Building Web Reputation Systems

The authors have collaborated with many people over dozens of social media sites to deliver successful (and some not-so-successful) communities. Often, success or failure was a factor of the incentives provided by an underlying reputation system. Yahoo! Photos (which did private photo sharing via URLs) was eventually supplanted by Flickr—a social sharing site with reputation mechanisms built through-and-through.

Yahoo! Answers, with its point-based levels powering the interaction, rapidly became the number one (by traffic) Q&A site on the web! But because the points were solely based on participation, and not quality, the site was overrun by abusive users and produced generally content that was too low quality to generate the desired level of revenue for the company. Ultimately, a second reputation system was needed just to deal with the customer care overload that the abuse was burying the product teams profitability.

This chapter will use all the material presented to describe several case studies of the deployment of reputation systems. It will look at widely acknowledged successes as well as partial and complete failures. These will demonstrate every part of the reputation grammar and graphing method by looking at real-life field examples.

Finally, the authors will provide some analysis of the state of the art in deployed reputation models as well as make some prognostications about possible future experiments and likely trends.

Yahoo! Answers anti-spam measures, including detailed analysis of the business needs, decisions made, final model, metrics before-and-after, etc.

This chapter will be an in-depth case study of a well-known and successful community that utilizes a reputation system. Right now, I am thinking of XBox Live because it uses a variety of different reputation types for a variety of purposes. And tho' it is highly competitive—and therefore atypical—it will also be fun to dissect and 'reverse engineer.' There is also an abundance of reference material on the subject. It would be great to get some insider perspective in there as well—interviews w/XBox community folks.

Reputation is HARD!

Some forward-looking analysis. What improvements are there to be made in the reputation space? What communities are 'getting it right?' Wrong?

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