Building Web Reputation Systems- P17

Building Web Reputation Systems- P17:Today’s Web is the product of over a billion hands and minds. Around the clock andaround the globe, people are pumping out contributions small and large: full-lengthfeatures on Vimeo, video shorts on YouTube, comments on Blogger, discussions onYahoo! Groups, and tagged-and-titled Del.icio.us bookmarks. User-generated contentand robust crowd participation have become the hallmarks of Web 2.0.
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Building Web Reputation Systems- P17The granddaddy of reputation-based content moderation is Slashdot, and it employsthis strategy to great effect. Figure 8-5 illustrates Slashdot’s multiple levels of contentobscurity: comments below a certain score are abbreviated in a thread—just enoughcontent from the post is left “peeking out” to preserve context and invite those whoare curious to read more. Those comments that dip below an even lower score arehidden altogether and no longer sully the reader’s display.Figure 8-5. Slashdot seemingly hides more posts than it displays. It’s a system that favors your rightsas a discriminating information consumer over everyone else’s desire to be heard.To avoid the presumption trap, make these controls user-configurable. Let users choosethe quality-level that they’d like to see. Don’t bury this setting as a user-preference.Make it evident and easily accessible right in the main information display; otherwise,it will probably never be discovered or changed. (A bonus to keeping the control easilyaccessible: users who want to change it frequently can do so with ease.)You may be concerned that providing a quality threshold will unfairly punish newcontributors or new contributions that haven’t had enough exposure to the communityto surpass the level of the threshold for display. Consider pairing this strategy withInferred Reputation (see the section “Inferred Reputation for Content Submis-sions” on page 210) to give those new entrants a leg up on the quality game.Expressing DissatisfactionRemember The Gong Show? It was a popular American game show in the 1970s—contestants would come on and display a “talent” of their choosing to celebrity judges,any one of whom, at any point during the performance (OK, there were time limits,but that’s beside the point), could strike an enormous gong to disqualify that contest-ant. Trust us, it was great entertainment.206 | Chapter 8: Using Reputation: The Good, The Bad, and the UglyToday’s Web has a smaller, quieter (and, sadly, less satisfying) equivalent to that show’s“gong.” It is a judgmental little widget—the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down vote—thatoften accompanies user-contributed entities as a form of participatory crowd judgment.(See the section “Two-state votes (thumb ratings)” on page 140.) Consider providingat least this level of explicit user voting for content on your site.It’s probably best to provide your users with some means of expressing an opinion aboutcontent. Otherwise, they will likely co-opt whatever other mechanisms are available todo so; either user comments (and threads) will quickly fill up with back-and-forthbickering over peoples’ spelling abilities and “+1” type posts or abuse reports (dis-cussed in the next section). And we don’t want to encourage inappropriate abuse re-porting. Sometimes arming the community with a simple, satisfying mechanism to say“I disagree” is enough.Out with the UglyAnd then there’s just some stuff that you don’t want to keep around. At all. It’s offensiveand violates your TOS. Or it’s illegal and violates common taste. This is the stuff thatshould very quickly acquire a bad reputation. You’ll want your community to be ableto identify this stuff swiftly and effectively, and you’ll want your system to be able toact on it efficiently.Reporting AbuseReporting abuse is serious business. It is an explicit input into your reputation systemunlike any other: it potentially has legal repercussions. It is basically a user-to-userreputation claim (which we generally discourage; see “Good Inputs” on page 135).Users should not think of it as an evaluative act, i.e., is this content good or bad—ratherit should feel like a straightforward act of discovery: “Whoa! This shouldn’t be here!”Your interface design should attempt to reduce the likelihood that users will conflateabuse reporting with other, more evaluative, reputation inputs. Discourage users fromreporting anything that is not actual abuse. Figure 8-6 demonstrates a number of designchanges that the Yahoo! Answers team enacted to clarify the intent of all the controls,and—as a side benefit—to reduce the likelihood that users would erroneously file re-ports against undeserving questions or answers.In general, here are some good guidelines for maintaining the fidelity of your abusereports, to ensure that they remain good inputs that produce high-confidence contentreputations: • Keep the Report Abuse mechanism clear and distinct from other reputation inputs that could be easily confused. Place it at a noticeable distance from the piece of content that it acts upon. (Though, of course, this is a design balance. It should be close enough that the mechanism and the entity still appear associated.) Out with the Ugly | 207Figure 8-6. Yahoo! Answers redesigned a number of re ...