launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Lucian Adrian Grijincu <lucian.grijincu@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 11:50 AM, David Planella
<david.planella@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Not debating the goodness of badges here, but there are areas of
> contribution where participants do care about karma, not as a single
> value, but as a measure of the work they do in the area they care about.
>
> As an example, translators often follow the top contributors page and
> take a pride in being there:
>
> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+topcontributors


>From the thousands translators (most of whom come and contribute 1-10
strings) only a very tiny fraction care about that page because only a
tiny fraction gets the honor of appearing there. I'm on that list and
I didn't even know that list existed. And I don't really care that
much for it.


But I can tell you one thing: even though I only answered a few
questions on askubuntu.com, I FEEL A NEED to come by and see whether
there's something new there (an answer got accepted, new answers or
comments on my questions, etc?, my question god is a favorite of 10
people, I now have 195 points, a new badge for upvoting, a new badge
for commenting, etc.)

I have added askubuntu.com to my "banned" list of websites (chrome
nanny) so I wouldn't waste time any more on this.


> That does not necessarily mean that we encourage quantity over quality
> (in Ubuntu, for example, we obviously do the contrary), but at least
> people seem to be happy about karma in translations, and I'm sure in
> other areas as well.
>
> Also this data is also useful in other sites to highlight good work in
> different areas of contribution:
>
> http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com/


Again, very very few get there. By the time you get there you don't
need these kinds of rewards. You have a reward in the work itself.

What I'm talking about is a way to engage and catch in those users
that otherwise might be just passers-by.
I believe that hooking them in through a few of these meaningless
rewards would keep some of these users more on LP.

This is similar somewhat to the facebook water-your-crops,
feed-your-cattle games.

-- 
 .
..: Lucian