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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

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  • I think it is easy to label things as either 'wrong' or 'correct' behaviors, but in reality these things are very blurry.  While I do agree that there might be good reasons to tweak or tune the points aspect of the system, I do think that the system as it stands is way more right than it is wrong.  This site has been one of the most friendly and lively communities that I have seen (and I have seen and participated in other sites that are mostly dead now).  I think that encouragements like 'like' and 'helpful' are one way that keeps such a friendly tone here.  It is clear that there have been limits placed on the rewarding for overuse of the 'like' and 'helpful' clicks, which speaks well for administration of this site.

     

    A lot of notifications are placed into the message system, but I feel that the reporting of like/helpful has my brought attention to many threads that I initially missed.  I do agree that I ignore a lot of the messages, just clicking on them and then moving on, but I gladly do that, to find the ones that I am interested in reading.

     

    Hopefully you have found a suitable method to limit the messages to your own inbox.

  • in reply to genebren

    I'm with you on the overall positives of the forum.  This is actually the only place I post or frequent.  It's like what my Facebook is to my wife. 

     

    One tweak I'm making now is eliminating "following" on anything I joined over a year ago...assuming I can do that.

     

    See ya',

    Sean

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