Where did the Thumbs Down Go?

Use the "Report abuse" button, but ONLY if you can justify WHY the answer violates the CG TO AN ABUSE TEAM. IF and when you falsely report for any reason, you'll just destroy your own reporting credibility with the abuse teams. That's how community moderation is SUPPOSED to work. IF you don't like the new system, DON"T USE IT. If you use it, Yahoo Inc. will take that as a "Yes" vote for that rating system. IF you really want to let Yahoo know what you think about the new rating system, use the "Send feedback" hyperlink toward the bottom of the page and add your comment to the thread that's pinned to the top of main Suggestion board. To get to the Suggestion board (there's more than one", click the green "about" tab, then select "Suggestion board" from the drop down menu. Losing five points by complaining on YA is pointless (pun intended), because Yahoo employees do NOT usually read or moderate the YA boards.

"...June 6, 2012 at 2:30 pm

NEW: Ratings

Tags: announcement, Product Updates

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. ...

...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, ..."

http://yanswersblog.com/index.php/archives/2012/06...

The PC's in American don't like getting thumbs down so often The Liberats at Yahoo changed it for that reason only.

It's still here on some questions. The other ratings are in beta testing so yahoo is yet to figure out if they want to keep or lose it. -Jacob