we are in the right direction.
[...]
Thanks for that Laure, that's interesting.
From that I take it that SAP marketing (right ?) does have a big say in what happens on SCN, correct?
Now I feel quite ignorant as I never fully realized that before...
What about these changes you mentioned? Is is me not paying enough attention to the information roll-out from the SCN team or had these changes and the analyzed effects not been published?
Laure Cetin wrote:
[...]
And I will say again that I believe a real reputation system is the next step for SCN: giving people certain rights and weight based on their status, as verified by SAP (i.e. not a status based on points). Then the impact of your 1-star rating, Lars, becomes much more powerful, and it becomes data that we the SCN team can analyze. E.g. if a members gets X 1-star ratings from X trusted members of our community, then a flag needs to be raised or the reputation of the author should be affected accordingly.
As for negative feedback and its impact, it is always something to consider carefully. I've thought about reducing someone's points when they get a 1-star rating on their content and Audrey Stevenson have debated over it several times already. There could be abuse especially when people compete against each other for a spot on the leaderboard or something else such as a Topic Leader recognition. Anonymous 1-star ratings can be dangerous.
[...]
In that sense badges are very powerful, don't you think? It's all about reputation and trust: can I trust this person's content?
Also, I want to remind you, in case you forgot, that the penalty points apply for content that is reported and rejected, not content that is in pre-moderation. This means after people have had the opportunity to learn on SCN (via onboarding missions) and earn a few points - hopefully by authoring content themselves.
A weighted rating approach sounds very promising indeed and "verified by SAP" would hopefully eliminate point-gaming on a large scale.
Would love to see that in real life.
Concerning the badges: to be honest, I'm torn about those.
After all, shouldn't the content contain the value by itself?
However I see your point here.
The penalty points after rejection.. hmmm... that's a lot like trying to get people to behave better by having penalties on crimes, that is, hard violations of the general rules/the law.
Does that work anywhere?
I think, providing the options for negative feedback that neither stigmatizes the feedback provider nor really punishes the content author would yield better effect here.
No, I am saying that punishment and law enforcement is pointless.
What I say is that removing the reason or the option to commit crime are more effective means.
If there's no point system that invites to exploitation, then there won't be point games.
If "hollow points" are not the leading measure of recognition here in SCN, then why bother chasing after these little ****?
Also: not sure about anybody else, but I sure don't want to have a SCN "police" around.
What I say is that removing the reason or the option to commit crime are more effective means.
If there's no point system that invites to exploitation, then there won't be point games.
That's kind of like saying "If you stay home, you won't get mugged" or "If cars only reach 10 mph, there wouldn't be any serious acidents". It basically ignores the benefics of leaving your house or getting somewhere faster.
I know you think points bring nothing to SCN, but a lot of people think otherwise. I for one don't have a clue who you are, or what you have contributed, but the mere fact that you have a Diamond next to your name will probably make me check your profile, your contributions, or set you on "Follow". If you were "steel" .... well who knows....
And this is not subjective, that is a fact. I'm one person but I'm also human so.....
If "hollow points" are not the leading measure of recognition here in SCN, then why bother chasing after these little ****?
Do you really think that Diamond next to your name has zero impact on someone that doesn't know who you are? Sure the "popular/oldschool" folk on SCN know you, but for the vast majority you are an unknown, and that Diamond sets up apart.
Maybe I don't care as much about how many people "know me" because I don't primarily use SCN to "be known", to get a job or to advertise my services.
I share know-how that is supposed to help and/or entertain others.
I enjoy seeing that communities form and "switch on" - just like the SAP HANA community did.
Or the Oracle community before that (ok, MaxDB didn't really got the upswing... ).
If I can help to spark up such communities, that's what I find motivating to engage further.
And I'd love to see that this motivates others to do the same - and sometimes it does (at least I've got that impression).
People that engage with their communities don't need to have a shiny blinking badge to figure out that this or that contributor seems to be active and provides useful stuff.
Sure enough, people go buy books from bestseller lists and walk into the blockbuster movies.
Does that mean they cannot recognize a good book or film when they see it?
Consuming content is not dictated by rankings - just heavily overlaid.
Maybe I don't care as much about how many people "know me" because I don't primarily use SCN to "be known", to get a job or to advertise my services.
Maybe you don't care because you are already known, and because you don't need to get a job. Take a minute to think about this from other (less famous) people's perpective.
Imagine you are relatively new to SAP, nobody knows you, and you are one person in an ocean of SCN users. Imagine you don't have access to things like SAP TechEd, and you can't use the SAP badge to get invited to stuff. Imagine you are one person in thousands contributing, trying to learn and maybe get a better job.
Do you think your content would have as much visibility? It wouldn't. Points provide a positive feedback loop for good content. People who don't know you take a closer look at your content based on your points reputation (if this guy is a emerald, he must be good) which in turn gives you more points, which give you more visibility, etc. If your content sucks, you won't get points/recognition anyway, but you can have awesome content that nobody gets to see if you are an unknown with 10 points.
Diamonds post a blog and everybody reads it. It may be crap, it may be trivial, but people look at it because they expect good content from these unknown people, which happen to have a diamond attached.
People that engage with their communities don't need to have a shiny blinking badge to figure out that this or that contributor seems to be active and provides useful stuff.
Sure enough, people go buy books from bestseller lists and walk into the blockbuster movies.
Does that mean they cannot recognize a good book or film when they see it?
When they see it, yes. But marketing (and points) exist to drive people to the content.
Joao,
the situation you describe and that I should imagine is exactly where I had been in when I started to contribute here on SCN.
And yet I did not do it to improve my job marketability, but for the reasons I already mentioned.
I started by answering tech questions. And by writing an occasional blog post.
Not sure why anybody would be attracted more to an answer that solves his/her problem just because it comes from me having 4K points (I do remember the T-shirts from back then) or from me having some badge-thingy next to my name.
If the answer is correct, logical and reproducible it simply doesn't matter who gave it.
Anyhow, my point here was not primarily bash the point system. Instead I am still interested in options to pave the way for more quality content. Downrating bad content independent of RoE violations is an important point here.
If there's an easy way to provide constructive feedback with that. even better.
(just pops to my mind, but why not have little rating categories for each post?
E.g. "makes sense" -| o |+, "is readable" -| o |+, "well produced" -| o |+, "non-trivial" -| o |+, "entertaining" -| o |+, "just amazing" -| o |+... )
And yet I did not do it to improve my job marketability, but for the reasons I already mentioned.
The fact that you didn't, doesn't make it wrong for other people to do it.
Not sure why anybody would be attracted more to an answer that solves his/her problem just because it comes from me having 4K points (I do remember the T-shirts from back then) or from me having some badge-thingy next to my name.
I wasn't talking about answers, I was talking about blogs and documents, longer documents that you need to choose wheter to invest your time reading it or not. When you are looking for answers you are in desperate mode, that's why link farmers try to take advantage of it.
That's another big problem with the point system as you described is that "entrenchment" of well-knowns vs welcoming new people. We actually then have behavior that is less welcoming of people who are new, because we look and see that lack of a badge or status. There is no reason why someone new shouldn't be give a better level of respect and consideration than what is currently given. I think it hurts the community instead of making it better.
That being said I still like badges without points. I like missions and things that drive positive behavior, I just dont' think points do anything more than just drive people getting a "larger number".
The other issue is that folks with large numbers can post some pretty "out there stuff" including myself. The large number might be more a measure of "insanity" rather than "quality" at times .
Clearly the way we look at the community is very different for you and me.
What's so difficult in accepting that some people like me really just do contribute for the public benefit as the primary goal?
If users can take their SCN reputation and get a better job with it, that's cool.
But does that help to get better content?
I don't think so.
So, your point is: all is good and points/badges are great. And that's it?
What's so difficult in accepting that some people like me really just do contribute for the public benefit as the primary goal?
It's not, I accept it. Where did I say otherwise?
So, your point is: all is good and points/badges are great. And that's it?
No, I've stated several times that points encourage good and bad content.
As this conversation finally died out, I'm closing it now.
Thanks for everyone sharing opinions.
- Lars
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Ahhh Jelena - surely we are now in the days when you crowdsource your own homework rather than do it yourself! But thanks for the Otto Gold thread - I've bookedmarked that and I'm adding it to my list of blogs I send to the people who don't take the hint when I moderate them the first time!
Looking at the whole thread... it's going to be a continuing discussion - gamification is still a relatively new phenomenon but I'm with (who I'm starting to think I should nominate for sainthood?!) that the benefits we see on SCN far outweigh the detractions. Nor do I think letting everyone digitally beat up someone's content that they don't like, however good the reason, is the answer. There may be some value in a thumbs down but it' still problematic, and I somehow doubt that you stop all the bad behaviour by either turning off gamification or downgrading people's points - people are human, and not all human behaviours are beneficial.
BTW - I have NEVER heard of SAP Employees being given goals to get a certain number of points on SCN - and I have been with SAP for 20 years. We were at one stage congratulated if we were in the top 100 of contributors - but that was in the SDN years and it was more in the nature of recognizing our contribution as this was nearly always on our own time. And by the way, most of us still continue to contribute largely on our own time. We have heard of such schemes very occasionally at partners... at which point I believe the current practice is to sick onto them for a "please explain" chat.
Personally I don't agree with banning the SAP Marketing content - there's always new topics where we need to at least make people aware of the options and let's face it this is the site where we reach the most customers and partners. But I do think they should be very strongly encouraged to provide decent quality content along with the marketing. I've just been through this in raising awareness on some new UX services and put a lot of effort into making sure my latest blog wasn't just a marketing blurb. At the risk of being yelled at... here 'tis - so it's definitely possible to add actual content to marketing (ok I may have overcompensated).
Btw this is exactly the sort of blog where I expect to get a lot of views - because of the nature of the content and the tags - but not a lot points - and that's absolutely fine. Lots of attention is not the same thing as well-liked - same as a celebrity with a lot of notoriety is not the same as someone who is well-loved (several recent court cases come to mind ).
IMO Gamification can only encourage the right behaviour - it can't enforce it. Gamification can only increase people's motivation and engagement - it can't enforce the value and belief systems that go behind that motivation. It's a tool - and as a tool I believe it clearly adds value to our community. You are free to disagree with me. That's why we call it a community after all.
Nice blog plug, Jocelyn! If all the SAP marketing content was like that I'm sure there would be very few objections for it to be posted on SCN. But unfortunately most of it goes like "Roses are red, violets are blue and, by the way, SAP has this product X that my manager is telling me I need to sell. So check out this link.". [badly need the eye-rolling smiley here]
Absolutely agree Jelena - and that's been another of those Marilyn Pratt or equivalent tasks to go and have a chat... unfortunately they don't always want to hear it. Often because the people writing such pieces are doing it second or third hand ... and the better option is to get someone who knows what they are talking about to expand on it.
Btw I don't tend to see them in my spaces fortunately because our folk have all been educated on what's expected and most of them are regularly involved in SCN. What I have done in the past is put some internal pressure on people to post the sort of content we need - but IMO that really needs to come from SAP employees who are regulars in that SCN space and can advocate internally for better quality content.
As a customer or partner if you feel strongly about a piece in your space ATM I would suggest a) commenting on the blog as to what content you would need to make this useful b) looking at the leaderboard for any SAP employees on the list and DM them about getting some better content. Silence is often taken tacit consent to these sorts of blogs unfortunately.
Best I can suggest for now ... SAP is a big company... getting the message through to everyone is always a challenge.
hmm...
Jocelyn Dart wrote:
BTW - I have NEVER heard of SAP Employees being given goals to get a certain number of points on SCN - and I have been with SAP for 20 years.
Well, then you likely had been on a better spot the last 20 years (and checking our employee directory I find that confirmed ). Just as with KBA authorship, SCN points definitively have been goal-relevant for parts of our company on a large-scale.
Jocelyn Dart wrote:
Looking at the whole thread... it's going to be a continuing discussion - gamification is still a relatively new phenomenon but I'm with Laure Cetin (who I'm starting to think I should nominate for sainthood?!) that the benefits we see on SCN far outweigh the detractions. Nor do I think letting everyone digitally beat up someone's content that they don't like, however good the reason, is the answer. There may be some value in a thumbs down but it' still problematic, and I somehow doubt that you stop all the bad behaviour by either turning off gamification or downgrading people's points - people are human, and not all human behaviours are beneficial.
That's close to the point.
The 'thumbs-down' should of course not be a beatin' to death.
But as of now, the only corrective measure or indication of necessary improvement to the author of crap-content is either the extreme (being pulled by the moderator, eventually with comments, but not necessarily so) or very hard for the feedback provider.
I don't think anyone in their sane senses would believe or even ask for stopping of "all bad behaviour" - just as prisons don't stop all crime (see above).
My question was not about changing human nature or anything like that; I merely wanted to see if the current state and trend of content quality is consensual and intended.
Lauren provided an answer good enough for me - for now.
It's definitively still a topic that makes me re-consider further engagement with SCN on a regular basis.
I left support before it turned into AGS so perhaps that's why Lars. Mind you based on the internal material you showed me - it's just one of several measures and there's certainly no set goal of a certain number of points or points level or anything of that nature. In fact the encouragement was for support folk to help answer questions that were getting ignored by others - and even then the answers they give would still have to win a helpful or correct answer. (Something we could perhaps do with in standard support SAP Messages )
Lars Breddemann wrote:
And we had them before. And will have them afterwards.
Maybe it's just me but I feel the blog/document quality on the Old SDN was much higher. Could this be because most of them were pre-moderated?
Personally I didn't blog on SCN before because I didn't want to deal with this kind of censorship (and some might feel SCN wasn't missing out much ). Then the floodgates opened and Gamification came around, which caused many talented authors to surface. But then again, lots of "digital garbage" were posted as well.
Two years later SCN still seem to struggle with identity crisis of sorts and finding the balance between being a truly professional website (where some kind of quality control would be expected) and "dump it all in and let it sort itself out" YouTube-style repository (yet without providing a 'dislike' button). So you pose a very valid and timely question - what is the goal?
Right now it seems every space is moderated/curated in its own style - e.g. ABAP space moderators are doing great job in holding the fort while [some spaces we don't speak of] are overrun with the kind of content mentioned in this discussion. Could SCN (and will it?) get on the same page as one community?
These discussions flare up every few months but, sadly, we just seem to be going in circles. Personally I'd love to see less content with better quality on SCN (and definitely less empty self-promotion by the "SAP trapezoids"), but it's the site's owner that needs to decide what SCN is exactly. But I guess they're a bit busy at the moment with "simplification".
The problem is that both gamification/points system mostly only reward behavior, rather than punish bad behavior. It's nice that there is a new mechanism that takes away points, but the real issue is that negative feedback mechanism are strongly discouraged. In addition we really need a "pay to consume" mechanism that requires real participation to use the content for people who also want to contribute.
That being said however I'm in complete agreement with Julius that SAP needs to "Let it Go" and get rid of the points. I would however still keep the mission based badges, but not make them points related, but stricly activity related. For less a radical change, we could promote people to rate more content by providing a "Siskel & Ebert" mission.
Take care,
Stephen
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That being said however I'm in complete agreement with Julius that SAP needs to "Let it Go"...
I thought you were going to say that SAP should stop interfering with SCN .
That's one of the main problems, because much content isn't correctly moderated due to SAP marketing interference. There are other business interests in play, which have become more important then quality.
You can just check the home page, where most of the topics are determined by SAP Marketing push, instead of what matters to most of SCN community. There is quality content hidden behind all the stuff SAP is trying to push down our throats.
Actually I have seen the opposite where SAP Product Management was not involved with SCN and even though the community was "good" it wasn't great.
The welcome page is "SAP's", always has and always will be. I personally don't look at that page and never really have. I reviewed it yesterday and it just appeared to have a bunch of HANA and fiori content being pushed out to people. That's fine with me. SAP has bet the farm on HANA, to the point that where customers will either adopt HANA or another vendor.
Is there too much marketing content in other places on SCN that has no value? The answer yes. I don't have solution except complain in the comments of each blog that you think has no value and challenge the author (politely and respectfully though).
Take care,
Stephen
This has been said a few times by others also, since gamification was introduced. If you look at some of the statistics you'll see we're not even very good at rewarding good content - blogs with 1000's of views are sometimes lucky to get 10 likes or * ratings. Couple that with a reluctance to provide negative ratings and there really is little difference between good and bad content from a ratings point of view. The whole idea is that good content will be preferred over bad content because we rate accordingly. Since we don't, this just doesn't work.
I'm not sure we even need to get much more comfortable giving negative ratings. If we just ignore the bad content and give positive ratings (3* or more) where appropriate, this will work much better than it does now. But there have been blog posts and other forms of encouragement about this, and nothing has changed. Maybe it is time for a re-think?
I do think the social aspect of SCN is very important, but only in the context of good quality technical interactions. I prefer to take purely social interactions out of blogs and forums (status updates here on SCN, or over on Twitter)
Don't get me started on the fad of using SCN as a marketing platform...
Steve.
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Everybody is a kind of a moderator because of the Alert button. You should make use of it if you find low quality. It does not really help to open a new discussion and hope that others do this job.
I think we need to understand that the poster of these blogs and documents has a blue trapezoid icon next to his name with 3 white letters that make the name SAP.
It is not easy for the normal community consumers to decide if this is low quality or just the new way of distributing official content. At least this SAP badge next to the user name places a huge hurdle to get content abused (if it is not just pure marketing stuff).
The question which is coming into my mind is if this low quality content is really caused by the Gamification system in SCN, or just because some managers make KPI's out of that SCN point system, which would then classify as an inhouse issue.
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Jürgen L wrote:
...just because some managers make KPI's out of that SCN point system, which would then classify as an inhouse issue.
There is an expression in English called "Give them enough rope and they will hang themselves". It is still the system which is the problem, and not just the behaviour it encourages. Best would be to get rid of the system which makes folks repeatedly and on mass behave in an unprofessional way.
Cheers,
Julius
I agree to the problem of SAP-affiliated content that really appears as if somebody has to deliver number of blogs posted per month goals.
I've seen team with such goals (same for knowledge base articles and WIKI pages) and I fully agree that this is SAP internal and a problem. At least this is my personal view on this.
However, the example posts I took were just the ones I had at hand quickly. There are lots of bad content posts also from non-SAP authors as well.
But I surely see and agree to the point here: SAP tagged posts are seen as the quality mark that is acceptable.
Concerning the use of the Alert button: I never saw it as the quality check button. Maybe I got that wrong, but I thought it should be used to address RoE violations.
I'd heard rumours there were such goals within SAP, but didn't want to believe them. This explains a lot. This is obviously misguided, but if such KPIs much exist, may I suggest a small modification. Change it from "blogs posted" to "blogs posted that get 5* ratings". Or "blogs posted that don't get reported as spam"!
And yes, this isn't the only problem. Not even the biggest problem, perhaps, but I suggest it is easier to solve. And since it does set some sort of example for others, perhaps solving it quickly would be a start in solving other problems too?
Best would be to get rid of the system which makes folks repeatedly and on mass behave in an unprofessional way.
I think in the end you need to strike a balance and determine if the benefits of the points system overcomes its negative side. Every game is abusable, but the game also brings positive engagement to SCN.
If you closed everything that gives someone "rope", the world would be much duller.
Well, the problem is of course that once you set such goals - which I still think is wrong and btw also common practice in other organisations - you have to have them within the control of the ones that should achieve them.
Is there any way to ensure that a good blog post gets a deserved 5 star rating? Nope.
So creating a goal like this would just be unfair again.
But maybe let's not get focused too much on this - from my view - side-aspect of the question.
What I want to know is whether there is a SCN strategy concerned with the content quality and whether there is something in there that should improve this quality.
Just personally, I am sick and tired of being "the bad cop" when I comment on blog posts for the gazillionth time, that a bunch of screenshots and some documentation statements are not what I think make a good blog.
I don't like to provide a LMGTFY link when I see unprepared questions, but I feel that's the only possible response that delivers the desired information and provides a hint towards the OP of the question that (s)he should have done the homework.
As I wrote above, providing negative feedback is a lot more difficult here than positive feedback. You have to put in more effort and you always risk being regarded as a negative person. For positive feedback there's no effort required as no qualified answer is needed and there's no risk involved.
I'd think if others experience the same this would call for a change.
Maybe an easier way to provide constructive feedback could help?
(e.g. buttons for: "not original", "old as Gandalf", "unstructured even down to the letters of your words" or something along these lines).
And on the other hand: clearly provide the information who liked and high-rated a posting.
Currently LIKES are trackable, but ratings are not (except the same user posts a comment as well).
I am of course not sure that this would change a bit, but I guess if there is some evolutionary pressure to what gets published, this might be a start. Or not?
Really, I am far from being sure here.
Until SCN decides what it wants to be, things won't change. The not so recent push to make SCN a marketing platform mean less quality content and lower standards.
If SCN's goals aren't clear, the strategy going forward can't be clear.
I understand perfectly what you mean when you say that giving negative feedback can make you seem like a negative person. Unfortunatly in many countries you have a carebear culture, where you are perceived as the bad guy if you say anything other then "good job". I'm an outlier, since I find annoying the useless "Good job", "Good post" empty comments that keep getting into my notifications.
Sorry to disagree with you. It is not a balance of points pro's and con's, as there will always be a bit of sillyness and fun - even in the ABAP Performance forum there are many very entertaining discussions...
The Coffee Corner is a nice community example of this destruction by points: there were no points and it was lively and certainly not dull. Then points flooded the place with noise and when it was turned off finally a lot of folks who used to contribute to it had left or stopped their watches on the posts.
The security forum is another example. The number of knowledgable people interested in entertaining and useful discussions can be counted on one hand. If we can get that up to 10 + folks discussing interesting things which are not flooded by noise of link farmers hoping for the beloved points (they just do random searches because the OP is too lazy to do the same or does not even have access to SMP) then it is hopefully just a small jump to have 100+ knowledgable folks who use SCN and also contribute collaboratively to SCN.
The points system has been around for long enough to have done enough damage that it might take a generation to repair that - luckily in the SAP world a generation is about 1 or 2 years normally.
Can we please turn the points system off in the Security Forum as an experiment / pilot to see the affect on quality and try to get some contributors back who are not interested anymore because of the noise?
Cheers,
Julius
Just wanted to share the previous experience of writing blogs, It would go for Approval and then based on the feedback from the moderator we used to edit the blog and resend.
In the starting, I used to get blogs rejected sometimes even for grammar mistakes and used to wait for 1-2 weeks for getting it published.
But that practice made me learn to write in a better way and it improved my writing ( still I got to improve though )
Just wanted to mention how tough it was earlier to write a blog or article compared to what we have now.
Regards,
Krishna Tangudu
I have to agree that concerned moderators are very important, as they provided critical feedback that enables us to improve. On the MM space Jurgen is an excellent examples as he asks you to add little details that really improve your text and I'my grateful for the feedback.
But moderators still have guidelines to follow and some of the guidelines seem to go towards a marketing anything goes attitude.
Hi Julius
Within a space, the only (potential) value points have is to determine the topic leader since it's based on the top 3 rankings. I realise not everyone would necessarily think topic leader award is also of value.
However, if we assumed it was one of the positive elements to retains then there needs to be a replacement system. One possibility could be the moderators choosing (key piece is to exclude the moderators from qualifying for the award) but that could cause grief and dispute.
Otherwise, retain the points but hide the rankings for a space so they are revealed at the end of the year. For those who love points, they can still see their overall SCN tally and rank
I only suggest this as a way to find a compromise in those who like the gamification platform and use of points and those who see the negatives of it. I'll take any approach that retains the quality contributors so I can continue to learn.
Regards
Colleen
Colleen Lee wrote:
However, if we assumed it was one of the positive elements to retain...
I am aware that some folks might hope that points are a positive element and I have for some time also suspected that there are a few who even pray for it as they seem willing to worship / beg for them, but have not been confronted by such an assumption before.
Yes, with that assumption you win the discussion hands-down...
Cheers,
Julius
I am aware that some folks might hope that points are a positive element and I have for some time also suspected that there are a few who even pray for it as they seem willing to worship / beg for them, but have not been confronted by such an assumption before.
I guess you should be a little bit open minded. I don't do much recruiting, but the first thing I check besides the CV is if the person has a profile on SCN, and if he/she does I check their posts. In this modern age your Linkedin/Facebook/SCN profile shows a great deal about who you are, and points can give a very concrete metric for the more lazy recruiters.
That said, you should try to understand that gamification provides a good reason for people to contribute in a meaningful way, because yes, people do like rewards.
It's common for people who already have a lot of recognition to say points are useless and should go away (usually diamonds and emeralds), but you should understand that not every SAP consultant is able to go to SAP events, isn't as popular, and most get lost in the crowd. Points provide a metric for the unknowns out there, that recruiters could look for.
Does it bring bad content to SCN? Yes. But it also gives an incentive for people to publish good content, and that incentive will only increase when recruiters give more and more importance to online profiles. They are still too old fashioned, but things are changing fast, and it is becoming quite common for people to be rejected because of idiotic or creepy Facebook posts.
In this age of the internet, when we spend so much time online, our online persona shows a lot about you, something that recruiters didn't have access in the past. Times are changing.
Hi Lars,
I'm also wondering what were the goals of implementing gamification into the SCN.
If the goals were purely oriented to increase the overall activity and (re)engage the newcomers, then I would consider the gamification concept as successful.
If one of the goals was also to increase the quality of contributions, then I completely agree with you. This concept failed to meet this goal.
The majority of gamification models are in general favoring the "quantity" over the "quality". It is not an easy task to design a mechanism which would be driving more quantity, but not at the expense of quality.
What are your ideas how to reach both goals?
Cheers,
Martin
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Lars.
i think something between Gauss and Pareto distribution still applies here but i have no real predilection to prove it and maybe social media makes it even more pronounced. from the inside out, this can be considered 'laziness', but from the outside in, #SCN is competing with other social media platforms and they all trend very quickly down to the least common denominator, the epitome of which is 'Yo'.
i do appreciate quality over quantity and do not care (or do i?) for points and badges but 'penalizing' for bad content (unless it's simply offensive) somehow may turn off some of the shy 'socialites' who may want to start small. the new gamers may want to see if publishing here pays for their efforts or not
usually it doesn't which i sense is part of your concern here, too.
take it easy,
greg
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I don't criticize that some users don't down-rate content or others that do this.
What I wanted to point out was: the points system doesn't help to reduce low-quality contributions.
The comment about not saying anything if it is not nice surely is spot on.
Providing feedback that is not "like" or "very good" is much much harder and more difficult than the positive or non-feedback option.
It's easily possible to applaud, it's easily possible to say nothing (ignoring is barely possible, since a page view is counted independent from the readers reception) but disagreement is difficult.
To me this seems to be a rather strong voluntary design decision for SCN as a communication platform.
This in turn is the reason for this thread: since just passing on the things that we don't like in SCN is the (new?) standard, I thought I'd ask you on your view on that.
Thanks for contributing!
Cheers, Larrs
Hi Lars - did not get you wrong at all and could not agree with you more.
I do provide low ratings to content now but I always include constructive feedback as my reason (that is, I won't hide behind anonymity of a negative rating).
However, where the material is not appropriate I choose to say nothing/do nothing and press Alert Moderator. I have started to get a little bit of a following and recognition on SCN of recent so I am more cautious in how and when I voice my opinions.
What I wanted to point out was: the points system doesn't help to reduce low-quality contributions.
You are not the only one who thinks this.. I'm waiting for to jump in here!
Probably now comes back to if we can't stop the eagerness of low quality what are constructive ways to re-train and change this culture with or without gamification. I see a large portion of it is desire to contribute so low hanging fruit is picked off quickly unless the moderator in that space has an iron fist and stamps it out immediately.
Regards
Colleen
Hi Lars
One of the problems that existed that there was (is) no real down vote . Moderators can now give minus points I believe (recently introduced) for bad quality content but right now, in my opinion, only moderators can really do something about bad quality content.
Thumbs down could be an idea?
If I give a low star rating, unless something changed, I'm giving a little bit of points to the author. Certainly I don't want to do that? Report for abuse can be an alternative but then the question is, where do you draw the line.
What I find crap content, is sometimes seen as valuable by others (often those people don't know too much about the topic at that moment from my perspective).
I think this is a well known issue and one that is not easy to solve. The social aspect in liking / voting is almost impossible to get rid off.
One of the goals of the gamification should be that quality content surfaces and that's most of the times the case with the exceptional content but often good quality content is left behind (especially on less popular spaces) unfortunately and doesn't surface as it should.
It would also be useful for the SCN team to have analytics on top of SCN. extracted content from SCN at one point and threw it in an analysis tools that can show relations and what we found out was that there were vicious circles of likes / voting amongst friends and also amongst accounts and their respective fake accounts . It was clearly visible where the streams were going. I think I still have a draft blog "will the real slim-shady please stand up" lying about addressing the point but I don't have the answer straight away either.
We cannot provide this insight on large scale so far because Tom extracted content manually, that's not do-able for the whole of SCN.
"This in turn is the reason for this thread: since just passing on the things that we don't like in SCN is the (new?) standard, I thought I'd ask you on your view on that."
Sad enough, for me it is to a large extent. I've commented on pieces I found unworthy in the past but I didn't see any change. The author(s) often just continue and disregard the comment / do nothing with the feedback.
Best regards
Tom
Hi Tom
If I give a low star rating, unless something changed, I'm giving a little bit of points to the author. Certainly I don't want to do that? Report for abuse can be an alternative but then the question is, where do you draw the line.
I was under impression low starts (1 or 2) did not get points? I can't find a document to link this but recall it coming up in a discussion recently.
Regards
Colleen
I only have two comments I would like to add to what has already been said:
Cheers,
Julius
Hi Lars
Looking around I don't see a lot of people "down-rating" low quality content. Usually even the worst stuff gets some 5-star ratings from someone and nearly nobody sets low-star ratings.
That's the difficult bit - must be the human nature side and upbringings where a lot of us are taught 'if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all'
I hope quality outshines quantity. But we do need a way for freshers/juniors to join SCN and learn so one day they are in a position to contribute to quality material (by then they will not longer be a fresher).
Regards
Colleen
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Hi Lars,
The answer is already in your question "a place for high quality content or if broad audience appeal and visitor streams". We obviously cant have both. Right now SCN has struck a correct balance between these two after the recent changes to the RoE and SCN gamification rules.
The problem is being a community based portal we do have to give some weight-age to participation otherwise SCN would turn out to be a exclusive club for the technically strong and experienced. By saying this I am not supporting low quality content I am just saying that not everyone has the expertise or knowledge to put together a good blog or a discussion but everyone is enthusiastic about doing it in SCN. If people can take a comment or advice from the senior members and improve upon it then it would be really great.
There are always going to be people who forget to silence their cellphones in meeting and people who do not read the RoE before participating .
Benedict
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