Kata auto-retired with 4 "Somewhat Satisfied" and 1 "Not Satisfied" votes

[CliffStamp]

It appears that a kata can be retired if there are a string of negatives votes in a row. I would assume that the intent of this was to retire katas which were so problematic that the negatives heavily outweighed the positive, or a steady stream of issues just caused a pile up of downvotes.

However there there are a group of PU's who are seriously abusing this ability by

• making a down vote
• calling for mass action in gitter chat
• spamming downvotes

Thus they completely ignore the community feedback / interaction, and have created their own private enforcement militia. Note critically there is NO response time from the author to correct any issues, and there are at times no issues even raised, not even any feedback given. Ex

https://www.codewars.com/kata/5c001479a7c77ac734000c25

When pressed for why this was retired, one noted likely because it was "uninteresting" to those that downvoted. Note it was a white kata and that group are far from novice programmers.

Note the kata

• well written description
• random tests
• one small bug in the test suite

The author had no idea why it happened, no feedback given on the retirement.

If you wanted to create an elitist and openly hostile environment and about as anti-learning as you could, then this pretty much has achieved it. You have a small group of people who have their own standard of what quality means, which is never documented anywhere and enforced without explanation which is never even explained let alone actually defended.

Even if a new user somehow had that reception and for some crazy reason wanted to try again, there is no indication at all about what they need to do because no feedback is given, and there is no standard of what makes a quality problem even hinted at let alone documented for someone to try to follow. I seriously doubt that CW actually intended this retirement policy to be used in this way.

[kazk]

So this kata was retired after 4 "Somewhat Satisfied" and 1 "Not Satisfied".
I don't know if this is a bug or not, but I personally don't like the current behavior.

This happened because the current implementation only cares about the number of votes and the satisfaction percentage which is calculated by (up_vote + 0.5*ok_vote)/votes.

I think we should at least consider how many "Not Satisfied" was given or the ratio of it.

[kazk]

I don't know if this is an abuse though. I'd say it's Codewars' fault not being more clear. I was surprised by this to be honest.

[kazk]

Also, it's a good idea to give authors some time to fix before auto-retiring. But I'm not sure how to do that with current system's limitation. The votes are permanent in most cases so simply giving a time before retiring would be worse (author spends time to fix and fixes it, but gets retired anyways).

(I'm never on Gitter, but I read them randomly and see discussions about improving Codewars. I wish there's a way to keep track of them and manage the information better.)

[Voileexperiments]

@CliffStamp

I'm going to repeat the same arguments I have in cough one of the recent beta katas here:

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However there there are a group of PU's who are seriously abusing this ability by

• making a down vote
• calling for mass action in gitter chat
• spamming downvotes

For the record, this is not spamming, this is vote-brigading.

However, even then, your choice of word here is, frankly, disgusting:

• In what sense is this an abuse? People can upvote or downvote all they want. What is the problem in downvoting katas that are not up to quality? Why is this suddenly an "abuse"?
• If you're defining this as "abuse", what about instead doing the same but for upvotes to quickly make a beta kata approvable? Is this an "abuse"? If it's not, why is downvoting and abuse while upvoting is not?
• In what sense is this "spamming"? @10XL even has a tool to automatically upvote every kata you've solved. Is this spamming? Is "posting some old betas so someone will solve it and finally get enough votes for approval" vote-brigading? Is "bumping my beta kata to the top of the search list every day" spamming?
• Also, as far as I recall, nobody has actually called for massive action in gitter chat, so it's highly likely you're imagining things or just making it up.

Your choice of word "spamming" and "abuse" contains hidden agenda and sentiment that, unless you clarify yourself, remains hidden.

---

When pressed for why this was retired, one noted likely because it was "uninteresting" to those that downvoted. Note it was a white kata and that group are far from novice programmers.

If you wanted to create an elitist and openly hostile environment and about as anti-learning as you could, then this pretty much has achieved it. You have a small group of people who have their own standard of what quality means, which is never documented anywhere and enforced without explanation which is never even explained let alone actually defended.

Are you trying to pull off the "PUs are all elitists who downvote katas because they are too good for them, blablabla" public-shaming talks again?

Stop it already.

There was a time where PUs like me vote like a normal person does: according to how I feel about the kata and how it's written. Then there comes a few... "special" kata authors and users who throws a fit whenever a new beta kata is downvoted and begin to call all kinds of words on PUs who downvoted their katas. Occurrences like this happen literally every few days, and it's a massive annoyance and disappointment to participate in the beta process.

Eventually we settled to just upvote anything that is acceptable to prevent these "special" kata authors and users throwing tantrums at us again.

If beta quality gets lower, nobody but the likes of you are responsible for the mess.

You do not dictate how how people vote (if anything, it'd be a standard set up by CW officially), nobody owes you an explanation why they downvoted, and you do not simply police other user's votes. Do I have to fill in a "downvote submission form" filled in a 1000-word essay about why the downvote is justified, and get 5 approvals (which 2 of them must be from novice programmers) before I can even get the downvoted casted and applied? (And of course if you upvote, you just upvote and it's applied. Go figure.) Because these constant nagging and shaming is just suggesting this. This is a serious breach of other user's free will and freedom of speech. It's utterly disgusting.

(The same goes to ranking votes as well.)

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Currently the only way for users to express their opinion that actually matter in beta process is to cast their votes. Comments are pointless as anyone is free to straight out ignore them, and once there are enough votes and satisfaction rating, someone can just barge in, resolve all the issues instantly regardless of their validity and approve the kata.

This is the final line of defense in the current beta system. I did not post #1626 for no reasons.

If you don't like how others vote, use your votes. Stop calling names and public-shaming whoever downvoted the kata. You're abusing the process more than people posting links to new beta katas in gitter chat by causing drama like these in the first place.

[Voileexperiments]

@kazk As far as I can see, the only way to resolve the constant arguments about the same thing on beta katas are to set up a standard ASAP. Then everyone has to be referred to the standard and advised to comment on the standard outside CW.

Well, it's not like I haven't tried (I did posted lots of issues in this repo about various things that ought to have a standard), but whenever an issue is set up, the users who were arguing on CW comments almost never give any input, so it leads to nowhere and nothing can be done. Instead we're still stuck at pointless, unproductive arguments on new beta katas every few days, while they should be expressing their opinions on the github issues instead. At this point I'm not sure if these arguments are in good faith anymore.

Can we at least set up some issues to talk about these things in specific, and direct users to these issues to continue talking as soon as another argument is about to happen in a beta kata? Otherwise I'm not seeing how the standardization process can proceed.

[kazk]

@Voileexperiments Let's start by collecting "the constant arguments about the same thing". I'll create an issue about it for discussion and also a wiki page later that summarizes them so the community can reference it.

[Blind4Basics]

calling for mass action in gitter chat

@cliff: talking about me?

Did you seriously look at the katas I called this for? All was bad in those: bad description / bad tests / bad design / even done by cheaters, for some of them. Let's rather say I call for an action to be sure that no "casual user" will make a mistake by upvoting it, forbidding a retirement.

You'd say that the author could act on the kata to make it good. Yes. But in most case it requires to actually completely rewrite the thing. And the retirement can be educational for the author, too.

[Blind4Basics]

(wanted to edit, but firefox versino unsupported where I am, so...)

And the retirement can be educational for the author, too.

yes because in those cases, the original work is so bad that it clearly shows that the author published without any care about what others do or any sort of "respect" (translation troubles, don't focus your attention on the chosen word) for other users. So it's seems pretty fair to act that way.

[GiacomoSorbi]

I am sorry, but apparently I was mentioned indirectly in the discussion, as per Voile's habit: nice collection of strawmen up there, but the point is that a bunch of power-users goes around bullying other people, mostly new users, with nasty remarks and/or no feedback at all.

So odd that also it comes from somebody declaring that he just wants to downvote on a whim (like "this kata is too easy for me") and/or without bothering to leave a comment, uh...

Regardless, I think the correct solution would be to ponder the user story: somebody just blindly approving or downvoting katas should be weighted less and less.

And, please, spare the pathetic victimism of mentioning hidden agendas or attacks to one's freedom of speech (which was never impeded, as far as I am aware).

[CliffStamp]

And the retirement can be educational for the author, too.

It could be, but it won't for newcomers, the literature is clear on that, that isn't even debated. There are numerous katas where the author was actually trying to fix the issues, but the vote spamming preventing them from doing so as it can happen instantly, as in minutes. That is not going to create an environment where newcomers want to learn, it is just going to drive people away.

When you look at a kata, you see the effort that it would take you to write it, and the effort it would take you to think on/create the concept. For you, those katas are all trivial, and you see authors doing no work at all because that is what it would take for you, no effort. However for a beginner, even the most basic things can be a struggle like trying to sort out why Test.expect is not ok, but Test.assertEquals is, and how to use them and writing random tests is very daunting, especially as there are no examples set up for them to review, adapt, modify. In many languages even the most trivial thing like how to compare numbers isn't even standardized and even PU's debate about it, but yet newcomers are supposed to be able to do that and if they don't out come the spammed downvotes?

Plus when you look at what a new author sees when they look at existing kata, it isn't obvious that

• the approval conditions are a LOT higher now than in the past
• you don't have nearly as much time to make changes due to the current user base

There are complaints about that as well, people wondering why their kata don't get approved when they see the same type of thing being approved before. How come there are dozens of palindrome katas with only minor changes approved, but I make one kata on X which has only one other X type kata and I get spammed with downvotes and issues?

The massive increase in user base, and in particular very active users who look for new betas and instantly solve/rank them, makes it a very different environment than the past and this isn't made clear to a newcomer when it talks about making new katas. The reality of spammed downvotes and instant retirement isn't at all noted in the kata creation. If your kata isn't "interesting" then it could be instantly retired without warning - that, if true, deserves a very big and bold red flag in the kata creation documentation.

What is one of the main complaints now - lack of new and interesting content. Well guess what, this mass vote spamming and overly hostile reaction to newcomers is exactly what you want to do to create that problem. People who write new and interesting problems don't just wake up with the ability to do so, it comes with experience, and if you want that, then actually act in a manner which encourages it. Yeah there are very low effort and low yield katas, and there are likely low effort and low yield authors and some that never will be anything more. But you will never find the ones that could generate decent content with the "kill it with fire" approach noted above.

But hey, this is a community site - if the community actually wants this approach well go do it, but I can guarantee that content creation will stagnate because of it, that isn't even debatable, so think about what you want to achieve.

[Voileexperiments]

There are numerous katas where the author was actually trying to fix the issues, but the vote spamming

Define "vote spamming".

Votes that you don't like are not "spamming". If your kata has issues, then... your kata has issues? Why should I not downvote just because "author is trying to fix the issues", when it's not actually fixed at the moment? (See: raulbc777's katas, where he could say "I'll look into the issue" and then forget about it for 3 years) By next day you might even say "you shouldn't downvote because the kata author's learning how to do it".

For you, those katas are all trivial, and you see authors doing no work at all because that is what it would take for you, no effort. However for a beginner, even the most basic things can be a struggle

...Yeah, I called it.

It's funny how you're using "downvoting because kata shows no effort" as a strawman, when in the previous paragraph you're talking about "downvoting because kata has issues". Nobody doing the downvotes actually care about who is the one writing the kata, or their skills. We just downvote when the kata has issues, or is (near-)duplicate to the existing katas.

this mass vote spamming and overly hostile reaction to newcomers

If you're still trying to use this strawman, please pull out actual data that supports this claim before accusing everyone of being elitists, thank you. Your argument is misleading and disgusting.

[Voileexperiments]

@GiacomoSorbi

Regardless, I think the correct solution would be to ponder the user story: somebody just blindly approving or downvoting katas should be weighted less and less.

I also think the correct solution would be to revoke kata creation/translation privilege to users who keeps making problematic katas/translations, which would mean you'll instantly lose this privilege.

It seems like you're still butthurt about me downvoted on that kata of yours, but really, I don't owe any explanations to you about that, so you can go being salty about it for another months if you wanted. The only thing that I think you ought to know is that my track record is better than yours, I actually fix stuff that is broken, and users who are normal and reasonable agree about what I do and say. In some sense, you deserved it, so the ball of "reflecting on what's wrong with one self" is on your court.