Yahoo message boards- no more reccomendations?

Question

Why did Yahoo get rid of the reccomendation feature on their message boards?

Answer 1

I have heard that people had multiple IDs (which Yahoo lets you create) and people were recommending their own posts in an attempt to scew the impression their post actually had on people at a particular message board. Also, Yahoo was using operant conditioning to "reinforce" people using the message boards. For example, I post a message that scapegoats a person calling them a "lib" or something, then I get a recommendation. I do it again. I get another recommendation. I feel good that someone agrees with my anti-liberal ideology. This keeps me wanting to come back again and again looking for the recommendation. What this does for Yahoo is give them higher numbers of people using their services so that they can charge corporate advertisers more money. They disabled the recommend option because people used it so much they were slowing down Yahoo's servers. Yahoo doesn't even need it anymore because they have ridiculously high numbers of people using the message boards, so they are putting their server resources to other needs.

Don't expect Yahoo to come out and tell people the truth about it.

Answer 2

Was probably more often abused than useful.