I still feel progress visibility would be a meaningful and positive change.
The argument against it is basically that it could encourage users to game the system. But
- that sounds similar to the argument made for closed source code: safer when not publicly accessible
- isn’t that a central goal of gamification in the first place: encourage users to do things they might otherwise not do - because they are considered to be the right things to do
So for example, if gaming the system would mean reading more posts than one otherwise would - that seems to be just the goal.
If it would mean posting low quality replies to match a number - then wouldn’t the right check be to not reward low quality replies? It seems like we have the tools in place now to check for that.