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(Reviews Hub) Discontinuing Community Review Submissions


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RIP-Com-Rive.jpg

 

Today I have the unfortunate duty to announce the death of the Reviews Hub's community-submission system. If your review is currently being processed by the team, you should be hearing from them shortly, but unfortunately we aren't going to put more time/energy into this process right now. The reviews hub is otherwise unaffected, however, so all of the external blogs as well as our official team reviews are still up and active. 

 

Here are the two major points I want to convey:

  1. I'm still determined to make the reviews hub work
  2. I'm still determined to keep experimenting, even if this one didn't work out

 

 

If you're upset about this change, I'll try to understand where I'm coming from (maybe that'll help): the stars simply never aligned for this particular sub-project (experiment, really) inside the hub. Despite my good intentions and a lot effort, nobody really caught the 'bug', and the program ended up only making everybody cranky. I've received something close to forty meaty rants about the program (or the hub in general) since the beginning of April, and, frankly, I'm just tired of it. When people you respect start complaining constantly about a project, something has to change.

 

The day may come when this program is rebooted (or just retooled), but today is not that day.

 

Image of casket used in my header image was taken from here

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RIP hope you guys can make this work one day

~~

Does this apply to the whole Starter VN Reviews thing going on in active tasks

More or less, sorry : (.

 

If anybody is working on a review for that project, feel free to speak up in this thread. I'll see if we can't use it somewhere.

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Welp, good thing that I decided to give up on the Review Hub and used the blog instead, after like a month of submitting without any movement from review team...

Sorry : (

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If I understand correctly :This is a software related problem ?

No, it's the human side. A lot of things led to this, but I'm taking responsibility for it. I didn't manage to convey the vision/build enough enthusiasm for people to want to work on the project, I got burned out from complaints, and I've got higher priority projects (like the Front Site and a building bridges conference) which mean I can't do it, myself.

 

The concept will probably be retooled sometime this year, but for the time being I decided to close down submissions.

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I'd have a shit load of suggestions, ideas, but if it's being scrapped, so be it. I loved the idea though :( Great potential. I hope the day it gets discussed again isn't that far.

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I'd have a shit load of suggestions, ideas, but if it's being scrapped, so be it. I loved the idea though :( Great potential. I hope the day it gets discussed again isn't that far.

Yeah. I've got a fair number, too, so we'll have to compare notes when that day comes.

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This is for the best.  A poorly-implemented feature is a morale killer for all involved.

 

If you ever want to revive this, I'd suggest a peer-review system similar to what's used in academic circles.  This would spread out the work and put more responsibility on those submitting articles to also help review articles.  I think the issue with this system was you had one person handling all submissions who had very little interest in writing submissions or reviewing them.  That's not fun; that's just work.

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This is for the best.  A poorly-implemented feature is a morale killer for all involved.

 

If you ever want to revive this, I'd suggest a peer-review system similar to what's used in academic circles.  This would spread out the work and put more responsibility on those submitting articles to also help review articles.  I think the issue with this system was you had one person handling all submissions who had very little interest in writing submissions or reviewing them.  That's not fun; that's just work.

I've tried that for a few things in the past to fairly poor results. I'll keep the idea on the table, tho.

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Peer review for better or worse is powered by ego.  That's probably why in academic circles the submitter is blinded to who's commenting on the submission.  I could definitely see how that could put a cramp in the style of this site, which is less about results and more about having a good time.

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Peer review for better or worse is powered by ego.  That's probably why in academic circles the submitter is blinded to who's commenting on the submission.  I could definitely see how that could put a cramp in the style of this site, which is less about results and more about having a good time.

Well, that's part of it. The other part is that you have to get 3+ fairly knowledgeable people together and have them vet content which is often quite boring (and/or just plain bad) to someone of their experience. That's not something people want to do as a volunteer on a regular basis.

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The peer review idea was more along the lines of: "for every article you submit, you have to review someone else's article".  Alternatively, a revolving team composed of one veteran and several new members could go through submissions, with the team composition in constant flux.  That way new reviewers would be teaching each other to some extent.  The veteran would be there to sign off on the final result, but most of the revision process would be on the new reviewers.

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The peer review idea was more along the lines of: "for every article you submit, you have to review someone else's article".  Alternatively, a revolving team composed of one veteran and several new members could go through submissions, with the team composition in constant flux.  That way new reviewers would be teaching each other to some extent.  The veteran would be there to sign off on the final result, but most of the revision process would be on the new reviewers.

I'll keep that idea on the table. Thanks for the clarification.

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Burnout is real.  No one wants to deal with Eternal September: training an endless line of candidates that consume your time and energy, write a couple of articles, and then disappear.  Figuring out how to manage interns without wasting valuable resources is one of those difficult aspects of managing an organization.  Sometimes you just have to cut your losses, as you've done here.

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