Community Influence

Problem

In a creative community, the most valuable users to the ecosystem are a combination of extremely talented, and nice/helpful people. You want to come to the community to see really great work on a daily basis. You also want the conversation around the work to be productive, helpful, and critical.

Most of the times in a social community, the loudest voices carry the furthest. Also, the most prolific take up most of the real estate. We need a way to limit loud and prolific in favor of quality.

Sidenote: There's a lot of garbage out there. Storyboarding is creating sequential imagery that tells a story. Story is the most important part. A sequence is much more interesting if the story is strong, and the illustration is weak - rather than the inverse. Finely finished anthropomorphized animals chasing a magical orb is not a story. It might get you an A from your bitter community college art school professor. No one will ever tell you that it's trash - but this is not a safe space. This is real life. We want to inspire, teach, and help each other. This is not a place for vapid praise.

Limited posting

First, to limit noise, we will limit the sequences you can post over time. Maybe it's once a week, or every couple days.

Vouching

If you see a piece of work that is really great, (for whatever reason: illustration, storytelling, etc.), you can vouch for the work. But, you can only vouch for 3 people a month. So you can't just be vouching for people willy nilly.

What does vouching do?

First, people will see who vouched for you. That's pretty cool. But there's something deeper. It affects how many people will see your work.

Not all vouching is equal.

Influence

Behind the scenes, you have an influence score. You can accumulate influence by participating, posting, receiving applause. No one will be able to see what their influence score is.

When you vouch for someone's work, you are vouching for them. You are also increasing their influence. If your influence is high, you can very quickly increase their influence.

Therefore, if someone is new to the community, and they post something really great, they can immediately have great merit in the system.

What is influence good for?

Influence affects how people's work is displayed. Simply, the more influence you have, the more highly displayed your work is displayed. When you look at the newest sequences daily, they are ordered by influence. When you see other recommended sequences next to a board, they will be highly influencial.

Hey, if you have high influence, you'll just always show up on top!

No. Over time, influence settles to normal level. So if you aren't very active in the community, the influence will shrink. Maybe you were really great and active a few months ago, but now you're just normal. No big deal, because once people see your new great work, someone will surely vouch for you.

So what does this mean?

Ideally it means that when you are coming to the site every day, you are seeing great, new work. Additionally, if you are new, you can very quickly become featured because game recognize game. Hopefully, this filters out the noise as well.