Within five minutes I found the following phrases on "articles" that have been placed on Discover in the past few days, and that therefore potentially earn income for their "writers."
"So we always spend our lives in stress. So man goes away from his success. Never compare success with anyone. Fortune never accompanies success, and nature never helps. This is because you have not lost. Everyone has to strive for success."
"The human body is made up of Panchmahabhutas elements. Those elements are earth, water, fire, sky and air. In the end, every creature in this creation has to merge into this elements."
"Likewise, a lot of stress can energize practices that increment pulse, like horrible eating routine, actual dormancy, and utilizing tobacco or drinking liquor more than expected."
By no measure do these phrases (there are scores of similar ones) impart useful knowledge nor do they pass muster as examples of good English writing.
So, my question is what are the criteria for acceptance onto Discover?
The examples you have given Rupert surely should not be published. How do they get through? It's not only puzzling but disturbing. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the editing process.
Hello,
The standards should be the same as they were for the original HubPages.com. That is, our moderation team reviews content that could be problematic (e.g. violates community guidelines), spammy, spun, or contains other major issues. Quality of writing is not as carefully assessed as it is on Network Sites — this content does not yet reach an editor. We invite community members to flag problematic content as well.
Tessa
I think what's also baffling is that some unfeatured articles are actually better than the ones that made it to Discover.
They are full of errors, but some are still readable i.e. at least coherent. A couple of featured ones on Discover are downright incoherent.
That I completely agree. I'm also of the opinion that hubpages editors should take a second look to any of our recenly edited articles on either old Hubpages or discover and move them up, up niche sites!
"Panchamahabhuta"
Oh wow what a word. Sorry if off topic but I had to Google Search this as it sounded made up.
If I may quote you Tessa "our moderation team reviews content." So how does content of the type I excerpted above, and there's a lot that's even worse, get past the hawk-eyed vigilance of the team? Then, you say "this content does not yet reach an editor." Which is it? The team reviews or editors don't see it. I can't unravel that apparent contradiction.
It seems HP allows any old gibberish onto Discover and you leave it to the community to do the policing - unpaid I might add. Incidentally, we can't flag content from the Discover page.
I doubt many of us with the skill to separate the wheat from the chaff are going to spend much time toiling through submissions on a voluntary basis. I'm too old to take up the position of an unpaid intern.
If the standards for Discover are the same as they were for HubPages, why have Discover at all? My memory may be wobbly, but I thought the rationale for Discover was to hide the rubbish so the Google algorithm doesn't see them and punish the site.
Putting sub-standard on display on Discover defeats that purpose entirely.
Hello,
All new articles go through moderation and are then featured on Discover.HubPages; editors oversee content for our Network Sites or niche sites. (We see hundreds of articles daily!) We always invite our community members to flag content that might need review, but again, this is optional. You can refer to our post regarding the discover.hubpages.com forum announcement for more details.
Best,
Tessa
Tessa, I think the main concern is that poorly written articles are making it through QAP. Maybe the quality assessors need to tighten it up a bit? Surely HP doesn't want articles like Rupert outlined getting through QAP.
Plus, if glaring errors are caught in the QAP process and kept out of the Discover queue, HP editors and staff won't have to spend so much time looking at hundreds of articles.
I'd not been keeping up with all the quality assessment procedures until recently. But it appears that nothing is assessed by a human (i.e. editor or hubber) until after it's gone onto Discover. It's only then that it may or may not get demoted (or promoted). Spinning/translation issues are pretty difficult to spot by machines.
It's certainly not a great look. But I tend to see Discover as more of a holding house, or a purgatory. It's not a true niche in the same way that say Dengarden or Owlcation is. That's how I understand it anyway.
Paul, for us veterans, we know Discover is a holding ground. However, I just googled HubPages and the Discover version of HP came up. At first that worried me. Then I took a closer look. Discover.HubPages lists the niche sites within and shows feature articles within those sites. So, my take is, a writer looking for an online place to call home is never going to see the articles that we're discussing. Nor will any articles that languish on Discover be available to the public. That tells me they also don't rank with Google, so there's not really anything for us to worry about.
I have several articles and short stories that are still on HP, so getting them moved to Discover won't mean diddly-squat. The goal is to make it to the niche sites for all of us. These guys who are excited about making it to Discover are no threat, as we well know. What we DO know is that NONE of our articles that don't move beyond Discover are ever going to reach the public nor will they get our message across. Anything earned will be by Hubbers reading the Discover posts. So, I say: stop reading what's on Discover. That gives sub-par writers a (meager) means of earning.
Here's the link, see for yourselves: https://discover.hubpages.com/
Well said, Shauna. There's irony in the name: "Discover".
That is a good question, Rupert. I have been going through my articles and editing and updating them. I found that I still have 176 on HubPages that haven’t even made it to Discover. Even after I update them most still don’t move. I am not saying I am the best writer in the world but I do put a lot of effort into my work and I know it is better than a lot of the stuff I am seeing on Discover.
I have been submitting some to the niche sites and they are being accepted, but with so many that will take forever at one every 14 days. Does anyone know how to have your older articles moved to Discover? I know it may not appear in the search engines but at least it can earn something from views whereas anything languishing on the original HubPages can’t.
Question Please. How do you know when a hub has been moved to Discover?
Just returning to HubPages to write I had not heard of Discover.
Bobbi Purvis
I think you have taken a long time to discover this. There are many examples of mediocre articles being displayed on Discover and some very good articles with a lot of knowledge are languishing. This is part of the game and I don't bother as I have so many other things to do. All I can say is that most of the selection is arbitrary.
If my memory is correct, I once remarked that some of us writers knew such editorial issues better than certain of the ediitors at team.hubpages. Otherwise, such nonsense stuffs are not fitting at old Squidoo. My point is that article submissions is either read least by an editor, and mostly by AI software. And since such articles are spun through maciine softwares, AI deem them most fit.
Good morning. Still on my first cup of coffee so please forgive any incoherence.
I was cheered by Shauna's Discover discovery but I think Google and others still index Discover articles. I checked some of my own articles on Discover at random.
On one I found that 87 percent of referrers were sites such as Google, duckduckgo, Bing, and others. Discover and HP only referred 13 percent of views.
Another one was 69 percent non-HP referrers, and yet another 70 percent. The pattern seems clear.
Being a complete dweeb at matters technical I look forward to enlightenment.
The Discover articles don't bring down the niches, that's the important thing at the end of the day. It doesn't really matter if Discover gets a trickle of views from Google, Yahoo, or wherever, the important thing about Discover is that it's sealed off (in a technical sense) from the rest of the site and doesn't bring down the entire neighbourhood. That's my understanding. It's like a prison where the prisoners can receive the occasional outside visitor but not mingle with the general public?
The QAP process goes through this *insert name here* Amazon service. If the quality of the checks needs to be improved the people being paid peanuts to review each article need to have better skills or just show more interest in being paid peanuts. Both are unlikely to happen unless HP does not use this particular service anymore.
Is it even worth the extra cost if HP can find someone better to do it? Unlikely.
Discover is not a niche site. It has no standing with the other niche sites. If you write anything worth reading, have it moved off of discover.
I agree with you, Brandon. Discover is nothing more than a very meager means to earn an income since the original HP site was shut down to earnings. The only folks who read Discover articles are HP writers, so the audience is extremely limited.
MTurk is still alive and (not doing so) well? I would have thought that HP would have done away with that once they merged with Maven. Since HP/Maven has staff whose job it is to edit, they need to begin with the plethora of articles that now automatically get thrown there. Have a staff that mans Discover and have staff that concentrates on each niche site solely.
BTW, what are the criteria for editors? Do they go thru testing in order to qualify? And, are they American writers/editors?
This forum is bringing about deeper thinking about the processes to which we are subjected. Is HP/Maven listening?
Hello? Is anybody out there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNLhxKpfCnA
I'm not sure that MTurk is still being used. I did some assessing work there of new hubs at one time. My belief was that the initial QAP is done with software now, but I may well be wrong.
I got kicked off the HP MTurk years ago. They gave you a fluctuating auto-generated score and as I didn't agree with the other assessors a lot of the time, my score eventually fell below the threshold. I think most people just scanned the articles, I read them. Stuff that looked okay on the surface got through, even though if you read it you could see major flaws. It was pretty crude. But better than nothing I guess.
Years ago I chose assignments from MTurk that didn't take much time. Then, I discovered that HP moderated their hubs thru that format. I never engaged because I felt it would take too much time to edit properly. From what I remember, the pay for such wasn't worth the time. I was also discouraged that anyone could choose to edit HP articles without first taking a test.
There was never any "editing" involved on MTurk, certainly when I was involved. It was just reading the hub and being asked a number of questions. You were basically grading the hub on stuff like language quality, layout, etc.
And there was a test I seem to remember. I believe it was a basic English test. A kind of short quiz.
Pay wasn't great when I did it, but better than most jobs on MTurk, and it was the sort of thing you could do from home while listening to music or whatever. I seem to remember that the pay varied according to your HP MTurk score. For a time I had a high score, and my pay was (almost) reasonable (for an easy job), but then my score starting sinking because I didn't tend to agree with the other assessors and eventually I got the boot...
Then HP switched to another system I thought...
Thanks, Paul. I stand corrected. It was so long ago that I did anything on MTurk that it's all a bit hazy now. :-)
I've been trying to figure out how to address this issue and I think you hit on what was in the back of my mind. I mainly work on getting articles moved from Discover onto niche sites and don't think about getting them onto Discover. I have some still on the regular old Hubpages site and I've been moving them to another site. That's kind of the hierarchy of priorities for me. If they are still on Hubpages' non-ad site, it's time for them to go somewhere else, if they are on Discover try to get them onto a niche site.
I tend to think articles are no longer read by an editor. It was access through a AI software.
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