Community Design: Points as Motivation
Building a community-driven site? You should consider implementing a points system. Why? I’ll try to show you why in this post, but in a nutshell points systems are an ingenious way of taking something with no tangible value and turning it into a prized virtual currency of sorts.
Reddit, Slashdot, Hacker News, The Sixty One, I’m In Like With You — all examples of sites utilizing some kind of karma, points or other such reward system without actually offering anything “real.” Building a community from scratch is no easy feat. After letting potential users know what the value prop of your community is and why they need it, will that be enough for them to stick around? Maybe they’ll create an account and forget about it. Maybe they just don’t know anyone else within the community and feel no need to participate in a community with online strangers. How do you try to work around that?
At this point, most community designers turn to implementing something to spur users to contribute and act within the community. Seymour Papert’s constructionism learning theory talks about motivating people by engaging them in personally-meaningful projects that help construct new knowledge. Put that in context of a large community-driven website and that indirectly means motivation comes from each users’ desire to maintain a reputation as well as earn respect from that audience. This is further backed by Amy Bruckman’s assertion that having an audience motivates creation — something that stands out to me with it being the case on my own blog.
Sounds a bit deep but it really just comes down to letting your users make a place for themselves in the community. From the get-go it is always difficult to hook the new account holder and prevent them from bouncing away for good. One idea is to make it easy to get freebie points, such as for logging in daily or referring friends to the service. When I started using The Sixty One I didn’t really care much about the points and was just there for the music from time to time.
After a few weeks, I started racking up points just from my casual interaction. After referring some friends to the service and gaining points from bumping up songs that became successful, I now use the site more than I would have had I only a handful of points. To make its points system even more captivating, The Sixty One lets users progress through different levels, with each successive level giving the user more capabilities and privileges among the site.
The Sixty One is an example of a points based system where the points are indirectly dealt by other users’ actions. That is, you get points if a song you bump up becomes successful when other users bump it up. However, sites with karma-based implementations of points systems have a less reliable (read: takes more work to gain points) system. On these sites, points for each user are directly in the hands of the other users, often by other users rating their contributions or comments. While karma points are harder to achieve and promote insightful user activity, these communities tend to be less effective at luring in the new user who wants to jump right and advance without much difficulty.
I hate to back this up with a World of Warcraft example but it fits: leveling up in World of Warcraft is easier in the early levels and then as the user progresses, it becomes more challenging. This adaptive system encourages casual players to stick with the game instead of turning them away. It boils down to operant conditioning and reinforcement learning. It’s easier at first and then it gets harder as the user or player progresses. I’m not saying karma-based systems are ineffective, but they truly only work well in certain situations. For example, karma works well on Hacker News since new users are initially lured there by the interesting content and the karma points users gain after the fact is an added benefit which turns into a complementary form of motivation.
Twitter-able Summary: Points-based reward systems provide users in a community with the motivation they need to quickly become fully-engaged.
Do you participate in any online communities that dole out some sort of points? Do they keep you active in the site or are they just nice to have?
Somewhat Related: The Perils of the Anonymous User
Why the World of Warcraft reference…why!!!!?
I tend to agree though. Forums especially, who’s going to listen to a lurker that comes out to play with one meaningful post, compared to the forum rat with a bazillion spammy(was going to say stammy there :) ) posts?
Yay with Karma!
dunno. quality is always preferable to quantity. 5000 points doesn’t indicate one has anything to contribute. ever read past the first page of a /. thread? it goes downhill fast. best…skip
The best example I can think of is Kongregate, a social flash games website.
The site is loaded with achievements to accomplish and points to earn. The points go towards ‘levelling up’. These small features, when combined with already addictive games, keep me visiting.
Thanks for the tip on thesixtyone, I’de never heard of it before but I’m just checking it out now.
Good points Paul,
Though, XBox 360 probably would have been a better example than World of Warcraft. I have friends who only purchase the arcade games for the achievements. Now there is a system that not only gets you playing, but gets you to spend more money to do it. They are also more compelled to play a game longer than they normally would, long after they have beat it, to get that last achievement.
Some games give you an achiement just for completeing the initial training tutorial, and then, offer acheivments that are near impossible but for some reason are driven to keep trying for.
All this for gamer points that don’t mean nor get you anything. Brilliant.
@skipc - with karma systems like hacker news, if you don’t really have anything of value to say you get downmodded so it does reinforce quality contributions.
Sometimes point systems go awry. I recall PSTAM.com once counted top commenters over the previous thirty days, and rewarded them with a link-back in the sidebar on every page. Yet the widget disappeared along with a few of the most active participants.
Can point systems de-lurk without introducing carpetbaggers?
@Brendan - I’m not sure that counts as a point system since any comment counted and there was no built-in mechanism for determining a threshold of quality and assigning a value to that, which is the case with things like karma systems.
http://www.dreamincode.net one of the largest programming communities on the internet has been using a points system for years now, Dream Kudos.
@Brendan- randoms like me also got on the most comment roll, and in my case I was just chucking in my two cents to the post, not making any fantastic expositions about the topic at hand. it wasn’t a fantastic system.
However, it was very cool to see my name in “print” on pstam.com. Possibly got me hooked. Or maybe it was the awesome tech-but-understandable writing about cool stuff.
Paul,
We’ve been experimenting with points at IDG with varying success. One of the issues with them is that as the community matures, certain individuals begin to move away from the pack pretty quickly, making it daunting to new users. Check out http://sharkbait.computerworld.com for an example.
What do you think about using ambiguous levels rather than points? Meaning assigning points on the back-end, equating those points to user levels, but not necessarily informing users how many points it takes to get to the next level?
Tom
Hey Paul, as many are aware, Slashdot tracks your “karma.” If you have Positive, Good, or Excellent karma, this means you have posted more good comments than bad, and are eligible to moderate. This weeds out spam accounts.
There’s actually a branch of academia that studies game mechanics in communities, perhaps under the science of ludology (which some say is a pseudo-term). It applies to online and real-world instances, such as flyer miles, supermarket points / coupons, etc. Interestingly, what makes them “fun” is that you can find different strategies to game up points (e.g. coupon stacking).
Look up “Amy Jo Kim game mechanics” where she lays out five elements.
O’Reilly also has her piece on putting fun into your apps:
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2006/03/how_game_mechanics_can_make_yo.html
As a personal example:
Last year, I adapted Amy Jo Kim’s game mechanics framework into teaching my classes. While traditionally meant for writing applications, I’ve been interesting in using an idea of “collaborative competition” for class-based learning. So far I’ve come up with the following via the use of blogs:
COLLECTING: Various Award Web Badges (e.g. Most Commented, Most Authority, Special Mention, Best Presentation)
POINTS: Receiving Grades (1-3 points per post), Extra points for being cited in mass media
FEEDBACK: Real-timeness in scoring (e.g. widget-like leaderboard: inbound links via technorati ranking, blog traffic via sitemeter visits, geo-tracking via clustrmaps)
EXCHANGES: Happens when students link, trackback, comment on one another. Sharing of reputation and ownership of ideas.
CUSTOMIZATION: Blog aesthetics refers to personalization/identity/ownership
You can see how far I managed to do this at http://com125.wordpress.com
Paul, nice article. I do have a comment on comments; why not use disqus to keep your readers’ insightful (well, some) comments well organized AND the built-in points that comes with it :-)
I’m a bit weird and just like having everything in my database rather than relying on another service. Don’t get me wrong, Disqus is great and I love the work Daniel Ha is doing.
All I have to say is I hate coming to a new forum where, just because you have low post count, you’re looked down upon. “What, only three posts?! Noob!” There are certainly forums where this doesn’t happen all that often and most members are respectful (http://www.silverfishlongboarding.com/forum/index.php is one of these that I frequent), but I’ve been to my fare share of sites where post count = status. I’d rather hide post count and build up your name through being a good helpful respectable community member, rather than racking up post counts.
We run a community for MBA entrants in India http://www.pagalguy.com we have Thanks and Groans system. People take the Thanks very seriously! its points given by the community for the knowledge building and people work towards that to manage their reputation by adding knowledge in the forums …
Personally, I think creating a successful and thriving online community is a feat in and of itself. Blogs are more popular than, say, forums, and implementing and maintaining a points system takes a whole lot of work. Seriously, would you put more work into your blog or your forum?
Reminds me of the old Cyberarmy.net from years ago.
their Zebulun system (however you spell it) was almost the same, but their rewards were from passing challenges.
This did keep one interested and engaged.
-Ezra Hilyer - http://www.straypoetry.com
Hm, no after I’ve been reading trough your blog for several days, always hitting this fancy “I’m bored” button, let’s comment.
Thank you for this interesting article.
I totally agree with you about how addicting point systems are, although they may also prompt senior users to look down on newbies with only half a dozen points..but that shouldn’t be a problem in mature communities.
Interestingly, another addicting thing are these pagehits and faves on deviantART, the are not really points, but they also make me search and comment on other peoples’ works, just to receive a back-visit.
By the way, did you think about integrating a point system into Skribit, like the one in The 61, when the blogger decides to write about your suggestion, you get the boomba-woomba point bonus?
Greets,
Marcel
Forgive my not-so-good English, it’s not my first language. ;)
Hi I spearheaded development of http://www.wowcity.com a points based advertising system. Do you think small businesses / owners will dig the points system as an alternative to others? The simple rule ofcourse is the higher the points applied to the Ad for the same keywords within a city the higher position it gets for listings and classifieds.. thanks.
great article.. give me idea for my research paper recommendation part :) Thanks