Yes Mandatory Updates! I think the simple value of forcing projects to come back to the platform and keep their project active will add immense value to donors. However maybe we should zoom out and look at the value vs. cost of policing updates.
If you want to move away from subjective and centralized verification processes maybe we should question how moderating project updates takes us any closer to this goal.
Optimistic Update Moderation
Perhaps we build some sort of optimistic update moderation, where we assume all project updates are well intentioned, removing the requirement for individual review/approval and have an open signalling system for users.
Each project update, once posted could have three options under the heading “How informative was this update?”, users, other than the project owner, can respond with “upvote”,“downvote” or flag/report.
We can go further and set metrics to keep project moderators informed with minimal overhead. We could say that if a project update has over 75% downvotes with a minimum votes of 5 then a flag is sent to the project verification team, if a user flags or reports then obviously a flag is sent as well.
If the update is malicious or breaks our terms and conditions we de-list or cancel it. If its a bad/uninformative update we send them an email.
If a project games the system and provides garbage updates and/or “upvotes” themselves via multiple accounts it really doesn’t provide any clear benefits for them. Other users can see the project posting uninformative/bad updates and using their discretion, will simply not donate funds.
Going further, if we choose to incorporate project updates into a project ranking system we could say that any updates above the downvote threshold are disqualified, meaning the project is ranked as if that update never existed. We could also allow project mods to manually disqualify updates as well.
Hopefully these are helpful ideas, I think the end goal as I understood is to reduce the overhead for project moderation as giveth continues to scale. Let’s try to keep scalability in our focus and avoid becoming the project police.