That’s interesting, I’m from a forum with a user base made up largely of younger kids and lots of people feel quite motivated by trying to get badges and the Regular trust level —they do have little celebrations on getting Regular and those sorts of things (I do sometimes get a little worried that they’re too engaged by that motivation 
since also people do express a little disappointed at times when they haven’t gotten Regular)
It’s a pretty specific situation, but yeah maybe something to note is that reputation can sometimes go the other way and it might bring up other behaviours instead if we start to encourage people to compete against each other, rather than what we may be hoping for (more ‘quality’ posts)
Leaderboards Considered Harmful:
Who Benefits?
The most insidious artifact of a leaderboard community may be that the very presence of a leaderboard changes the community dynamic and calls into question the motivations for every action that users take. If that sounds a bit extreme, consider Twitter: friend counts and followers have become the coins of that realm. When you get a notification of a new follower, aren’t you just a little more likely to believe that it’s just someone fishing around for a reciprocal follow? Sad, but true. And this despite the fact that Twitter itself never has officially featured a leaderboard-it merely made the statistics known and provided an API to get at them. In doing so, it may have let the genie out of the bottle.
this is referring to a leaderboard in the form of a content showcase, but it’s just mentioning as well that taken in the other direction, it is possible that promoting competition may not encourage better quality content, and might just put the focus on only improving one’s status/rank instead — just something to keep in mind as well
A “Popular” tab is common on user-generated-content platforms like Hopscotch. Initially, it seemed like an effective and simple way to showcase high quality projects. Members would like projects and the most liked projects would rise to the top.
But by designing a system that prized high “like” counts, what naturally followed were projects aimed at purely gaining “likes”.
Again maybe these are more specific cases but it’s because i’ve seen when leaderboards can start to seem like they get out of hand 
so I thought it was worth mentioning to maybe keep in the back of your mind too