Why User Ratings Go Down

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In preparation for this month’s earnings payout, we’ve undergone a massive “clean up” of older discussions, responses and comments that do not meet the myLot Community Guidelines. Basically, this allows us to reallocate earnings from the “bad” discussions to the “good” discussions. (The more spam we can get rid of, the more we can pay everybody else!) As we grow, we’ve become better at addressing low quality posts near the time they were generated (with your help, of course!) The issue is with older discussions from November and before. We’re nearly caught up with addressing these older discussions. As a result, many of you have noticed fluctuations in both your earnings and user rating. Most user’s earnings have either gone up or stayed the same. A small group of user’s earnings have gone down. If we delete an old discussion, this also causes the user rating to decrease for everybody who participated in that discussion. But the amended user rating won’t display until the next time that user creates a discussion, response or comment. Here’s an example: Let’s say myLot receives multiple “report abuse” notifications for user XYZ. Upon further manual review, we find that user XYZ has repeatedly violated the myLot Community Guidelines by copying and pasting other users’ contributions to create 100 new discussions as his own. Therefore, we make the decision to cancel user XYZ’s account, forfeiting all of his earnings. Unaware that these discussions are plagiarized, many users contribute to these discussions. When we delete the plagiarized discussions of user XYZ, our system also deletes the non-offending responses and comments to these discussions. When this happens, user ratings go down the next time each user makes a post, as user ratings are re-calculated. We realize it can be frustrating to see your user rating fluctuating. This should occur much less frequently after this month’s earnings payout. In addition, we’re investigating ways to help further improve this process. Any comments or suggestions are welcome. We’ve come a long way in a short period of time, but we still have BIG plans for the future, and we still have a long way to go. We’re dedicated to continuously improving the myLot user experience and listening to your concerns. Thanks for your patience while we work through our growing pains! We will never guarantee perfection, but we will guarantee our commitment to continuously improve.