THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR FEEDBACK. This half-baked idea seems to need more time to cook. While credits will still accumulate on your accounts, they will NOT be required for anything any time soon.
TLDR; Making recipes public will soon require credits. Credits are freely earned by members in various ways. Making private recipes, mixing recipes, creating batches will not require credits.
I get a LOT of mail about the site every day, but lately there is a theme forming: Core community members don't love seeing multiple public copies of recipes, or huge numbers of public recipes churned out by other members that may not be putting in the effort to ensure they are "quality."
Now, this is an elitist attitude, I admit it. But quality recipes on All The Flavors is very important to me - and at the same time, I know I'm not the right judge to decide what "quality" is.
So I've introduced an experiment. Every day, every pro member gets his "paycheck." You earn credits towards public recipes, partially by being a pro member, and partially by doing stuff the community likes. Get followed by people, get reviews, be a long-time contributor, participate in contests, etc ... and your "paycheck" will increase.
Your paycheck accumulates as credits, and those credits are used to "pay" to make your recipes public. Every person starts out with 2 credits, and every pro member earns another one every month by default. The goal is that as soon as you have established yourself, you should be getting an average of 1 credit per week which, in my mind, is about the right speed to ensure a level of quality control without creating too much restriction.
Of course special circumstances will be considered, people can ask for a bunch of credits to migrate from another service, etc... They will all be considered on a case by case basis, but the goal is NOT to restrict the site, just to slow down public recipes a little bit and drive quality up.
I'll be tuning the 'earning' over time, and for right now, posting recipes do not "cost" credits - so all pro members are right now earning credits that they don't have to spend for some time.
So ... I expect this to gather some hate, to piss off and lose a few members, and ultimately to help quality of the site to improve into the future.
Here's your chance to get it out ... and also to ask questions, give me feedback to improve it, or suggest something better.
Read more about the in-development concept here and check out your profile page to see your current credits.
Let the anger (and hopefully constructive comments) flow!
- Q
EDIT: I had a mistake above, sorry. It said "for now, posting private recipes do not "cost" credits" and it should say "for now, posting recipes do not "cost" credits" ... posting PRIVATE recipes would NEVER cost credits. (And I tried so hard to be clear!)
I'm of two minds about this.
The first is that you're absolutely correct in that there should be discouragement of people blindly reposting recipes without even bothering to check if they exist. I think part of the deterrent is the paid nature of ATF, but I think a hundred free members wasting two hundred recipes on crap is still going to clog on the system. All the same, you run into crap on all websites, unless you want to just literally shut the gates now and keep it invite only.
On the other hand, I'm curious how many people complaining about quality are actually justified in doing so. One situation caught my eye earlier this week, and I decided to go back and take a deeper look at it before I passed judgement on anyone. Here's the recipe I looked at;
https://alltheflavors.com/recipes/17369#cereal_milks_enyawreklaw_by_ninhalo5
Let's run down a couple facts about this one;
- Four people have commented as of this time. All four rated it one star. All four are ATF supporters. All four essentially gave the same message, which is that it's a duplicate, it's clogging up the site, it should be deleted and/or private.
- Dalpho has 27 recipes, 1 public one(~3%), which is a Thug Juice clone.
- Joneser has 3 recipes, 0 public ones(0%), and 1 flavor. I'll assume the recipes are strawberry ripe at 5%, 10%, and 15%, because that makes me smile.
- CriticalVape has 3 recipes, 1 public one(~33%), and believes that "These duplicate posts are just going to bog down this beautiful site", and asks the poster of the original recipe to "Please stop". CriticalVape's one public recipe is a repost of someone elses' recipe. A recipe, I'll just presume, wasn't available on ATF, because the comedic value if it was already available on ATF might literally kill me.
- Finally, we have tranceinate, who has 18 total recipes, 11 public(~61%), who was the first poster, and wants to know why he'd post this, due to it already being on Wayne's profile.
- The poster is Ninhalo5, who has 59 total recipes, 3 public(~5%), and is also an ATF supporter.
- Now, this's where we reach the funny part of this entire post. The three public recipe's on Ninhalo5's account? All DIYorDIE recipes. None of which are available on Wayne's profile on ATF. In fact, in searching, I couldn't find duplicates of the three anywhere else on the site. In essence, Ninhalo5 has posted the sole copies of Cereal Milks, Boardwalk, and Blackout to ATF. He's not only not posting a duplicate that Wayne already has, he's not posting a duplicate anyone else publicly has either.
- So, how've four people decided this guy's recipe contribution is a waste of space?
I actually went back to that recipe to take a look at it, as an example of people blindly posting duplicates. What I instead found, after a little digging, is people not even doing their homework before pointing fingers. Ninhalo5 is doing something I'll often do; if I need to use a recipe, but there isn't a copy on the site, I post it with proper credit. If the person who made it ever posts it, I then take mine down. It looks like he's doing that, and these people are still One Starring him for no reason.
I have to say, personally, I'd oppose a credit system on the grounds that it'd merely further the elitism that's already happening. I think you have a perfectly good barrier in place that limits the damage people can do, and that system is the paywall. There's no reason to further limit it once people are within the paywall.
These were recipes that I was preparing to make. Naturally, I did a search and could not find them so, I manually put the recipes down in ATF to begin my mixing.
Being there are other recipes of Wayne's on site that were posted by others, I figured I would help out as well with some that were missing, also including the original URL for the recipes in the description.
I generally keep everything private but know Wayne has a huge following and being I did not find those recipes I added them. Sure, these recipes are a duplicate found on other sites, but as far as I could tell, not duplicated at ATF. If they are already there, I'll be happy to make them private again.
I still consider ATF a work in progress, so going to a credit system I think would be too early. When I signed up for this app there was only something like 50 recipes available, going on a credit system especially for people who is paying to support this project is kinda far fetched, and valuable recipes will end up not being added because of this. If we had that credit mindset awhile back those 50 recipes would only be found on e-liquid-recipes.
I think what would be more appropriate would be a report duplicate button on each recipe, then someone can be assigned to checking for duplicates. If one is found then they inform the person that posted it to either remove it or mark it as private.
I need to apologize to you. I saw your sharing of Cereal Milks, which is actually one of my favorite recipes by Wayne, and knew it wasn't on his ATF profile. I didn't bother to check like /u/DataNotAnecdotes did, but I felt pretty sure I hadn't seen anyone else share it yet, either. And I saw what those people were saying to you about it. And yet I said nothing. I should have 5-starred it and left a comment telling those people they were wrong. I'm very sorry for not doing that yesterday. I feel like the priest who walked past the traveler who had been beaten and robbed and did nothing, when I usually try to be the Good Samaritan.
/u/tranceinate I love you man, but you were one of the robbers. Make it right, please.
I ain't no robba. I dun goofed & I was the first to goof without double checking before goofing. Whaps. Fixed.
Edit: Looks like I mistook Waynes Cereal Strawberry Marshmallow Milk for the older, original, Cereal Milks. Damnit. I didn't mean to cause any of this, my apologies /u/Ninhalo5, /u/ID10-T
Well I feel like a prize asshole... I used one of his posted recipes as an example when asking Q about implementing a way to report reposts. So not only did I not help make it right, I helped in making the whole situation worse :\
Apologies, /u/Ninhalo5
Although I was trying to keep from dragging you into this, preventing you (and future Ninhalo5s) from accumulating unfair negative reviews was one of my specific short-term goals in this experiment.
As such, your vote actually holds quite a bit of sway here.
> Joneser has 3 recipes, 0 public ones(0%), and 1 flavor. I'll assume the recipes are strawberry ripe at 5%, 10%, and 15%, because that makes me smile.
I loved every part of this comment, but that part was a great twist. "Trolling with science!" is your new tag in my RES.
I've been on the fence about ATF. I manage my own community site, in an unrelated niche hobby, and have done so for over 5 years now. There are a lot of unique challenges in every niche. It's hard to keep a community from stagnating, or self-cannibalizing in a cliquey circle-jerk of death.
/u/queuetue's tag in my RES is, "Might be the smartest guy here." I've been watching ATF closely as an outsider; especially with regards to how the micro-community is perceived and engaged in the larger DIY community. This attempt at codified meritocracy was interesting, but I agree with his conclusion that this proposal was short-sighted. I'm a strong believer in meritocracy, but I don't believe it can be commodified in this way.
Upvoted twice if I could. :)
I was trying to be coy, but I should have realized it's difficult to prevent pointing fingers on a site with a lot of open data and clever people who like a puzzle.
My intent here had a few goals - to prevent established members of the community feel overshadowed by new members who sometimes take over the new recipes page in exuberance, to address the concerns about "copying" that exist everywhere in our ecosystem, and to limit the abuse that users might perceive when confronted with the two previous issues - all without censoring anyone.
I'll soften my stance for now, people can keep accumulating credits but I won't use them for anything.
I still think something like this is a good idea, but you're right that an artificial paywall inside of the actual paywall trends towards the concern that we'll eventually need another paywall inside of that one, and we are simply not addressing the real problems effectively here - if those problems exist at all.
First, my apologies if I pointed at something you were trying to keep under wraps. My intent was solely to highlight that not everyone who claims degradation of quality is correct when doing so, and certainly never to point fingers. Just presenting the facts.
I think something that might help, though, and provide a measure of comfort that the recipe base is further curate would be to possibly limit how free accounts can make recipes public. I'm not sure how many recipes publicly available on the site are from free accounts, but if he number is relatively low, it might be worth it to make it a requirement that only paid accounts can make recipes public. This's further helped now that you've added the ability to directly link to private recipes; people can still use all the functionality of ATF, even share with friends, but they're kept in their own little bubble until they choose to join the greater community.
I think a better system would be to allow paying members the ability to flag recipes to be deleted, and after it reaches a certain threshhold (10 reports or some other nominal value), it gets queued for deletion.
This way you let your userbase determine what's important/not important, rather than limiting their potential.
This is one of the other proposal stickies on my desk, and it almost was the topic of this post. :)
The problem I saw was it has the potential to introduce gangs, politics and smells a bit like groupthink censorship. Some of these recipes don't deserve to be hidden, or punished in any way, but they would be because of the nature of the beast.
Thanks for voicing this alternative.
I really liked the original idea of credits, however, I think there is merit in this one. Gangs could be a potential problem, but if the recipes were to go into a queue for deletion that queue it would then need to be reviewed. If it seems like its okay (not crappy or a duplicate), or that the users flagging it are brand new or from the same IP, then you could just leave it up.
Politics are a similar issue to gangs, but I imagine it in terms of "This recipe has DAAP in it and I don't vape DAAP so I'm flagging it". Both of these could help to be prevented by requiring people to select WHY a recipe is being flagged when they flag it - quality, duplication, whatever.
And finally, it IS kind of like groupthink censorship. If enough of the community feels that a recipe is not up to par, then it would not be public. The people who would flag recipes are likely the same group who have been complaining about the quality of recipes, because they want a certain level of quality from ATF that other eliquid recipe databases do not have. It IS kind of elitist but isn't that part of wanting high quality recipes without tons of duds?
I love ATF and appreciate all the hard work you do, and as I said I love the original idea anyways. I don't even know how hard it would be to moderate a deletion queue or implement those flagging features in the first place. Plus I'm sure you've thought of some or all of this already, but I wanted to mention them in case you haven't. Keep up the great work!
Edit: Grammar.
That means you'll need a human to sit there and review all the recipes queued up for deletion. Que has enough on his plate..he's going to need to start hiring interns or at the very least, taking pledges..ALPHA TAU PHI! But, I like the basic theme of this..our community deciding the quality of what is in the community database of recipes.
this sounds like a great way to encourage people to spam links to your site and have people create false accounts to follow themselves.
You're absolutely right - and this is the first thing /u/enyawreklaw brought up when I floated the idea. The hope was that I could tune the math in the backend to prevent this sort of behavior from taking place, but you're completely correct that it requires me to enter into an arms race that I may not want to dedicate myself to.
To be honest the main reason I became a paid member basically since ATF launched was because the layout and addition of recipes was streamlined by not having postings able to write down whatever variation they want of a concentrate name. I don't often pay for online services or software if I can avoid it or is on a very good sale. Having features removed from something I'm already paying for is unacceptable. I'm on board with avoiding ATF becoming another ELR but the current ranking and sorting options I feel already accomplish that and set it apart.
I definitely don't hate the idea of quality control and trimming the fat. I think you should set the amount of "credits" to be the same for everyone. If we are all paying the same amount for our memberships we shouldn't be getting a different amount of credits or total recipes we can post .
Like I said, the idea isn't horrible...just you need to make it as fair as possible for everyone. I guarantee you there are some people putting out delicious and well crafted recipes and not getting exposure and ratings. But due to the nature of our community others can put an equal amount of effort in but because of their status in the community, immediately get 5 stars and multiple reviews up within a day or two.
If you are going to do this make it fair and make it unchanging for everyone. You get 1 credit a month that you can spend or bank. No multipliers and no variables. This is the only way you can be fair to everyone paying for your service.
I like it but, dont have an ATF account yet :[
Cool concept though, seems like win-win.
- More active Community:Better recipes
Hopefully criticism will be constructive :]
Well, if there is a way I can, allow me to pay for your first month. I think you'd be a valuable contributor there. u/queuetue. Is there a way I can use my Google credits to purchase him at least 1 month of membership?
You can buy "gift codes" on your profile page (and there are lots of them floating around, ask manson, skiddz, wayne or one of the beginner blenders for some), but Bobby should know he would get a free ride from me if he wanted one. He gives enough value around here.
The issue isn't that he's not a PRO member, but that he says he hasn't chosen to become a member at all yet, which is perfectly fine by me, all are welcome, but I'm not trying to push on anyone. :)
Thanks I appreciate it.
Ill sign up today and go pro sooner than later.
IDK how to explain whatup/ITT isn't the place for that.
time and accessibility are my limiting factors. Most of my redditing is done on an iPhone. I see the value of your site
You are amazing as is everyone else here. You specifically for things like this, the solid advice you give, and other reasons.
Whatup with the username?
Thank you for the offer. I'm going to have to respectfully decline though. I just need to figure out an alternative form of payment than my debit card. CC should be here next week, I should have more free time as well after the holidays.
Hopefully I'll be there around then :] I only mention it bc I hold the least weight as a non member
The username is actually from an Immortal Technique song "I'm the worst advice, I am horrible, the reverse of Christ". Don't read to deep into it, I joined when I had no clue what Reddit was... I Googled my real name, saw people asking questions, and set the record straight. Hopefully you come to ATF soon!
Earning the right to share, sounds a bit backwards at first. But when you look at what ELR became and the problems you're trying to avoid, seems like an amazing solution.
I'm preferable to u/ckive 's idea..since taste is so subjective we may miss out on recipes that some people don't prefer or like but the overall community loves "Beta" could be an area to go to pull and mix new recipes of your choice and rate it. Set the threshold at say 10 reviews and 3 star minimum to go public?? It would probably be a lot less work for you as well as opposed to answering all the emails that may ensue. Just my two cents. Either way I appreciate the work that you do for the community. Thank you..
So is it going to be possible to share recipe links with friends to view private stuff? i.e. viewable via a direct link to people it is sent to without the recipe being public as such?
The question to ask is simply, "Which truly beneficial recipe, or recipes, posted publicly to ATF would this system prevent?
Without a ridiculous amount of unnecessary "research" into people's accounts (which working adults have no time for), it's pretty safe to say: None.
If there is any mixer, ATF member or otherwise, whom is posting more than 3 insanely awesome 4 or 5-Star NEW recipes per month to ATF, perhaps they should start as a pro mixer in the UK, France, or South Africa, and roll in money.
Bottom line is that there should be some form of restriction to posting public. We have all seen what ELR has become, a glorified e-liquid calculator. Full of nothing.
ATF has, and should be, a source for the best of the best. Tried and proven, curated recipes. Not someone's useless 4% strawberry single flavor mix NO ONE will mix.
I have posted one public recipe to ATF, my last ADV. A recipe from a master mixer, from the old school on ELR, who has not yet accepted invitation to join ATF. (I do not bog down ATF with my private recipes either. Choosing rather to store them on ELR, as I'm just more familiar with the interface.) THAT is what I believe ATF needs. Knockout recipes that DIYers have vetted as a community. No more waste or uncertainty.
I believe this is a decent start. Time will tell. The key is that Scott has the cajones to implement a system that, while you may label it "elitist", is designed to protect this wonderful collection of thoughtfully-developed, and intentionally curated recipes for all to benefit from, without wasting hard-earned money and time.
I don't disagree with you, but I think this idea is too far from what some people expect from the site to implement at this time. I'll let it mature and evolve a bit before raising it again.
A contrary argument to yours is, if I play Devil's Advocate, "I paid. Let me do what I want."
It's a valid argument, and one I knew would come up when I made this suggestion. I'll admit that even after my tongue in cheek invitation to bring the hate, I wasn't prepared for how strongly this argument would resonate with some.
I'm not going to argue with anyones' opinion on this matter, because I feel like it's pointless to debate on something that's subjective. We all have different views shaped by different experiences.
> Without a ridiculous amount of unnecessary "research" into people's accounts (which working adults have no time for), it's pretty safe to say: None.
But was this necessary? The only "research" you needed to do to not be needlessly cruel was a literal search for the name "Cereal Milks", and looking at one persons' profile to see if they had it posted. It's only after you and three other people decided it was alright to pointlessly gang up on someone whose only mistake was sharing a recipe they liked from a well-known mixer that I went in and decided to lay out the entire situation as transparently as possible.
If you don't have time for what amounts to a reference check and search before you decide to tell someone they're ruining a site you both love, maybe you just shouldn't comment. I somehow managed to dissect that car crash and yet still work 40 hours a week.
You will get no hate from me. I think this is an awesome way to promote quality. I don't understand what the complaints are about. Why would a person need to make more than two to four recipes per month public? Who has time to properly mix, test, revise, mix again, test again, revise, repeat, repeat etc., more than two recipes per month (other than special circumstances such as migrating from another service)? Hint: Nobody. And if they do happen to somehow create a handful of beauties at once, what does it hurt to leave a few of them private for another month? As long as you can still make as many private recipes as you want and use the private links to share them with your friends, why would anyone have an objection to this?
Yeah. I don't get the rampant hate this idea is creating
The only logical thing I can think of is that people don't like paying for one thing and having it changed into something else. They might feel bait-and-switched.
But it was always meant to be a premium recipe site, and this is just an effort to keep it that way.
That's the only logical thing. But people so frequently not logical... I don't know. The hate is seriously confusing to me, as long as it only effects the ability to create public recipes. If for some reason the ability to create private recipes were somehow limited, I'd get pissed and leave too.
By the way I'm vaping your blueberry cinnamon pastry right now and it is delicious!
I sometimes work in sets and therefore publish in sets (especially when working on the Flavor Of The Week stuff), so this can potentially be a bit of a bother for me. Additionally, I hold firmly that the username associated with any given recipe is the least valuable criterion for evaluating it. The site is called 'all the flavors' (not 'all the mixers'), after all.
These are just some things to keep in mind while tackling the thorny problem of keeping ATF clean and full of recipes of the highest quality. I appreciate the sentiment, I appreciate the site, and I appreciate all that you do. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, Q and keep up the good work!
What if you added a check box in the recipe creation page to flag it as a clone that got binned in a different table and after 3 months only the top rated clone of that recipe was kept public and all others go back to private. Not deleted just private. Sort of like a competition. If you find a clone in the unique section it gets flagged and moved back into the clone table. For all unique recipes, you could institute a voting / rating system that would only keep your recipe public if it maintained 3 stars or more month to month with a permanent spot if it averaged 3-4 stars over 6 mo. This keeps the bazillion clones like you find on ELR seperate from the unique recipes and keeps it clean and rewarding for those who really try. I think people would be more inclined to work harder at mixing if they knew it was more of a comp style.
An late but important point to raise in all of this, even though it will be lost down at the bottom, is that All The Flavors doesn't have more quality recipes than ELR does. ELR does, and maybe always will, have many more excellent recipes.
I think that, today, All The Flavors has a higher ratio of signal to noise, though, due to the paywall and other factors - and that's what I'm trying to preserve, while balancing the other issues discussed in this thread.
Just to add my two cents. I'm fine with it, I use ATF to create my recipes, I don't need to make everything I mix public, Just the odd rare recipe that I think deserve it. Public recipes should be limited in some way, you'd hope it could be done by people restraining themselves but if it can't then some system needs to be put into place to prevent it becoming another elr, which by the way I like and certainly has its place in the community but ATF is trying to be a little different. Surprised by all the hate and people cancelling subscriptions already.
I love that ATF has much higher quality stuff than I see elsewhere. Love the spirit of this change, too. Just two thoughts while I'm brainstorming -- this definitely isn't criticism.
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Baby Steps: Give twice what you think is fair initially. At the very least, be open to an exception process for newcomers that have respected recipes. There are plenty of folks in here with great recipes and no ATF account that I'd hate to see have some tiny limit when they finally join.
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Have an Intermediary Step: Not Public, not Private. Maybe "Beta" -- allow anyone to post and view here, but require a certain number of positive comments/reviews before it goes public. Alternately, keep things as they are, and let folks spend their "credits" to promote any recipe to "Best Of" recipes.
A thought, somewhat related to this.
I think you should remove the Keep this recipe private check box when adding a new recipe. I believe part of the "ELR problem" is people just in the habit of marking it public as they add recipes.
Keep the check box greyed out until the recipe is 24 hrs (or some amount of time) old.
This would at least make people have to do more work to make a recipe public.
I am fairly new to the forums. I've been mixing for just over a year and mainly hanging out in FB groups. I only have 2 recipes on ATF, my favorite and my latest. My concern is with reviews. I feel like not a lot of people review recipes or give constructive criticism. My favorite took 6 months to get 5 reviews on ELR. So if it doesn't get any reviews, it's gone? And then what's to stop others from flagging a recipe to get rid of it because they don't like the mixer or have a recipe with same flavor profile. Someone had mentioned giving a reason for flagging which I think is a good idea. I'm not mad and I'm not going to delete my account. Just curious as to how this is going work.
I had to laugh at this
Thanks for that, made my day. I notice no apology posted over there. :)
I think it's a great idea. Its a good way to keep it clean and uncluttered. Some of the things that got said over there are the exact reasons something like your proposal is good. There are SO many recipes over there that need to be made private
https://alltheflavors.com/recipes/14036#timebomb_by_dazcole
Did this guy take a clone and really try to add notes to it like its his own original recipe? Just curious, I know the folks at All the Flavors are against stealing recipes, even having one listed as "Dont steal this recipe, you bitch" ...classy lmao
I know the Oba Oba is a different note but Time Bomb is Time Bomb. Hopefully people aren't paying to get relabeled and repackaged clones as original recipes.
I'm a bit of a new user and for me the thing that attracts me to ATF is quality. I need few solid, quality recipes to learn from and not a thousand differing variants, half of them named "test". That I can get for free elsewhere. Any change that promotes that seems good to me.
Just my two cents from where I stand. I might have missed alot of angles though not having been around for long.
Oh my god this is AMAZING. You are such a wonderful human being. What a badass idea!
Ok, that was a MUCH better first response than I was expecting. :) Thanks.