Assessing content based on assessed trust in users

A computer-implemented method for selecting information to provide to customers of an electronic marketplace based on an automatic assessment of quality of the information, the method comprising:

• receiving from a customer a piece of content related to an available item;
• automatically determining a trust score for the customer based at least in part on prior activities of the customer at the electronic marketplace, at least some of the prior activities of the customer being unrelated to providing pieces of content to the electronic marketplace, the automatic determining of the trust score being performed by at least one of one or more programmed computing systems;
• for each of one or more content rating dimensions, automatically determining an initial quantitative assessment of the received piece of content for the content rating dimension based at least in part on the determined trust score for the customer, the automatic determining of the initial quantitative assessment being performed by at least one of the one or more programmed computing systems;
• after providing the received piece of content to other customers, receiving multiple evaluations of the piece of content from at least some of the other customers, each received evaluation including a quantitative assessment for each of one or more of the content rating dimensions;
• for each of at least one of the content rating dimensions, automatically determining an updated quantitative assessment of the received piece of content for the content rating dimension based at least in part on combining quantitative assessments for the content rating dimension from the received evaluations, the combining such that determined trust scores for the at least some other customers from prior activities of those other customers are used to weight the quantitative assessments in the evaluations received from those other customers, the automatic determining of the updated quantitative assessment being performed by at least one of the one or more programmed computing systems;
• and
• determining whether to provide the piece of content to one or more additional customers based at least in part on one or more of the automatically determined quantitative assessments for the piece of content, and wherein each of the one or more programmed computing systems includes at least one computer processor.

A computer-readable storage medium whose contents include instructions that when executed configure a computing device to select information to provide to users based on an automatic assessment of quality of the information, by performing a method comprising:

• receiving an indication of information supplied by a first user;
• after providing indications of the information to other users, receiving evaluations of the information from each of at least some of the other users;
• automatically assessing the quality of the information based at least in part on automatically determined trust scores for the other users in such a manner that the automatically determined trust score for each of the other users is used to influence an effect of the evaluation of that other user on the assessed quality, the automatically determined trust score for each of the other users being based at least in part on prior activities of that other user that are not related to evaluating information or to supplying information, the automatic assessing of the quality being performed by the configured computing device;
• and
• automatically determining a manner of using the information based at least in part on the automatically assessed quality of the information, the automatic determining being performed by the configured computing device.

A computing system configured to select information to provide to users based on an automatic assessment of quality of the information, comprising:

• one or more processors;
• a content quality assessment system that is configured to, when executed by at least one of the one or more processors:
• automatically assess a predicted degree of quality of a piece of content supplied by a first user for use by other users, the predicting of the degree of quality being based at least in part on a trust score for the first user that is automatically determined based at least in part on prior activities of the first user that are not related to supplying pieces of content for use by other users;
• and
• automatically update the assessed degree of quality of the piece of content based at least in part on evaluations of the piece of content received from multiple other users to whom the piece of content was made available and on automatically determined trust scores for the other users such that the automatically determined trust score for each of the other users is used to influence an effect of the evaluation of that other user on the updated assessed degree of quality;
• and
• a content manager system that is configured to, when executed by at least one of the one or more processors, automatically determine whether to make the supplied piece of content available to other users based at least in part on the automatically assessed predicted degree of quality of the piece of content.