If You Thought Spice Levels Were Extreme...
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We have been dealing with gamification and studying it for years. @Nic and I have discussed it at long length as I did with Tabrez as well. When implementing ML we specifically wanted to avoid going down the path of unnecessary gamification. Yes, it is awesome for engaging people and getting them to participate on the site but the downside is that it causes people to not put in time creating content, answering questions, being helpful or whatever but makes people look for ways to get points and "win", which is not what a community is about. So we strove to keep gamification to a minimum. There is very little info about people and without going to the "people" lists you see nothing about them. New users and veterans appear equally in discussions. We did not want people getting "street cred" purely for having been around. We want the community to decide who are the experts and who are not naturally, not with an automated platform making decisions - often based solely on activity.
Anyway, that was a long lead up to wanting to show you what people are excited about for gamification features for the platform. They are doing some really interesting things and I'm sure it is great for other forums. But just wanted people to know what we have at our disposal and are resisting implementing.
