Integrate with existing gamification programs in companies
ability to award points for events that happen outside of Discourse, like IRL events, or elsewhere online, like being a customer in a community, or buying a product.
the ability to allow users to redeem their points for swag, products or benefits
I would be curious to see if @thrivegiraffe and the Thank Ape Board have some top lessons learned from the various contribution types they’ve rewarded over the past year.
While their program expands beyond just the Forum, they have a similar leaderboard structure with some rewards geared towards specific Forum milestones.
I’m personally more interested in the “higher difficulty” milestones (something like a constructive comment that leads to an author making an edit to their proposal) rather than some of the more simple milestones such as liking a post. However, these “higher difficulty” milestones are likely harder to track and might be out of scope for the suggested Form plug-in.
Personally, I found seeing the current leaderboard was helpful to be motivated. Also getting some badges helped to motivate me to delve deeper in the forum.
That said I felt it could be expanded. Farming really becomes an issue if a very direct financial reward is given vs an overall gamification experience.
In the future the gamification maybe has benefits for social capital assessment.
Not many active voters are here on discourse, would love to see quality over quantity here on discourse. More number of people proposing new and unique ideas, feedback and general discussion. After all this is a forum, everything accounted here for would be better instead of general talks over other mediums where things often get lost and forgotten; twitter discussions over spaces and discord.
Would love to see how you can gamify the forums
Gamification does nothing in the long run imo. Similar to a play to earn ecosystem, you will most likely attract bots or people that will game the system to extract as much rewards as possible without giving real thought on how to contribute. Yes, it will pump the numbers of activity, but not much apart from that.
We also already have the Thank Ape reward system in place.
ThankApe is a third party system outside of the ApeCoin Dao. Also ThankApe could tap into the gamified data created by upgrading the official ApeCoin Forum.
Btw. I am thinking less about short term financial rewards, which as you say attract people to “farm” those rewards, but how labour contributions could impact our capital contributions (owning APE).
@yatsiu what do you think about adding gamification and it being one component in an algorithm which could account for labour, which functions as multiplier (with a cap) on your voting rights.
In essence to find the perfect match of capital and labour contributions for a voting mechanics.
Thank Ape brought myself (and countless others) here - Gamification surely would help retention / participation beyond the Thank Ape rewards. I think it’s a great idea.
@Vulkan That’s a good idea to ask @thrivegiraffe and the Board about what they’ve learned from rewarding different kinds of contributions over the past year. As the pioneers in this area, they likely have valuable lessons and insights to share
I also agree that it’s important to focus on the “higher difficulty” contributions that actually improve proposals or move discussions in a productive way, rather than just simple things like liking a post. Those more impactful contributions are exactly what we should be focusing on to improve and move the DAO and Forum further.
While tracking those higher difficulty milestones can certainly be more challenging than quantitative metrics, I agree it’s worth exploring ways to recognize and reward those qualitative factors.
I was thinking about using a hybrid approach that combines automated tracking with human review/validation this probably could do the trick
