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Designing a large scale community moderation system for Yahoo! Answers

From Wikimania


Designing a large scale community moderation system for Yahoo! Answers

Presenter Micah Alpern (Yahoo!)
Themes TechnologyCommunities
About the presenter
Micah Alpern is the Director of User Experience for Open Search at Yahoo!  His focus is on creating a thriving ecosystem within Search. Prior to his work on SearchMonkey and BOSS he was the design lead for Yahoo! Answers where he helped nurture a community which answers hundreds of millions questions. Prior to Yahoo! Micah was a lead designer at eBay and was a founding director of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Micah is an alumnus of the Human Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon.
Abstract

Yahoo! Answers is the largest Q&A service with hundreds of thousands of questions asked and answered every day.  Traditional moderation systems failed to scale with the products growth. To address these challenges the team deployed a Community Moderation system which empowering trusted Answers members to report and remove abusive content automatically. One of the challenges to making the system work was to understand who to trust. The Answers team built a rich reputation model based on an analysis of over a dozen different system actions. Creating a successful community moderation system required changes in technology, community guidelines & policy, and user experience design.

Language English
Video (download)