The Muti model and Zoopy spam
Recently I have been making use of muti alot. I am not sure what marked my return but I am thoroughly enjoying the site. That was up until today's abuse (and a fair amount this week) of the service by Zoopy. Within an hour Zoopy had voted themselves on the the muti charts over 5 times (it is against the rules to have more than 5 submissions (to the same hostname) inan hour).This really got my goat so I took it upon myself to let Neville know about this. Neville is great and responded fairly quickly to my irritation with feelings of agreement and frustration. He is at a bit of a loss about what to do with potential spammers, spammers and general wrong-doing. He asked me what my opinion was and I was also at a bit of a loss.My suggestion is to open it up to the people using muti. This is the purpose of this blog post. I want to know what you all think a possible solution to the above-mentioned problem could be. But first let me actually elaborate a bit more from Neville's perspective:
Remember that muti started out as an experimentto see if a reddit like site could work in a regional contextsuch as South Africa. For this type of site to work it needs 3things:1) a sustainable # of active member2) a suatainable # of submissions3) voter participationMy assesment is that muti has 1) and 2)but on 3) there are not enough people participatingIt is to me a very interesting question as to whySouth Africans are not participating in 3)
I think that Neville has stumbled upon an extremely interesting and poignant issue here. Participation. Participation is absolutely crucial to the success of this sort of site as well as just about any web 2.0 endeavour.One of the solutions brought up is to weight voting according to reliability of user, length of time a user has been registered, reputation, k-index, kudus and/or number of submission to muti. But writing this post I think that a better way to solve the problem is to possibly find a way to incentivise people to get involved and vote the good stories up and the rubbish, boring, old, irritating zoopy spam down (OK enough zoopy bashing, sometimes they post good stuff).So, what do you think a possible solution is? And how do we prevent the muti elite from taking over the world?
