I have found the gamification of Hacker News to be detrimental to my experience. Insightful but unpopular comments end up getting buried by retreads of the status quo. It's the tragedy of the commons: if every single person can upvote, the most-upvoted comment will be the one which appeals to every single person.
I prefer the threaded discussion style of kuro5hin back in the day where comments might be upvoted, but they stayed in the same temporal order they were posted in.
This is the tricky thing about game mechanics. Yes, they are effective in creating goals, or at least things to strive for. For games, simply creating a goal (any goal) is often enough.
It's much more difficult to create the goal you want. Forum karma and votes need voting ring and vendetta detection to be even minimally useful. Pandering detection would be great, but it's a hard problem.
The only way to avoid pandering is to have a culture where:
1) People vote based on what they want to read, not what they agree with
2) People want to read things they don't agree with as much as things they agree with
Both of these are hard. HN is the closest general-ish forum I've ever found to this, but it's still very far from the ideal. There's still a lot of pandering that goes on. The pandering just isn't all you see, like it is in many other places.
StackOverflow is actually even closer, but this is because of the very narrow focus. People want to read the thing that gives the largest volume of correct information in a concise manner.
Personally, I tend to want to respond to an article or discussion with whatever thought I'm having at the moment. The HN karma (in particular, the average) reminds me to try to filter my comments based on whether I'm saying something that I think others will find useful or whether I'm just saying it because I feel like saying it. I probably censor about half of what I would otherwise post based on this guideline, and it's nearly always to the betterment of my signal/noise ratio.
I find myself willing to spend more time/thought crafting a response to an article which I think will be read by more people. For example, I'm just pounding this out stream-of-consciousness style since I know it will only be read by those involved in this subthread, if that. Why not do the right thing and focus on thoughtful, well-written comments for their own sake? Because I have the karma carrot dangling in front of me. I feel like gamification has in this case removed my motivation to do what is most beneficial to the site.
That only means that gamification is not implemented correctly on HN.
If weight of every voter's vote is evaluated by you (1), then the resulting weight would be tuned up for you.
(1) You don't have to manually evaluate every voter. You just vote yourself, and if voter's votes correlate with your votes, then that voter's rank goes up (from the point of view of your personal rating system).
Upvotes/Downvotes need to go. I don't think it's too much to ask of adults to read entire thread in chronological order. It's fully sufficient to be able to flag spam or other comments that break policy and have favorites that are completely private.
I like the Reddit and LessWrong options of sorting comments by age or votes. Sure, it adds more complexity to the site's UI but considering HN is mainly about its discussions, making them better at the cost of complexity may not be so bad.
About 2 years ago, I was looking at a forum that looked like the one pictured and thought, "Why would anyone let this happen to their forum?"
Signatures started as a way to putting personality into your post, and they still are, but it's gone way overboard. Many forums put a reasonable limit on that stuff now. 2 lines, 100 characters, etc.
I never looked at StackExchange as a solution to that, though. Forums were for everything from chatting to problem solving, and are usually conveniently divided for such. StackExchange is just for problem solving.
> Based on the original size of those screenshots, only 18 percent of that forum thread page is content. The other 82 percent is lost to signatures, avatars, UI doohickeys, and other web forum frippery that has somehow become accepted as "the way things are done".
Avatars are a quick and easy way to identify an author - and that in itself carries quite a bit of information. (I'd trust someone I knew to be a mechanic to post valid repair advice, vs. someone who posts all the time about their car breaking because of dumb things they did.)
I noticed something interesting on Reddit. I recently installed the Reddit Enhancement Suite extension for my browser. One of the features is that it displays next to a user's name above their comment the sum of +/- 1 votes I have given them. It also colors them based on their distance from 0 (or something similar to this). Suddenly I find myself reading comments differently based on whether they a strong positive or negative rating from me. I worried a little when I found myself upvoting a comment that was made by a very common poster on the site, and I realized it was the sort of stupid joke that doesn't contribute to the discussion that I would normally down-vote.
The reputation the user had with me caused me to give their posts the benefit of the doubt. It was a very odd experience.
On HN, I almost never read the name of the person who posted something until I am about to vote on it. I enjoy trying to evaluate a post on its contribution to the topic, and not on the authority or popularity of the author.
That odd experience sounds like most human interaction outside of the web. With the added context, I guess you lose objectivity, but gain a sense of community.
I do love Avatars for these reasons, and having a signature as an entirely vain engagement. But quite often, I find myself removing the signature because...as shown on that site, they're quite large, gaudy, and bloody repetitive.
Gamification is a fad, it will almost certainly evolve into something more sensible, such as "engage your users," once the frenzy ends. It's nice to see Atwood highlighting the fact that they didn't set out to make StackOverflow gamified, they set out to engage users and foster quality contributions.
Saying that 'engage your users' is a better terminoligy for what's going on here than 'gamification' basically ignores the whole point of the idea, which is that people like to be making progress towards goals..not 'engaged', but metrically shown as advancing.
That is, at the very basic level, what gamification is, its making an activity into an activity with specific measures of progress toward a goal, such that people can rank themselves (and we do).
This isn't a new or faddish idea, its an insight into how people act, and an attempt to use that bit of new understanding, as Atwood did, before being aware of the term, to engage users using what are called 'game mechanics' which are basically motivations outside of the actual reward structures of the activity. I suspect "engage your users" is moving into the much more targeted and practicable mode of "gamify your interface" rather than vice versa.
Games are not games because they are scored and have goals. Games are games because they are fun. Scoring is one aspect and usually present, but it's only one aspect and will only appease a subset of people. You can play soccer for 2+ hours and not achieve a single goal. It's still fun. Even if goals are scored, keeping track is entirely optional. Soccer is a game and fun, even when you don't "gamify" it by keeping score.
Furthermore, "gamification" by that definition often begets "gaming" the system. Because scoring, measuring, and mechanical details almost never perfectly match the spirit and original intent of the game, these edge cases cause dissonance and frequently disengagement. Examples: A baseball player hitting 17 foul balls waiting for a good pitch, basketball players causing fouls on purpose simply to stop the game clock, monks in Everquest using the "feign death" skill to split mobs that would be unbeatable as a group; these are real dynamics in successful game systems originally designed or evolved to be that way. In other areas, such as academic grading or pay-for-performance, the dissonance is significantly more profound.
People play foldit because it's fun, and that's what "gamification" should be about. The scoring metrics are merely a small piece of that.
Granted that's what games are about. But gamification is about using game mechanics (mechanics being things like -scores- which let you understand your position against that position of other people, and rules, which keep you from doing whatever you like, as something completely aside from the point of the 'fun' of the game) to do something much more functional than make things fun: to make things addictive or otherwise drive the user to pursue things outside of their standard pattern.
Stack overflow's design isn't about making it fun, its about making the users collaborate into something that is easy and valuable to the population. The rules of a game in general aren't about making the games fun, they're about providing a framework for competition.
Right, and that's why I think "gamification" will be a fad. Eventually people will see through transparent attempts to lead them by the nose through otherwise completely unengaging content and will move on to something more compelling.
Sure, designers will continue to include game mechanics to enhance engagement, it just won't be this crazy concept that everyone obsesses about. It'll just be a tool you can use sometime if the situation seems right.
And I disagree about stackoverflow on both counts. I believe it is fun, and that competition is a nonessential component to the sites success. Some people do thrive on competition, others do not. The core of stackoverflow is the dialogue between askers and answerers. Maybe say "rewarding" instead of "fun." The scores and rules are a nice enhancement to the core experience-- they facilitate public recognition, sorting and organization, among other things. There has been competition and recognition on Wikipedia for a long time, and they have made no overt attempt to "gamify".
Another important thing that the stackoverflow game mechanics do is guide users to functionality they might not know about. What you call "driving" users I would call "leading." Hardcore completionist, achievement-oriented, and competitive users are, of course, driven. The rest, however, are not, and to them features like "badges" just bring attention to the wide variety of ways the site can be engaging. The FAQ is well-written and very useful. The "analytical" badge merely helps draw a little extra attention to it. vBulletin has a boilerplate FAQ that probably no one has read in years since it's the same on every single forum that uses the software.
Yep, that's the point. People who use gamification for things like green living and saving energy, or advertising, or redeeming rewards, etc are missing the point. There's nothing to freaking gamify. Nobody feels any sense of achievement from saving energy, or redeeming airmile rewards, or checking in to places and doing random stuff.
Yes they do. First of all, saving energy is in itself a reward. Moreover, that's easily gameable by simply comparing yourself to a group of strangers at their energy efficiency house. Airline miles is kinda a hard one, except for the people in that group, competing there (and I'm sure there is), and as far a s random stuff...I'm here in large part because every once in a while I wonder if I can't get a few upvotes on hacker news, hopefully by saying something helpful or insightful, of course.
Saving energy doesn't instill a sense of achievement. Nobody has a bucket list with an item that says "Save as much energy as I can". It just doesn't inspire anyone. Sorry if that's your startup idea.
What struck me most is Jeff's disregard for potential patent threats. Perhaps inadvertent, but he also makes a strong case for why such "business method" patents hinder innovation rather than promote it.
"What we do have to think about [in the era of social networking] is human to human interaction," he said. And according to Spolsky, to do that, you have to think as an anthropologist does.
I've heard the quote as "bad artists borrow, great artists steal", which always made more sense to me. A bad artist will take what someone else has done, but it remains essentially the original artists vision and concept. A great artist steals it, and claims total ownership, making it uniquely theirs, despite the original source.
I prefer the threaded discussion style of kuro5hin back in the day where comments might be upvoted, but they stayed in the same temporal order they were posted in.