10.5. Using Reputation: The…Ugly

In Chapter 8, we detailed three main uses for reputation (other than displaying scores directly to users). We only half-jokingly referred to them as the good, the bad, and the ugly. Since the Yahoo! Answers community content moderation model says nothing about the quality of the content itself—only about the users who generate and interact with it—it can’t really rank content from best to worst. These first two use categories—the good and the bad—don’t apply to this moderation model.

The Yahoo! Answers system dealt exclusively with the last category—the ugly—by allowing users to rid the site of content that violated the terms of service or the community guidelines.