Insomnia

Last week, Stack Overflow opened to the public. I gave it a look. It is a simple system; people ask questions, people answer the questions. There is a system for upmodding and downmodding the questions and answers. Like many nascent crowdsourced web sites, the content is pretty good so far. Time will tell if the self-ruling system will continue to work or if the content will start to slowly drift towards mediocrity.

I am a lurker in most of the similar sites that I read. For this one however, I started to contribute right away. Why was that? After thinking about this for a little while now I think I have a theory: StackOverflow treats its participants like players in a role playing game.

Like many of the other community-based systems, there is a score that rewards user that create good content. Other sites call it karma, this one calls it reputation. The main difference is that this site gives you a compelling incentive to hoard the reputation points. You have goals, quests of sorts. You need to have gathered 15 points to be able to upmod someone else's content. You need 50 to be able to leave comments. There's a whole menu of things that you can do on the site but you need to gather some reputation to be able to do them.

In addition, the system will reward you with a badge for accomplishing specific tasks. You get the teacher badge for your first answer that gets modded up. You get another badge for completing all fields in your profile.

For me, this makes it very compelling to go there and participate. So, I'll stop writing right now and go see if I can't answer some questions. I really would like to get my good answer badge.

Labels: fun, tech

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