Cardano Media Guidelines On Official Channels - Your Input Is Desired (Stake Pool Advertising)

English General Discussions
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Hello Fam,

Cardano is growing up, and is doing so fast. In order to keep it still orderly - it is important to make sense of what is appropriate and what not.

Obviously, landscape is changing rapidly. Along, some rules may grow obsolete. While others need to be thought through further. Community members are gathering from wide range of personal experiences and cultural backgrounds. Having everyone be on the same page is more than desirable. But how?

There is a great upside with having a pre-determined set of values that govern conduct on official forums. Even when it comes to advertising and promotions. Whether it is one’s stake pool or other related businesses and activities within or outside of the ecosystem. Is is clear that a uniform and easy to navigate guidelines are currently unavailable. Presently, information must be pieced together from multiple sources from various platforms or individual experiences. Confusing at best.

I humbly suggest this thread to ideally serve as a community driven input that provides a spring board for the community management team at Cardano Foundation to draft a comprehensive media guideline. The hope is that it can serve as a single point of reference and be used as a living document to help navigate any discrepancies effectively and resolutely. Such that will empower administrators of various platforms to act with minimal doubt and maximum respectability.

This also includes merits of advertisements embedded in other forms of media (in)directly. Such as posting links to articles, video, audio and other media with reference to the advertisement of one’s activities. Including topics of individual profile utilisations for these purposes and similar ‘creative’ solutions. Remember, the basic premise is not to ‘shut down’ community presentation efforts but rather infuse it with an orderly conduct instead. So that we can empower community with tools that will enable all to thrive equally and opportunely.

It is also worth considering to determine what are the best standards and practices with help of creating sample visual guidelines (such as proportionality of adverts to the content created, size or length, its positioning, etc.). Determining what is clearly acceptable and what is questionable at best. This will also help avoid unnecessary community rifts over each other’s actions.

I understand that it may be impossible to be everywhere at once. However, my sincere hope is that these guidelines would serve as a community wide enforcement mechanism that would self-regulate as well. You can always come back here to discuss new inputs and ideas to be considered by the community management team at CF regularly.

The ideal outcome of this effort would NOT be what some would quickly jump and call ‘censorship.’ Instead, a community driven, sensible adaptation of an easy to consume & share media guideline for not only existing but all new incoming ecosystem members as well. One stop shop to avoid information fragmentation.

Lastly, this discussion should not be limited to SPO related context only. It is quickly becoming an obsolete way of thinking to pursue this solely. Cardano ecosystem is ever expanding across the board. So the guidelines should grow along, too. For example, with growing dFund proposals, we can expect influx of entries for funding across all the channels, etc. And marketing campaigns needed and associated with that as well while competing for votes. Getting ahead of this may also be a sound idea.

Discuss in thread below and let’s knock this one out to be numero uno.

Thank you for your effort and participation.

Danny

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Existing sample landscape of regulations/guidelines:

Telegram (#rules command)

  • “No spamming or low value content. Posts and comments including referral links*, phishing websites, affiliate links, (stake pool) advertisements or duplicate content will be removed and repeat offenders will be banned. DM an admin before posting any telegram ref. links.”

Reddit:

  • “Alt accounts are not allowed. In addition, posts including referral links, phishing websites, affiliate links, (stake pool) advertisements or duplicate content will be removed and repeat offenders will be banned.”
  • “Low-value content includes but is not limited to; memes, reaction gifs, speculation/hype, old links, duplicate links etc.”

Ambassador Pools

Cardano Forum

  • “Don’t post promotional content and/or advertisements.”

Facebook

  • “FYI: Stake Pool advertisements anywhere else on our social media platforms will be removed and users warned. If you see any such posts where they don’t belong, please use the report function. Thank you!”

Existing Available Venues for Active Advertising for SPOs:

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I would like to add that information released on video alone, especially when coming from representatives of IOG or Emurgo (including Charles Hoskinson himself), should not be considered useful or actionable. Video is fine for the people that like it, but first we need releases to be written, even for the SEO issue alone (Cardano needs to be adopted, therefore it needs to be search engine indexed and findable / readable especially by people other than us).

Besides the obvious SEO problem: People who have Cardano operations as only one facet of multi-faceted jobs cannot sift through videos for release dates, announcements, technology overviews, vital changes to stake pool operations and Cardano protocols. It maybe comforting to watch the videos, but to be a matter of record (i.e., useful & credible) they need to be transcribed, outlined, linked, serialised, cross-referenced, and corrected when they are superseded or contradicted.

As repeated so often in our internal culture, Cardano holds itself to a very high engineering and scientific standard. That’s why it’s so embarrassing
 as a scientist & engineer myself, and also to observe a loss of credibility in the outside world
 that whole cycles of anticipation, release and response to Cardano growth are only made through video chats, Q&A’s and howdy-doody type sessions that make us look like amateurs compared to other serious software projects.

Thankfully the Cardano Foundation itself recruited a PR specialist this summer who I have seen is also a fine technical writer. Briefs from the CF are coming out in forms that we can immediately scan, index, and begin using. With Cardano’s aggressive Goguen schedule coming out I pray that IOG & Emurgo will be able to do the same as releases carry greater public interest and business urgency. This post is a great example of synergy between video & writing that we used to see more often & I pray will become the norm.

However if IOG Marketing has not already identified the need for written releases to accompany the regular floods of video then we will continue to have a public credibility problem as well as a frightening inefficiency in our own community. Our media as a whole would certainly be standing head & shoulders above all the other cryptos if we could place a priority on the written word relative to the video format, which unfortunately is the worldwide refuge for amateurs and con artists.

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Thank you @dannyribar for bringing this into the forum.

What many may did not know is that we already had a no ad policy with “
posts including referral links, phishing websites, affiliate links, (stake pool) advertisements or duplicate content will be removed and repeat offenders will be banned
”

Some things were nevertheless tolerated and we must agree here on how it will be handled well and fairly in future by moderators.

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I second that. Cardano’s aspiration as a project is to “activate a new age of sustainable, globally-distributed innovation”, no less, and yet its community has somehow developed a habitude to communicate everything by video first and often only? Give me a break. There even exists a website that allows to search through transcripts of rambling videos. If that is an example of the sustainable, globally-distributed innovation we want, we are doing it wrong, I’m afraid.

Our whole civilization is built on text for a reason. We all learned to read and write. Relying on oral tradition in 2020 is neither innovative nor sustainable.

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I agree and 3rd the ‘rambling video’ problem, that COSDpool wrote so succinctly in the first post here.

There was a post on the forum about information coming from so many different places and mediums, and it’s still a problem.

I do not have time to watch hours of Charles Hoskinson Ama, or Project Catalyst townhalls, or Aparna Ju updates etc.
Or search through multiple telegram groups, reddit, CF forums because one or the other misses information from the other.

It makes a lot more sense to have ONE place where all FAQs/new updates can be listed, and can be searched. Even if the links are links to clips videos.

Where that place is needs to be discussed:

In the old days an official website would achieve this, but the team at CF in charge of the website seem to have left it to die.
We have a wiki but it’s not advertised on the website. I only know about it because i complain so much.
Preferably the news feed would eventually be on Daedelus or other wallet so it’s not ‘centralised’.

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In regards to SPOs. It’s already been said in telegram:

Allowing stake pool names on your name tag/banner in telegram is advertising.

To make a rule, not enforce the rule sometimes but then suddenly enforce the rule is not a good precedent.
Be consistent in enforcing or remove the rule.
———-

CF and IOG try this ‘trying to gauge community opinion’ by opening a thread or making a telegram group. But what you get is a bunch of opinions from those most vocal, that those in power choose or choose not to listen to - look at the roadmap which i think is a pointless endeavor for the same reason.
Until there is a way to vote on ideas, listening to opinions is still not decentralisation.

—-
Personally i hate advertisements. But if Cardano is trying to attract business and Entrepreneurs it seems contradictory to not allow advertising.

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We cannot and should not completely prevent advertising and many would certainly agree that advertising in names is no problem at all.

We should encourage stake pool operators to put their stake pool in brackets like “Andy Hendrikx [ANDH]”. This makes practically everything they write an advertisement for their pool and also serves as your personal business card. (so that they do not have to shill their pool bluntly or subtile)

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Completely agree. We need more written releases and video transcripts than just videos. Written text has more credibility, sense of urgency and purpose. It’s important for the futur of cardano to communicate more through the written text.

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thanks @Omshivaya, and welcome to the Forum community :slightly_smiling_face: As we all can see, the video issue has been brought up before, over a month ago in the Developers forum track, where it was completely ignored (as was the direct appeal to IOG Marketing):

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Thanks @COSDpool. Hoping this time the issue is taken seriously by the developers and the Cardano marketing team.

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I created an app for people to stay up to date using their mobile. Cardanomobile.com used on your mobile aims to do that. If you have content let me know so I can share.

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  • “No spamming or low value content. Posts and comments including referral links*, phishing websites, affiliate links, (stake pool) advertisements or duplicate content will be removed and repeat offenders will be banned. DM an admin before posting any telegram ref. links.”

  1. This is the guideline that I have been following on all forums for over a year. To me this guideline makes perfect sense. Remove low value content that is clearly made for an advertisement but keep content that has an advertisement if it provides value and the advertisement itself is not the purpose of the video.

  2. This obviously leaves room for bias, but that’s okay. It’s okay to have one post taken down because it’s too ad heavy but I disagree with the idea of taking down every piece of video content that has a stakepool advertisement. I have had content that is over 40 minutes long taken down when it has less than 3 minutes of advertisement. There should be a process to appeal takedown.

  3. To me this is the same as having your stakepool name in your telegram name or putting it at the end of your reddit post. People use this in their name or reddit post for free advertisement while still providing value by helping newcommers to the community or other SPOs. I think this is okay as long as it’s not low value as the rules state. Now let’s compare this to a 20-90 minute YouTube video, 3 minutes of advertisement in that video but the rest of the video is educational and provides value. Percentage wise advertisement in your name compared to a YouTube video is very similar in terms of content. So why should that protection not extend to YouTube videos as it always has?
    image

  • For me it seems very short-sighted to remove all video content that includes an advertisement. What immediately comes to my mind is that some moderators want to shield delegate’s ears from video stakepool ads in case content creators have their own biases or that they also see it as an advantage. When I first mentioned this I was immediately scrutinized at the idea of that being the case, with a moderator stating that “I am making this all about me”. When in reality I meant content creators on YouTube in general. In my opinion, delegates are responsible for their stake and do not need to be shielded from a two-minute advertisement that they can just skip. After stating this publicly on the forums one moderator solidified my belief on this being a key factor in the change of policy.
    image

  • “All the more reason you need to be not fooled into brainwashing from biased views.”

  1. Can delegates not make informed decisions based on competing viewpoints? Or should we shield them from all viewpoints that we deem “brainwashing”?
  2. The Cardano forums should allow all competing opinions and not limit people from posting content unless it’s a blatant ad. Nor should they be in the realm of telling content creators that they shouldn’t include an ad in the first x amount of seconds in the video. To me, it’s pretty clear when a video is about an advertisement.
  3. If I didn’t include a stakepool advertisement in the video, it would stay up. However, I can include a million YouTube ads about dollar shaveclub. Should we shield the Cardano community from dollar shaveclub ads as biased opinions may make people pay more for their razors? There shouldn’t be a difference between stakepool ads and any other ad especially since we have Goguen in the pipeline. Should we not allow dApp ads in videos, as there are other competing dApp makers that aren’t making videos?
  • To me the rules have always been fine and do not limit competing opinions but going down the road of no longer accepting videos that include any SPO advertisements is a slippery slope. That will only lead to more rules about how people should make their content. I do however appreciate that a forum post was created to allow people to provide their opinion. I do hope this leads to a fine medium for everyone!
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Totally unacceptable. I do not understand why community members are being censored.
@Frederik_Gregaard what is going on?

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This happened to The Cryptoviser earlier in 2020. I ended up basically NOT posting on the reddit anymore, which maybe is CF’s goal?

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If the rules have changed, they need to be spelled with clear-cut cases. If mods use a lot of discretion, then they cannot be SPOs, because when they take down content like this it clearly points to conflict of interest.

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If in the appropriate section on the forum or anywhere in the reddit feed I don’t mind this content. If your video was some sort of brainwashing propaganda you would be allowed to post it if you didn’t mention your pool, so that argument doesn’t really make sense.
I find it more troubling that moderators (who should be neutral by definition) can also be SPOs.

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According to my email, the video was posted on this forum with a clickbait headline: a sensational accusation in the video title & forum topic which, as far as I could tell (forgive me for not having 90 minutes to watch the entire thing), seemed mainly over a difference of opinion with a blog writer who at least had the skill & guts to commit his opinions to a readable web page.

Therefore, in order to try to get to the heart of the matter (which the video producer made very difficult, not providing any outline or topic index to his material), the viewer faces the prospect of having to watch the entire rambling video
 which then of course includes the pool and other advertising. That’s the breach of the forum guidelines as I see it: effectively forcing that advertising upon the viewer.

This is another case in point about the video medium being inherently exploitative and of limited practical use. Video producers should have greater, not lesser, requirements to demonstrate their material is correct and useful. A 90-minute rambling, self-promoting video leading from a vague accusation is a fair target for removal based on quality guidelines alone.

If this message were released with accompanying text (or preferably in text instead), it would have been straightforward to separate the advertising from the message itself and I don’t see how anyone could have had a problem with that.

And for many of the visitors curious over the controversial headline, it would have been best of all to spend 30 seconds getting the main point from a web page, instead of having to spend 10 minutes trying to dig it out of a 90-minute clickbait video.

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The video was in no way clickbait. IOG does contradict themselves in the article, that’s a fact. But that’s not the point of this post.

It’s not an opinion that pledge doesn’t work to protect the network from Sybil attacks.

I am speaking about content creation being a allowed to have SPO advertisements in general.

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Rule has been in place since March 2018, and was made even clearer by adding (stake pool) advertisement in Dec 2019 (for ITN) which our friend above quoted bit perhaps wants to use wordplay for.

Also, the posts being deleted on reddit as well as his comments were by someone who does NOT run stake pool (I only support it , Pey was made fully aware before, but instead of using special access to CF for challenging rule laid out in Mar 2018 , there are tantrums thrown in social media) - and the same rule he quotes , not sure why/how that becomes conflict of interest, please verify facts :slightly_smiling_face:

No one had any issues until Pey, and if other posts were being deleted - I fully support the moderation team to apply same rules to Pey as well, there are no special treatments or golden spoon for ambassadors/content creators.

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Even if a certain amount of pool advertising were to be allowed, I don’t see how this video would pass muster. The content portion of your video where you go through the article constantly mentions bloom, you even spoil your “big announcement” twice during it, stating that you’re opening more pools and for a limited time they will have lower fees. There is no 2-3 minute portion that can be skipped, comments about bloom are woven tightly into the entire discussion of the article.

You say that it is a slippery slope to not accept advertisement videos, but in my mind at least this rule is clear, the slippery slope to me would be some group deciding what constitutes too much, since even with this video it seems there are different opinions. Seems like a tall order to go through every video and decide whether it meets a certain bar or not.

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