To make sure Yahoo! Answers remains the destination of choice for everyone out there who wants to get the answer to their question or to help other people with their answers, it is important to make sure Answers is a place where high-quality answers are acknowledged.
For the next few weeks, different groups of users will be randomly given one of three different versions of the new ratings. Your usage of these will be tracked, to aid us in deciding which combination will be the permanent one.
While the testing is going on, the old thumbs up/thumbs down will still be around, for those not getting the new feature. They will still be running in the background for everyone, so you may be getting the new ratings but also notice some answers collapsed.
Our new ratings feature will allow you to indicate which answers you think are quality and why you think this is a worthy answer. Replacing thumbs up/thumbs down, you will now be able to choose one of our new ratings types to give to as many answers as you want on the question page.
The options you may see include:
- Informative – Sometimes an answer gives you exactly the facts, the details, the history or science behind a question that was asked. In this case, an informative rating indicates that this answer contained the information required (and often may be an answer that gave excellent information that was above your expectations
- Useful – Some questions ask more for advice than information. A question like “how should you explain a gap year on your CV” or “what should I tell my boyfriend” may not be a great answer because of the information involved, but because the answerer helped through sharing of personal experience or through advice on a given situation.
- Helpful - a cross between Informative and Useful. It covers answers that try to help the asker, without being just advice, but maybe not giving as much detail as you’d like to see.
- Amusing – Although Yahoo! Answers is a place for the sharing of knowledge and experiences, we know that some answers can be amusing in nature and this is fine as long as the answerer is trying to genuinely answer the question. In the case of some great content that also made you laugh, you can rate content as ‘Amusing’
- Agree – Sometimes you want to agree with an answerer’s opinion because it is exactly what you were thinking! In this case, you may find an answer that does not contain a lot of information or advice but contains an opinion that you want to share your agreement with.
It is important to note that you can only give one rating to each answer. Although you may change your rating, note that if you do so that this will remove the old rating from the question when the new one is assigned.
Old Thumbs Up
For old questions that had thumbs up/thumbs down ratings, those ratings will now appear slightly differently. Because we don’t know which rating is a best match, we will now show an answer that had 10 thumbs up as having 10 Agree ratings. Up until now, users could only “agree that content was something they liked” and we don’t know if this was because it was informative, it was helpful or if it was just that they agreed with the opinion.
Therefore, promoting quality questions and answers is a really important. Please take the time to rate the answers that you want to rate so that other users can know which answers of theirs the community thought were fantastic. We will be using these ratings data to better promote the higher quality content in more prominent positions across the site.
The old way of minimizing content that had 5 more thumbs down than thumbs up is obviously now no longer going to happen. We realize this was a bugbear of many users. Although it did hide a lot of poor quality content, it often affected users who wrote opinion-based content that a lot of others disagreed with, rather than necessarily being bad quality in itself.
Points
You do not get any points for rating or for being rated. This is because we want the giving and receiving to be based on merit only. Our goal is to understand which content is the best and to be able to enhance Answers with better promotion of this high quality content over time.
Thanks for reading,
(5 votes, average: 4.20) 
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