Blog Tier Issue

Hello fellow lichessians,

You may or may not be aware that not all blogs are created equal: You have been assigned a tier from the beginning, and that tier is controlled by site moderators and administrators.

So what tier are you? The default tier is “Low tier” (no, not Normal Tier, which is a different tier entirely) for most people*. Low tier means that when someone likes your blog, notifications are NOT sent to their followers. In essence, your blog is doomed to never be popular, regardless of the content (unless your tier gets increased by a moderator).

*I will note that titled players and players with standard ratings > 2200 are automatically given Normal tier, which gives your friends notifications. I'm against this inequality, but I also want to focus on fixing one problem at a time so I won't delve into that issue now.

So let’s assume that you are an untitled player that does not have 2200 rating in a standard chess time control. You put a lot of effort into a blog that you believe will be entertaining and informative. However, since you are at Low tier, not many people will end up seeing your blog. Since your blog is unpopular (and it really isn’t your fault), chances are mods won’t see it either, which leaves you stuck at Low tier. Hence, the chances of your tier increasing is close to 0, creating a cycle that can only be broken by dumb luck: a mod happens to stumble across your well-written blog and decides to increase your tier.

This is just downright unfair and wastes the time of lichess users who genuinely want to put out good content. I believe it makes more sense for lichess users to start at “Normal tier”, and mods can downgrade spammy and low-effort users to “Low tier”. That system will allow good users to rise to the top, and will enable mods to filter out low-quality content. In the current system, everyone stays at the bottom, unnoticed, unless a mod happens to come across them and increase their tier.

Relevant code snips for this:

github.com/ornicar/lila/blob/0485c87f7ab239fe25be3335dade8ad618960a1e/modules/ublog/src/main/UblogBlog.scala#L40

github.com/ornicar/lila/blob/master/modules/ublog/src/main/UblogRank.scala#L74

Mods see a list of all new blog posts that haven't been explicitly assigned a tier yet so there's no need for them to randomly find your blog. If you write great blog posts, this tends to be even better for you than if everybody started at normal tier because there's a pretty good chance your blog will get a tier higher than normal if your first blog post is really good.

And this avoids the community blogs page being filled with masses of bad blog posts, many of them even being blatant copyright violations or just random spam.

On the other hand, just because the current system is the best known system doesn't necessarily mean it will scale well over time.

The quality of my writing is probably erratic and I'm puzzling over whether I should start multi-accounting just so I can choose which of my articles I want a wider audience to see; but for other players, I wonder if the more players write, the more they (at least some of them) improve at writing.

I don't know about you benwerner, but between dealing with racist DMs and deciding which blogs to bump, I think one of these will take precedent. And it's not dealing with blog tiers. Undoubtedly many people will not get the tier bumps they deserve because mods have better things to do.

I would argue that if lichess was so worried about more spam and copyright violations etc, perhaps this whole blog idea was a bad one and it shouldn't have been implemented. Lichess knew very well that this would happen: The forums have existed for a decade, and they have always been filled with crap, so it had to be expected of the blogverse as well. Only implement a feature if you are able to moderate it.

Lichess either has to make this feature open to all, like we all wanted, or nonexistent.

There aren't that many new posts in untiered blogs every day. And clearly, some mods prefer looking for interesting blog posts from time to time instead of reading racist DMs non-stop.

And the feature is very much open to all. As has been said before on the simul discussion, Lichess promoting your stuff has never been considered a feature. It should always be taken as a bonus. But everybody, no matter the tier (except those that are completely blocked for copyright violations, illegal content, etc.) can create blogs and share them with whomever they want. They are also still shown on your profile and promoted to followers. And even low-tier posts will usually show up on the community page a bit further down when they are new.

Though either way, arguing that the feature should rather not have been implemented instead of how it currently is is clearly nonsensical.

"And the feature is very much open to all. As has been said before on the simul discussion, Lichess promoting your stuff has never been considered a feature. It should always be taken as a bonus."

I thought the concept of following wasn't a "bonus". It's that if someone I am following does something, I want to know about it. This should be the default. If someone I am following likes blog X, I want to see that they have liked blog X so that I can check it out as well.

@TCF_Namelecc said in #4:
> I would argue that if lichess was so worried about more spam and copyright violations etc, perhaps this whole blog idea was a bad one and it shouldn't have been implemented. Lichess knew very well that this would happen: The forums have existed for a decade, and they have always been filled with crap, so it had to be expected of the blogverse as well. Only implement a feature if you are able to moderate it.

Although I don't care for the last sentence or the tone of this argument, it's not wrong. Forums are difficult to moderate and tiers are one moderation solution although hopefully over time a better solution is found. This morning I spent 2 hours researching and writing about the recent news in the international shogi festival, yet my work goes undiscovered (probably because I listed it under "chess variants" as other categories don't apply); not that I care, but I'm sure some other authors care whether their work is seen and don't want to abuse the tagging system, or resort to using cat pictures, exaggerated titles, viral content, etc. to get their content seen.

Anyways, success! Low tier blogs are now disseminated via timelines.

github.com/ornicar/lila/pull/10028 thanks kraktus and thibs