Comments on: More Randy Farmer on the Real ID fiasco

By: Tesh

Tesh — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 15:54:08 +0000

Great article, guys. Thanks!

By: F. Randall Farmer

F. Randall Farmer — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:24:33 +0000

Melissa -

Yahoo! Answers has a lot of problems, that’s for sure. The mechanism you describe: [voting up/down on posts] is a bad design and wasn’t a part of the work that we did to clean out the worst-of-the-worst trolls (those who violated terms of service.)

I didn’t mean to heap praise on Yahoo! Answers or say that everything was sunshine and roses over there – it’s not. I was trying to point out that there are other means to deal with specific abuse problems.

Sorry to overgeneralize in the interview – it was not my intent. I wish Yahoo! Answers had continued on the road to improving content quality by reforming various problems, including the one you pointed out. Sigh.

Randy

By: Melissa

Melissa — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 13:38:11 +0000

My only issue is his comparison of “success” in Yahoo Answers with the same tactics. As a person who at one time used Yahoo Answers, I would have to say that it has become worse when it comes to trolls and it doesn’t really stop the true trolls. People make multiple accounts and vote for themselves or against another person. The moderators don’t check to see if the person was really posting inflammatory material, they just automatically delete the post if more than 2 people report it.

So you can easily report useful information, but if someone wants top answer, they just report you with their main account and with their “sock account” in order to weed out the competition. And yes, there are people there who take the top answer title seriously enough to have multiple accounts.

Yes, in WoW a person won’t be able to just make another account, but lots of people multibox. Also, all they have to do is get their friends to report you to have your answer removed if they don’t “like” your reply in a thread regardless of it’s validity.

So no Randy, yahoo Answers is not a success. All it has done is driven me away. I rarely bother to answer questions there anymore. I know many people that now consider it to be a joke.

By: Yogi

Yogi — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 05:27:09 +0000

Ya. Great read. Thanks for posting this. Interesting perspective for sure.

By: Stabs

Stabs — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 00:16:06 +0000

Thanks Randy and Julian. An extremely interesting insight.

By: Ravious

Ravious — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 23:49:22 +0000

Cool interview. Love hearing it from their side of things.

By: Rog

Rog — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 21:47:17 +0000

I appreciated Blizzard’s recant, although it’s more of a “not at this time, but we’re still integrating Real ID elsewhere”.

I imagine someone over at Blizzard is currently crying in their coffee because they’d already made big plans to either integrate with Facebook or compete with Facebook.

I’m of the opinion we need smarter social networking with more control given to the users. IE: Not Facebook or a Facebook-clone.