If the forum wants to accumulate good posts, shouldn't we have some stimulation/motivation system?

I was thinking what exactly the community spirit is, and suddenly it comes to my mind that shouldn’t it be very natural that we should have a stimulation / motivation method if we want to collect good thinking?

I know there are already user level system and badge system. But it’s easy to know that both are very poor at stimulating people. The user level system only have a few levels. The badge system is better, but there are many when first using the forum, when you use it long, the new badges are not so many. And it can not stimulate people keep working hard in the forum.

I think we can have a scoring system —— maybe just the praise number system is enough.
We can just show the praise number of an account and let people compete the praise numbers.
I think in this way, people will think hard and devote good posts.

And you can read this post.

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I think what you’re referring to are persuasion or engagement strategies.

You might find the tactics chapter of this resource useful to consolidate your thinking

https://www.feverbee.com/strategy/part-three-tactics/

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Please see Discourse Meta

Note the default time range and default sort order.

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Great. There it is. So it is quite easy rewraping it and marketing it. Problem is, how to make it beautiful and natural to make people know their scores and feel the motivation.

That like count isn’t going to ensure quality of posts though – it will potentially support engagement, but that will be of little long term value to the community on its own. Your sense of community (or community spirit) is going to be dictated by your strategy – i.e. deciding on the behaviours you want to see, and using the right tactics to model those.

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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 :sweat_smile: 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.

Build Responsibly:

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 :grin: so I thought it was worth mentioning to maybe keep in the back of your mind too

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