The problem with reputation points, and other forms of game mechanics

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Money forces a certain amount of seriousness. Even small amounts of money make a discussion serious. Trying to use game mechanics, and a points system, removes that seriousness, because games are not serious, unless there is money involved:

Stack Overflow uses ‘reputation’ points and an achievement system to promote high activity among its users. I think that as the opportunity to increase your reputation and your number of achievements dwindled, so did a lot of user activity. There’s a plateau you hit there where you either have to devote way too much time to help other people do their work, or you just fall out of it. When you do, you don’t have a lot of incentive to get back into the game.

Early in Stack Overflow’s history, a need for knowledge engineering and a community with growing rules skewed the amount of reputation points towards early adopters. Games of code golf, “what’s your favorite programming comic strip” threads, and “What language should I start learning now” threads made it way too easy to attain points without actually demonstrating real knowledge or expertise. Obviously, there are users with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of reputation points who actually earned most of them by demonstrating expertise. But how do I tell them apart from the people who had the funniest joke about Ruby programmers, posted a few Dilbert comic strips, and then went after a series of low-hanging fruit with well-formatted responses?

Post external references

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    http://robertelwell.info/blog/stack-overflow-fatigue/
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