Adding on to that, if your community has gone off the rails with badges, there’s a middle road between living with it or disabling them altogether. You could disable everything except the badges that are (1) incredibly hard to gamify and (2) undeniably useful “good user” signalling.
- received signals that are hard to do “tit-for-tat” schemes with, like helpdesk. If someone is creating bogus questions and answers, that’s straight up destructive and should be actively deterred, possibly by disabling the badge, but I’d be quite surprised if this became a large scale problem that couldn’t be solved with occasional moderator intervention.
- Content created in special categories, e.g our Scribe or bug reporter badges.
- 3rd party signals like our contributor or soon-to-be-added translator badge.
If your users are “gaming” these badges, it may not be a bad thing.