By now, I think most of you have probably heard that we upgraded the DU Recommend function to allow people to "Unrecommend" as well. For those of you who missed it, here is my thread from last week announcing the change.

The DU admins have been monitoring the new feature, and we are pleased to see that it is working more-or-less how we intended it to work. In fact, I think it is working better than I expected. Our motivation for giving you the ability to unrecommend was to improve the overall quality of the threads that make it to the DU Greatest Page, while giving a boost to topics that have broad appeal to our members, and it seems to be doing just that. We believe the unrecommend function has been a success, and it is a net positive for our community.

Obviously, there are many people who are not happy about this change, and have said so. After trying the new system for five days, we believe that the most dire predictions have not come to pass. However, we do believe some of your concerns are legitimate. We have been closely monitoring the system to see how it is being used and abused, and will continue to do so. So far, it is our impression that the vast majority of DUers are trying to use the system in a fair and responsible manner. A small number of people have used it in a manner we would consider irresponsible, and an even smaller number have been grossly abusive in their use of the system. We have the ability to bar members from using the system if they abuse it, and we have taken advantage of that ability in a few extreme cases. But we believe it is very difficult for the small number of abusive users to have much impact because there are so many people using it in a responsible manner. For the most part, the ratings seem fair. Obviously, there are exceptions -- but I don't think it makes sense to throw out the entire system because a few deserving threads did not make it to the greatest page, or because a few undeserving threads did. Overall, I think that happens a lot less under our new system compared to the system we had before.

We are going to continue to monitor the system to see how it is working, and how it is not. We are committed to making any changes that we deem necessary and appropriate so that the system is relatively fair and free from abuse. One change that we are considering -- which has been suggested by many of you -- is to get rid of the "<0" designation so threads will never display a rating lower than 0. We believe this change would take away one incentive for people to abuse the system, and it would not affect our goal of improving the content of the Greatest Page.

Also, now that we have the system in place, there are a lot of cool things we can do with it. Many of you have suggested that we could crunch the recs and unrecs in new ways in order to create lists of highly controversial threads, or popular threads, or threads with the most positive recommendations, or whatever. We think it would be cool to do this. If we can provide you with more different ways to experience DU, that's a good thing.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we improve DU. And thank you for all of your feedback.

Skinner, EarlG, and Elad
DU Administrators