Askville Blog

Community Guideline Improvements

Hey Askville,

Based on the great feedback and discussions we've heard, we wanted to share with you some of the changes we will be making going forward with our community guidelines.  At the end of the day, we all have a shared goal to make Askville a friendlier place where people can have meaningful relationships in a safe environment based on intelligent interchange of ideas.  After looking at the discussion it’s clear that we need clearer guidelines, better enforcement, more involvement from the staff and more accountability for people’s actions.

The following is a summary of A) Concrete actions we will be taking and B) Concerns that were voiced by the community that we are still investigating.

CONCRETE ACTIONS WE ARE TAKING:

Harassment
It’s clear that everyone is concerned about issues with harassment and that there have been many forms of harassment taking place using everything from questions to discussion boards to personal messages. 

Based on people’s feedback, especially the concern that harassment is continuing in an endless cycle, we are instituting a zero-tolerance policy for any kind of behavior that demonstrates intent to harass an individual.  This policy will be strictly enforced.  The consequences will be a temporary suspension of a user's account, which will also count against the 4-strike and your out policy, where after the 4th strike, the account will be permanently banned.

Many of you have stated that we should not ignore infractions that have happened in the past.  As a result we are suspending the accounts of 17 individuals based on a review of their past behavior (this list may increase as we continue our investigation).  It is clear that these individuals all engaged in activities with intent to harass an individual or individual(s) in the past.  These members will have their accounts suspended for 7 days effective by end of day today and they will be assessed 3 strikes against their accounts (i.e., after the temporary suspension, if the user continues to harass others, their account will be permanently banned).

Increased Transparency and Accountability
In addition, to support the transparency that people have asked for, by the end of today, if any account has been suspended or banned, their avatars will change to signal that they are currently being suspended or have been banned. 

Fairer Voting and Reduce Gaming
Later this week, we will be rolling out a feature where the answerer's identity will be hidden/anonymous during both the voting period and appeal process.  We believe this should help reduce voting abuse, collusion, and favoritism that is going on in Askville.  As stated in our previous blog entry, we have already cracked down on voting abuse/collusion and will continue to do so.

Multiple Accounts
We already have safeguards in place to prevent users from easily creating multiple accounts.  We have investigated several allegations already and in a vast majority of cases we have discovered that users do not have multiple accounts, but rather they are just friends.  That said, our safeguards are not full proof.  We will be adding additional measures that will help us further detect users who have created multiple accounts.  Once we identify users with multiple accounts, we will ban both accounts, per our community guidelines.

Consistent Enforcement
It was very clear from the feedback that we, the Askville staff, need to do a much better job at consistent enforcement.  We’ve begun focusing more effort on monitoring abuse reports and are working to improve our internal systems for tracking abuse feedback so that we can respond to issues in a more timely fashion.  Having a dedicated Community Manager will have a major impact on this front.  Moreover, we will also be working to make the abuse-reporting system more user-friendly.  We’re especially concerned about areas where abuse is happening, for example in the personal messaging area.

UPCOMING FEATURES RELATED TO COMMUNITY GUIDELINES:

Better Transparency
In the forum there was a clear desire for more transparency of people’s behavior as this creates the foundation of trust and accountability on the site.  The fact that there’s already a good amount of transparency on the site has proven to be an asset to the community.  As a start, we will start working on improving transparency by making suppressed content more transparent by displaying who the person was that created the inappropriate content.   

Ignore A User
To support better self-defense and self-policing we will start investigating ways to build a robust “ignore feature” that will help people better protect themselves from other members when necessary.  This will likely take a considerable amount of work and so in the meantime we would ask that people still rely on the report-abuse system.

OTHER CONCERNS STILL BEING DISCUSSED
People have also voiced some very valid concerns that we share and will be investigating further actions we can take.  Those include:

1) More involvement between the Askville Staff and the community. 

2) More consistent enforcement of Terms of Service.

3) More timely dealing with troll behavior and abusive content

4) Make newbies feel more welcomed to Askville

5) A long list of feature improvements.

We will continue to discuss publicly and privately how we can further improve the aforementioned concerns.  Every community will have its growing pains, and we realize we are currently going through one right now.  We hope that these actions will improve Askville and make it a safer and friendlier place to visit every day for both old veterans as well as newbies.  To be clear, we haven't made any changes to our terms of service, we are just enforcing them more sternly and reducing the amount of "gray" area with the hopes that it will result in a friendlier Askville.  For everyone's benefit, below are links to our Terms of Service as well as blog entries related to our community guidelines:

http://askville.amazon.com/termsofservice.html

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/05/clarifying-comm.html

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/06/recent-activity.html (last point of blog entry)

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/07/politcs-relig-1.html

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2008/03/what-would-you.html 

For those interested in our blog entry about Bonus Questions that was posted earlier today, please click on link below:

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2008/08/bonus-questions.html

One final note: Although we love Askville dearly and would do it voluntarily as all of you do every day, we also need to generate profits for Amazon.  Askville's business model is tied to generating revenues based on the content that is created on this site.  Content includes questions, answers, discussion posts, and even bonus questions.  We will try our best to keep a balance between maintaining a healthy community while also generating profits for Amazon. 

Sincerely,
AskvilleMayor

 

Bonus Questions and Voting Abuse Update

Hey Askville,

As many of you know, over a month ago we launched a controversial feature called Bonus Questions in an alpha lab (feature is only available to a select number of Askville users to get their feedback).  Today, I want to clarify what they are, why we have them on Askville, why they are still in alpha lab, and what we plan on doing with them in the future.

What are Bonus Questions and why do we have them on Askville?
There actually are two features tied to Bonus Questions:
A) the Bonus Question Box; and
B) Bonus Questions

A) Bonus Question Box – is currently available to alpha lab users only.  This is an experimental feature (hence, it is still in alpha lab) that we launched over a month ago.  The original concept of the Bonus Question Box is to give each user questions that we wanted to highlight based on a user’s interests, recent activity, preferences, and other factors (e.g. your friend asked a question that is on page 45, we wanted to highlight that question for you).  In effect, the Bonus Question Box would act as a personalization filter for each user.  The more you use Askville, the more relevant the Bonus Question Box would get.  We felt this would help users discover more interesting questions, faster.  However, due to limited resources and re-prioritization of projects, we haven’t been able to implement the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box (we hope to do this in the coming months), which is why it is still in  alpha lab.

B) Bonus Questions – Absent the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box, we wanted to create other types of questions that could potentially be interesting for Askville members to answer.  Many newbies (as well as many veteran Askvillers) who stumble upon Askville have difficulty finding a question to answer, making their first experience on Askville a frustrating one.  Moreover, certain types of questions that would be interesting to find answers to (e.g. sports, entertainment news, trivia, etc…) are rarely asked on Askville, but we realize would generate interesting answers by our community.  Consequently, with the help of another Amazon business model (mturk.com), we started to create Bonus Questions (henceforth called mturk Bonus Questions).  Knowing that the quality of questions created by mturk.com would range from good to really bad, we decided that mturk Bonus Questions would originally be only visible via the Bonus Question Box (for alpha lab users to see only) and only those that had at least one answer submitted by the community are the only ones that would be displayed to the rest of the community on all the major question lists on Askville (i.e. roughly 80% of mturk Bonus Questions are hidden).  Our hypothesis was that if someone from the Askville community decided to submit an answer to a mturk Bonus Question, the question most likely would be good enough for other Askville members to see, for better or for worse.  Furthermore, since we knew that we would get some poorly written mturk Bonus Questions, we allowed our community to edit any mturk Bonus Question to improve the quality of the question.  Eventually, there will be other types of Bonus Questions once we have built the personalization features for the Bonus Question Box.  Until then, the only types of Bonus Questions available will be mturk Bonus Questions.

Why are the Bonus Question Box and mturk Bonus Questions still in alpha lab and what are their future plans?
Both features are still a work in progress, which is why they both are considered Alpha Lab features.  That said, mturk Bonus Questions that were answered by at least one Askville member does show up on all the main question lists on Askville.  We realize that there is still a lot of work ahead of us to build the personalization features of the Bonus Question Box and improve the quality of mturk Bonus Questions.  We still believe that once we have implemented personalization on the former and improved the quality of the latter, coupled with adding additional types of Bonus Questions, the Askville experience will improve dramatically.  In the interim, we kindly ask for everyone’s patience as we continue to make strides in both features. 

Are there any guidelines with respect to Bonus Questions and editing mturk Bonus Questions in particular?
So long as the edited mturk Bonus Questions are related to the same topics that were originally submitted, users are able to make whatever changes they want to the questions.  If a mturk Bonus Question is too hard to answer, go ahead and edit it to make it easier for you and others to answer.  We realize that there has been controversy over this issue.  We apologize for not being clearer about this.  We also are okay with users answering mturk Bonus Questions that they themselves have edited.  We enabled this feature by design to make it even easier to submit answers to these questions.  Keep in mind that the primary purpose of mturk Bonus Questions is to encourage Askville users to submit answers to a wider range of questions.  That being said, all other community guidelines, including voting abuse, apply to these questions. 

Voting Abuse Update
We are working on some major changes to our voting system, some of which will be released shortly, based on some of the feedback we have received recently.  We also have banned several accounts due to voting abuse/collusion between members.  Gaming the voting system is a clear cut violation of our guidelines and we will continue to immediately ban members who are colluding with each other with the intent of gaming Askville's ecosystem.  In addition, we have warned/taken action on over 30 other Askvillers who have been negatively voting against certain members of the community.  With our new Community Manager, we hope to stay on top of voting abuse.  That said, please refer to our blog post in March 2007 on Voting 101 to get a better understanding of our voting abuse guidelines:

http://askville.typepad.com/askville_blog/2007/03/voting-101.html

Moreover, users who are negatively voting down appealed Bonus Questions (or voting negatively on any appeals based on who the answerer is and not on the quality of the content) are violating our community guidelines.

Christian, our Community Manager, will be posting an Open Forum question that will allow users to give us feedback on the Alpha Lab Bonus Question Box and mturk Bonus Questions.  Thanks again for your patience and feedback as we work to improve these Alpha Lab features.

Sincerely,
AskvilleMayor

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