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Could points for Helpful and Likes be Driving Wrong Behaviors?

Sean_Miller

I often am happy to see my inbox summary showing a lot of messages available to read, but then I often get disappointed because the majority of them are folks marking "helpful" in discussions I was part of. 

The reason its disappointing is that it looks like they are nuking the entire discussion.  Every single person that commented is tagged with a like and helpful.  Even posts that are just saying "thanks for posting" are tagged as helpful or liked.  Total dilution of the purpose of the button.

 

At first, I thought - well that's super friendly.  Then I dug a little further and looked at profiles of the users doing the nuking and I saw that what is happening is they are scoring 10 points per click.

 

To me, this seems like the points rewards are driving the wrong behavior here.  A behavior that actually doesn't boost one's reputation in the real world - particularly, because it clutters my inbox with bogus helpful tags. Also, the person that took 3 hours to blog on something is getting less points than the guy nuking every comment as helpful.

 

So, my feedback is, do we really need to reward for clicking like or helpful?  When someone is helpful, I'm compelled to click it anyway without the expectation of getting rewarded.  I know they'll get points and its a good virtual way to express thanks.

 

Or, best yet, can I suppress the "helpful" notifications from my inbox?

 

-Sean

Parents

  • I see this post has invoked plenty of responses, which I've only glanced at - so maybe my comment is already addressed.

     

    The curious thing I've noticed is that there are actually two options provided to the question "Helpful": YES and NO.

     

    However, I've yet to see any NO's used (is there an embarrassment factor perhaps with a "NO").

     

    Maybe if NO's could be used to downgrade the YES's, as intended (I believe the "is it helpful" option is supposed to rank responses so that a reader can quickly get to the best answers), then we would have a better system - is that not how stack overflow works (vote based). Then, just a suggestion, but if a NO could also be used to subtract/reduce the 10 points given to those trigger happy folk then it might solve the issue.

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  • I see this post has invoked plenty of responses, which I've only glanced at - so maybe my comment is already addressed.

     

    The curious thing I've noticed is that there are actually two options provided to the question "Helpful": YES and NO.

     

    However, I've yet to see any NO's used (is there an embarrassment factor perhaps with a "NO").

     

    Maybe if NO's could be used to downgrade the YES's, as intended (I believe the "is it helpful" option is supposed to rank responses so that a reader can quickly get to the best answers), then we would have a better system - is that not how stack overflow works (vote based). Then, just a suggestion, but if a NO could also be used to subtract/reduce the 10 points given to those trigger happy folk then it might solve the issue.

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  • in reply to BigG

    Hi BigG,

     

    I believe that clicking the unhelpful will produce a report like:  5 of 6 found this helpful

     

    If you have marked something Helpful and then change your mind you can reverse your Helpful by Clicking Helpful again. However the accounting of points that you and the author received initially does not seem to be reversed.

     

    John