Community Hero (contributed 50 reviews and 300 grades)
If this sounds like a good idea, feel free to add your suggestions. Tiered badges (bronze, silver, gold) would be great for incentivizing users to read or contribute.
I’m indifferent towards achievements in general, but I don’t think streak achievements are a good idea. The others like number of books read or reviews given are fine because you can’t “lose” progress. But with streak achievements if you miss a day (or whatever interval) you go back to zero, which I find discouraging.
I thought that was already an existing feature suggestion (I remember discussing it in the main feature discussion thread) but I guess it never made it to a full request?
Agreed, streaks feel punitive for no reason. They also push people to do meaningless stuff (e.g., connecting to the website without other purpose than keeping the streak).
I do agree with the streak counter that could be punitive. Also it will increase workload of people trying to get their streaks restored. On the other side a non-strict control of a streak makes it useless.
It’s not up to me, but I would be disappointed to see this personally. One of the things I love about this site is that it doesn’t “want” anything from me. It doesn’t care whether I read every day, or I don’t read anything for a month/year. It doesn’t matter whether I log Days Read, time spent, etc. The site has zero expectations, and it isn’t trying to influence or “incentivize” me to behave in a certain way. It’s also not trying to elevate anyone over anyone else. The closest it gets to trying to influence my behavior is asking if I want to grade things.
If someone wants to celebrate that they’ve achieved any of the things you mentioned, they can just put that on their profile, or make a forum post, imo. On the same token, if someone’s not interested in those things they shouldn’t have the site making them conscious of it. While it might be motivating for some, it might be demotivating or intimidating (or just annoying) for others.
So what do you want to do with this PR? Speculative? Leave it pending?
I’d say this in case this is implemented, to make it optional opt-in and part of the on-board process. If you don’t opt-in, you won’t see anybody’s badges.
No the thing I had in mind was for “achievements”. I just found the message (and it was from me, that’s probably why I remembered it… just not writing it )
I meant it as part of the onboarding experience, guiding new users to try using the features of the site.
Right. Yeah everytime one of these ‘gamefication’ feature requests comes up, everyone chimes in (rightly!) that they would not want this as default . I do agree that the ‘streaks’ badge maybe should live in a ‘challenge’ feature that is opted into rather than a badge.
I also am not personally motivated by these sorts of features… However, like you say, I think it can be done in a way which makes it’s unobserved by users who don’t opt in. And there are a lot of users who do find a lot value in these features that we should support. Just look at all the learners doing the Tadoku challenge or read every day challenges.
But yes, it would be opt in
Approved.
Out of curiosity, what do you think of the discourse badges? Personally, I just ignore them and it makes zero impact on me. I think it’s different than Duolingo where it’s actively in your face all the time as something you should be chasing, if that makes sense.
I find them a bit silly/charming, but otherwise tune them out. I think they’re probably positive overall though. I think forums are a place where incentivizing makes sense, since they require communal participation to function. Also, forums are a bit intimidating when you haven’t posted before (or even when you have). I think the badges lighten some of that by giving you light, positive reinforcement.
One thing that’s kinda cool about the Discourse badges is that when you click the notification, it contains the link to the original post. A nice moment of reminiscence.
Yes, definitely agree. Tbh I never even noticed before that you can see the Discourse badges on people’s forum profiles, since I’m only ever looking for someone’s Natively profile link, when I click on their icon. And I (happily) have no idea what badges are even available.
The regular badge has a huge impact, as it grants to right to make wiki posts.
I don’t think I have used that here, but I made a few wikis on the WK forum.
The regular badge is the only really important one.
It also gives the users some powers, so you don’t really want to give it to everyone, but just the people invested in the forum.
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. I do agree that the ‘streaks’ badge maybe should live in a ‘challenge’ feature that is opted into rather than a badge.
