Yes, About the badge system. Badge system will bonus people in many dimensions. You don’t know when you will get one. Like the first like, “first reply”, “first share”, etc. Getting such badges truely make people feel glad for a while.
But, there are some flows:
- You don’t know when you will get one. So, it’s more like a surprise pleasure. Not regular.
In the very first days of using the Discourse, I keep getting badges, but since then, in about 8 months I think, I get nothing. That makes me feel so boring when replying or creating now posts.
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You don’t know how to get one. You keep logging in every day, keep replying, keep providing good answers or good articles, but nothing happened then.
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The award are in multi-dimensions, so people won’t be competing !!! While Competing and Showing Off is a very good motivation method.
I’ve already tried to create a few new badges to award people. But, not so many and not in One System. You see, people like to get some small award for some small effort, not Wait a long long long time and do much much much work and get a big award.
On the other way, I think maybe praise number system is a good system to develop. People can just work for collecting praises for important contributions. You can View the most popular ask and answer Chinese Website Zhihu, their system is based on praise numbers. For each question, the most praised answer will be listed first. For different areas, the most praised person is listed first. If you want to apply some previleges, you must have enough praises. But, that also makes people try to show humor in their answers to get more praises, that makes many answers seem to be not so serious. But, active Comes First.