[Pending] Make Sythe Great Again: Limit threadmaxxing

A suggestion I would make to the autobumping dilemma, is to limit the autobumping to single threads, allowing more donations to increase the amount of threads a user can autobump.

It's much easier to handle support for a single thread than it is to 50. The current meta jumps from 0 to 50 autobumpable threads, so it makes sense for those that pay for autobumping to try to ammortize their investment over and maximize their advertising real estate.

As an added bonus to the AIO concerns, AIO providers would still be able to function by purchasing autobumping multiple times for multiple threads.

In essence, the theme here is similar to the PoW solution to email spamming that gave rise to bitcoin. There needs to be a cost associated with each message. This cost of course need not be paid, as a bumping quota that refreshes every day is essentially free. But the ability to pay for additionaly bumps would lend to a typical freemium model.

 

I believe your 1st primary problem highlighted is solved by auto-bumping.

• Too many threads: Currently there's a lot of traffic on the sections, it's impractical for consumers and surely hard for mods too manage.
  
  How often than not have you messaged someone, or joined their server and not gotten a reply to find them inactive or unresponsive?
  That is due to auto-bumping. A lot of people have gone on vacation to keep auto-bumping while having inactive servers. Or stopped sales.Or even worse left Sythe and taken a break.
  With manual bumping you'd only see those active at that time, reducing the amount of threads bumped and traffic.
  This gives the most relevant content for newcomers. And it also rewards those who are more active, by getting customers at times when they are online. This gives incentive to new users to visit Sythe and bump only threads that are active and relevant at that time. (This is not moderated as much via auto bumpers, as it is not a conscious daily decision to bump a thread)
  
  
• Generic threads: Many businesses just try to offer every service by reselling with 0 added value.
  
• Disincentive to specialize: Businesses suffer as well, especially considering businesses are often amateur entrepeneurs who need some guidance. Businesses should be encouraged to specialize in a niche, not to spread out and try to be everything.

These last 2 points don't make much sense to me as Sythe is a place for businesses to come and advertise their sales for games. Obv you are going to have repetitive threads, same in any online forum market. It is up to businesses to add new value and uniqueness to attract users. Sythe shouldn't be forcing that on you, that comes naturally as you grow and realise how competitive and saturated the market really is. You will decide whether to specialise and when to expand, it all comes with practice and good business entrepreneurs will know that before making services. Sythe isnt really a place for you to come and 'try' out your hand in business, although that is what it has become unfortunately.

 

I agree about making auto-bumping into single threads or even removing it.

But why would anyone pay for bumps. It should be a free and mostly fair service to use, otherwise you're setting up a very capitalistic market where whales will buy so many bumps and always be bumping which scares away newcomers coming into the market hoping to make a buck. A risky ROI.

 

What do you mean scaling with threads? Can you be more clear? Thanks.

 

The amount of bumps a user is allowed, let's call it B, scales linearly with the amount of threads a user has open, let's call it T.

B=kT

Where k depends on whatever the allowed frecuency is. (currently 1 bump per thread per 4 hours.)

In simple language, the more threads a business opens, the more bumps they have.

So a user with 1 thread is given 1 bump every 4 hours. A user with 20 threads is given 20 bumps every 4 hours.

B= 1t * 1b/1t/4h = 1b/4h
B= 20t * 1b/1t/4h = 20b/4h

My proposed rule change is to change the rule from 1b/1t/4h to xb/yh. The x and y magnitudes can be whatever, but the fundamental change is that bumps per user would no longer scale with threads, that is, they are not linearly dependent on the amount of threads a user has, that is, there would be no bump-advantage to creating additional threads.

With the new rule, assuming we chose a frequency of 1 bump every 2 hours:

B= 1t * 1b/2h = 1b/2h
B= 20t * 1b/2h = 1b/2h


Is that clearer?

 

This is a fairly standard phenomenon in advertising. In a market where sending a message is free, the medium becomes innundated with low value messages: spam.
Associating a cost with sending a message, even if it is just infinitesimal, filters the lowest value messages.
As mentioned, a freemium model, where non-paying users can have a basic reach, greatly mitigates the capitalistic monopoly dystopia.

 

Doing some reading on Proof of Work, hashcash and the email precedent for this situation, I found an article called Sybil Attack. Which describes a vulnerability that may be occuring to sythe right now, or at least a vulnerability that the current system allows.

Sybil attack - Wikipedia

Let's break down how this applies to Sythe

The vulnerability

Specifically, the problem is that any person might create multiple accounts to maximize the front page real estate by increasing the allowed bumps.

Current measures

The current measure of limiting autobumping behind a donation works great to protect against sybil attacks. At least for first party autobumping, but not third party autobumpers.

Another measures that fight this are the rules that disallow multiple account creation and that ban proxies/VPNs.

Runescape et al.
This of course mirrors with Runescape and other of the services sythe targets. In runescape, F2P account creation may have a low identity cost, but P2P identities cost a bond.
IP addresses and compute resources also present separate costs per identity.

Current issues
While the measures work great for avoiding 0value autobumping spam, it just needs a bit of tweaking to get the incentives right and combat "spam" from users that have already been vetted and paid for the privileges of being promoted.
I believe that Sythe was designed to act as a kind of classifieds directory. But the capacity to search a directory and gain information about specialty of providers is dwindled by the incentives towards maximizing thread ownership.

Proposed solution
Change bump frequency rule so that amount of bumps are fixed and not proportional to amount of threads.

 

While the notion of a free market is central to sythe, of course there are regulations, and the market is greatly shaped by them. Being a market mod, you are certainly not ignoring the regulations that shape said market (expounded in my previous posts), and you certainly have been given precisely the powers and responsibilities to regulate such market.

To say that a market you are responsible for is a free market is really nothing more than to say you are against the measure in question. But if I misunderstand and your notion is that the market is totally free and no intervention of any kind shall take place, then just go ahead and abdicate from your moderator position, as that would make the freest markets of them all.

But of course a market needs some level of intervention, which is why sythe has market moderators, and the big outside has senators.

 

You sir are an expert at saying a lot of nothing. Word salad extraordinaire. You want to restrict businesses from bumping their listings in the different markets they partake in. Penalizing users for market expansion in a free market is asinine.

 

Ok.

You, like Kanye, are conflating Free Market for a Market with the incumbent set of restrictions. I suppose if you just wilfully ignore your surroundings, everything looks like a force of nature free of intervention.

 

You misunderstand, paid bumps are not part of my proposal, but of the actual ruleset. Bumps are currently paid, autobumps that is, it costs 300$.

 

Damn you said it perfect.

 

bump

 

Updating.

We can table the discussion on whether this would be beneficial, and focus on how it would be implemented.

First let's look at the current implementation.

Legislative

1- Rules are defined in the following thread: The Official Sythe.org Rules

2- More specific bumping rules are defined in: Bumping rules

Executive
As with most rules, users can report posts that break these rules and they are hanlded by staff.

 

Now with regards to possible proposed implementations.

Let's look at some requirements and value measurements to compare different implementation strategies.

1- Simplicity of legislative texts should be valued, this can be measured in amount of characters changed in the main rule section. If necessary more complex conditions can be specified in the bump rules thread as a new post.

2- Simplicity of moderating should be valued, whether some bumping should be allowed should be easy to verify by users and staff.

3- Simplicity of understanding should be valued. Finally, while simplicity 1 and 2 generally imply 3, this might not always be the case. In short, the rule should be easy to understand.

4- During the transition between the new rule and the old, executive practices and timelines should be well defined to ensure a smooth transition and give businesses a chance to stay up to date with the regulation change.

Here's such a proposed change:

A- Change text in sythe rules from:

to

B- Make a thread in the sythe news section to update rules.
C- Make a post in the bumping rules thread to further explain the change

D- If the new rule is approved, it will enter into effect the first day of the next quarter. During that quarter users will be issued a 1 point infraction once if they fail to update, but no further action will be taken on repeat offenses. In the following quarter repeat offenders will be issued another 1 point infraction when bumping excessively, if the issue persists their threads might be closed or more infractions may be applied.

 

Executive

Users or staff that need to determine whether a bump is legitimate might simply compare the dates of two bumps or go into the profile of a poster, and look at their last posts.

Users participating in more than one market section will organically notice diversity if the rule is being followed, and might notice the same names in all section if not, inviting them to inspect and report if necessary.

 

@Yoshiki

I've noticed you are usually on patrol duty. I'm wondering, from a moderating perspective, do you find the above plan enforceable?

Regards, Tom.

 

I think auto bumping should be reserved for $2000 donors, thoughts?

@PijaVenosa
@Cedrick
@tendyies
@INNOKIN
@JoeyOSRS1

 

$1000 seems good.