Posting Etiquette in Quarry

I’ve seen a lot of different kind of posting and commenting going on in Quarry — some good, some not so good — And I decided to create a post about the do’s and do not’s where posting is concerned inspired by what I would say is the definitive authority on the matter.

Basic Posting Rules

  1. Stick to blockchain and crypto-related news;
  2. No airdrop referral posts;
  3. No pornography;
  4. No violence;
  5. Refrain from NSFW content.

For submitting airdrop referrals in-app, please see our post: All About Airdrops

Breaking the rules could result in your post being reported and at worst a ban of your account. The idea is to spread knowledge and information about blockchain, not to be a forum to take advantage of your fellow quarriors.

Please consider your community before posting anything, and if the answer to ‘Would I want to read about this?’ is ‘No!’ then please refrain from submitting that particular link.

Below is an edited and revised take on the reddit.com wiki article written to promote proper posting etiquette. You can find and review the full version of that article here.


Please do

  • Remember the human. When you communicate online, all you see is a computer screen. When talking to someone you might want to ask yourself “Would I say it to the person’s face?” or “Would I get jumped if I said this to a buddy?”
  • Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life.
  • Moderate based on quality, not opinion. Well written and interesting content can be worthwhile, even if you disagree with it.
  • Use proper grammar and spelling. Intelligent discourse requires a standard system of communication. Be open to gentle corrections.
  • Look for the original source of content, and submit that. Often, a blog will reference another blog, which references another, and so on with everyone displaying ads along the way. Dig through those references and submit a link to the creator, who actually deserves the traffic.
  • Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, up-vote it. If you think it does not contribute or is off-topic in, report it.
  • Search for duplicates before posting. Redundant posts add nothing new to previous conversations. That said, sometimes bad timing, a bad title, or just plain bad luck can cause an interesting story to fail to get noticed. Feel free to post something again if you feel that the earlier posting didn’t get the attention it deserved and you think you can do better.
  • Link to the direct version of a media file if the page it was found on isn’t the creator’s and doesn’t add additional information or context.
  • Link to canonical and persistent URLs where possible, not temporary pages that might disappear. In particular, use the “permalink” for blog entries, not the blog’s index page.
  • Consider posting constructive criticism / an explanation instead of reporting something, and do so carefully and tactfully.
  • Report any spam you find.
  • Browse the new submissions page (News) and vote on it. Regard it, perhaps, as a public service.
  • Actually read an article before you vote on it (as opposed to just basing your vote on the title).
  • Posts containing explicit material such as nudity, horrible injury etc, are not permitted and should stick to blockchain in context.
  • Use an “Innocent until proven guilty” mentality. Unless there is obvious proof that a submission is fake, or is whoring ROX, please don’t say it is. It ruins the experience for not only you, but the rest of us as well.

Please don’t

  • Engage in illegal activity.
  • Post someone’s personal information, or post links to personal information. This includes links to public Facebook pages and screenshots of Facebook pages with the names still legible. We all get outraged by the ignorant things people say and do online, but witch hunts and vigilantism hurt innocent people too often, and such posts or comments will be removed. Users posting personal info are subject to an immediate account ban. If you see a user posting personal info, please contact support (help@quarry.rocks). Additionally, on pages such as Facebook, where personal information is often displayed, please mask the personal information and personal photographs using a blur function, erase function, or simply block it out with color. When personal information is relevant to the post (i.e. comment wars) please use color blocking for the personal information to indicate whose comment is whose.
  • Repost deleted/removed information. Remember that comment was just deleted because it had personal information in it or was a picture of gore? Resist the urge to repost it. It doesn’t matter what the content was. If it was deleted/removed, it should stay deleted/removed.
  • Be (intentionally) rude at all. By choosing not to be rude, you increase the overall civility of the community and make it better for all of us.
  • Follow those who are rabble rousing against another person without first investigating both sides of the issue that’s being presented. Those who are inciting this type of action often have malicious reasons behind their actions and are, more often than not, a troll. Remember, every time someone who’s contributed large amounts of effort into assisting the growth of community as a whole is driven away, projects that would benefit the whole easily flounder.
  • Ask people to Troll others on Quarry, in real life, or on other blogs/sites. We aren’t your personal army.
  • Conduct personal attacks on other commenters. Ad hominem and other distracting attacks do not add anything to the conversation.
  • Start a flame war. Just report and “walk away”. If you really feel you have to confront them, leave a polite message with a quote or link to the rules, and no more.
  • Insult others. Insults do not contribute to a rational discussion. Constructive Criticism, however, is appropriate and encouraged.
  • Troll. Trolling does not contribute to the conversation.
In regard to voting
  • Report an otherwise acceptable post because you don’t personally like it. Think before you report and take a moment to ensure you’re reporting someone because they are not contributing to the community dialogue or discussion. If you simply take a moment to stop, think and examine your reasons for reporting, rather than doing so out of an emotional reaction, you will ensure that your reports are given for good reasons.
  • Mass report someone else’s posts. If it really is the content you have a problem with (as opposed to the person), by all means report when you come upon it. But don’t go out of your way to seek out an enemy’s posts.
  • Up-vote or report based just on the person that posted it. Don’t up-vote or report comments and posts just because the poster’s username is familiar to you. Make your vote based on the content.
  • Report posts just because you do not like them. You should only be using the report button if the post breaks the Quarry rules.
In regard to promoting Quarry posts
  • Hint at asking for votes. (“Show me some love!”, “Is this Trending worthy?”, “Vote This Up to Spread the Word!”, “If this makes the Trending Tab, I’ll adopt this stray cat and name it Quarry”, “If this reaches 500 points, I’ll get a tattoo of doge!”, “Up-vote if you do this!”, “Why isn’t this getting more attention?”, etc.)
  • Ask for up-votes in exchange for gifts or prizes. “Up-vote me to the top and I’ll give away …”
  • Create mass reports or up-vote campaigns. This includes attacking a user’s profile history when they say something bad and participating in ROX party groups.
In regard to new submissions
  • Post hoaxes. If snopes.com has already declared something false, you probably shouldn’t be submitting it to Quarry.
  • Flood Quarry with a lot of stories in a short span of time. By doing this you flood the News queue. Be warned, your future submissions may be automatically blocked by the spam filter.
  • Linkjack stories: linking to stories via blog posts that add nothing extra.
  • Use link shorteners to post your content. There are few reasons to hide what you’re linking to, and most of them are sneaky (if you are, use the “preview” feature that those services offer).
In regard to comments
  • Make comments that lack content. Phrases such as “Hi”, “Hello”, “this”, “lol”, and “I came here to say this” are not witty, original, or funny, and do not add anything to the discussion.
  • Announce your vote (with rare exceptions). “Up-vote” and “Report” aren’t terribly interesting comments and only increase the noise to signal ratio.
  • Complain about other users reposting/rehosting stories, images, videos, or any other content. Users should give credit where credit should be given, but if someone fails to do so, and is not causing harm, please either don’t point it out, or point it out politely and leave it at that.
  • Complain about the votes you do or do not receive, especially by making a submission voicing your complaint. You may have just gotten unlucky. Try submitting later or seek out other communities to submit to.
  • Complain about reposts. Just because you have seen it before doesn’t mean everyone has. Votes indicate the popularity of a post, so just vote. Keep in mind that linking to previous posts is not automatically a complaint; it is information.

Voting on Articles in Quarry

With Quarry, you are rewarded for voting on information you believe is valuable, interesting, or truthful.

When you upvote an article, you are staking a claim and declaring to the community that you believe in what is being presented. As more people upvote the article, value is generated and distributed proportionally at the end of the day in the form of Quarry Rocks (ROX). If you discover great content before anyone else, you can earn an even higher curation reward! This is a how we thank you for selecting and promoting awesome content that the community wants to see.

We know what you’re thinking: I’ll just upvote everything! Unfortunately, no. Each day, you are limited by your quota of upvotes, so make them count! Look for articles that rock!

We believe in the wisdom of the crowd. As more people vote and receive rewards, we are confident that the best, most useful and interesting blockchain info will rise to the top.

So get out there and (Quarry) Rock the vote!

ÐApp Spotlight: Augur

Google the Future

Augur is a prediction market, a tool used to place bets on the future outcome of any event.

At a fundamental level, Augur is an implementation of Wisdom of the Crowd, a philosophical and economic concept that can be boiled down as follows: When you ask a sufficiently large number of people the same question, their collective answer is often more correct than asking a single person, even an expert. Augur provides a financial incentive to this exchange of guesses in the form of Ether, paid out to the users who correctly predict the outcome of a given event.

Aside from the possibiltiy of profitting from a prediction (i.e. betting), the simple existence of such a market is useful in a variety of circumstances. When trying to predict the winner of a sporting event, for example, Wisdom of the Crowd is a good way to approximate odds. Similarly, a prediction market can be used to determine market sentiment about a company, opinions about world leader (and their odds of reelection), or even something as simple as weather forecasts.

Augur’s advantage over traditional prediction markets (such as those in Los Vegas) is that it is decentralized. Because no one person is “calling the shots” on outcomes (for example, by wrongly reporting that Croatia, not France, won the 2018 World Cup), Augur is far less susceptible to meddling or foul play. In lieu of a single arbiter, Augur instead utilizes a consensus system built on Reputation ($REP). From the Augur FAQ:

Reputation (REP) is a cryptocurrency, used by reporters during market dispute phases of Augur. REP holders must perform work, in the form of staking their REP on correct outcomes, to receive a portion of the markets settlement fees. If you do not report correctly, you do not get the fees. If you report incorrectly, you lose your REP. If you don’t participate in a fork (when the network has a very large dispute over an outcome), you lose 5% of your REP. Passive holders of Reputation (REP) that are not using their Reputation (REP) within the Augur protocol to stake on disputes and forks are penalized. The treatment of REP within the Augur protocol is governed not by the Forecast Foundation but by the protocols smart contracts as described in the Augur white paper and documentation.

Augur’s most immediately compelling stated goal is the concept of being able to “Google the future.” While the predictions on the platform cannot be guaranteed to be correct, a prediction market with a sufficiently high number of users represents the best possible guess based on current public knowledge.

Augur aims to be this and more. In a 2017 Medium post entitled “Augur Master Plan,” founder Joey Krug wrote:

The long term plan is to overtake all derivatives trading though liquidity and network effects, although in the beginning these limitations mean the first markets and activity on Augur will be surrounding new markets or markets that are currently expensive or limited in certain ways. Think Chinese and Russian investors wanting to speculate on US stocks, or vice versa, people wanting to speculate on sporting events more cheaply, or people who just want to create a new market for something that doesn’t exist at the moment due to multi-million dollar startup costs for creating a new financial derivative. With augur we can remove that million and drop the cost down to “multi dollar.”

Essentially, Augur contains the framework for creating an entirely new decentralized financial system, far beyond the scope of simply betting on relatively inconsequential events. Whether this is a good or bad things depends on your political positions, but I don’t think anyone can deny that it is an interesting and potentially world-changing possibility.

In June 2018, Augur’s long-awaited mainnet launched, allowing users complete access to the platform. At time of writing, half a million dollars in value already rides on the outcomes of the listed events.

For more information, check out https://www.augur.net or read their whitepaper.
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