Comments on: LinkedIn Starts Cleaning Up Answers Spam

By: TallTroll

TallTroll — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:00:59 +0000

Terrible choice of response. Social networks of any kind need far better policing than this. Digg are just in the process of finding out how bad user feedback is as a signal of quality.

The scalable, sustainable choice would have been to initiate a user / moderator system, as I suggested at the time. *sigh* They’ll learn. I hope the lesson doesn’t kill the feature off

By: Scott Allen

Scott Allen — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:37:57 +0000

Unfortunately at the moment there’s no easy way to flag or rate answers, only questions. They’ll probably end up adding this, I would guess, but this is another one of those things that simply should have been there from the beginning.

What may have happened in this case is that the person asking the question used the option to send it directly to their network, and that Natalia may be unfamiliar with Answers, not realizing how this might appear, or even that it would appear publicly to such a large number of people. Publicly, it may look silly, but in private, it would be perfectly appropriate and courteous to respond in this way.

By: Peter Parkes

Peter Parkes — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:06:05 +0000

I’d be suspicious of interacting with someone who consistently posted spam, and so the reputational damage factor (I suspect) might have acted to reduce it in the long term.

Still, this is certainly a very necessary move.

What about spam (or just silly) answers? Here’s an example from today:

Hello Rohit,

Quick note to appologize for not being able to assist with your request.

Regards,

Natalia

I may be missing something, but I suspect that this isn’t going to look too great on Natalia’s profile. Do we need a means of flagging responses like this, though?