Ask HN:What can user generated sites do to protect their web reputations?
From my perspective when I worked there, HubPages did everything right as far as removing bad spam, identifying duplicate content, and promoting its best quality articles.
We worked on tools to make content generation easier and had some of the strictest moderation policies for any user generated web site (a maximum of 2 external links to a single domain, minimum word count, and a "hopping" service that encouraged members to rank content).
Clearly, none of this was enough because HubPages was apparently severely hurting its reputation with the general public.
At Hacker News, any link to HubPages will immediately go dead. When people talk about HubPages, I keep hearing people talk about the amount of low quality articles and low quality content that was appearing high up in the search results.
I'm only using HubPages as an example. I would be very interested to hear what other user generated content sites are doing?
Does giving each user their own subdomain improve the situation? Would this have made it easier to distinguish between the high quality and low quality content. Blogger, for example, has some of the highest and lowest quality blogs imaginable.
Do sites such as scribd do anything special to protect their reputation from spammers and authors who post sloppy or junky content?
I don't work at HubPages anymore. I will probably jump back into the start up space in 2 years (I signed a contact with United Health Care for a 2-year stint).
I would be very interested to hear what people at Hacker News think. How should a user generated content site protect its reputation and deal with the high levels of low quality content that are an inevitable part of the model.