Every so often, conversations about how to improve SN will inspire solutions related to our beloved cowboy hats. (Perhaps one of our resident archeologists will dig some of those threads up and put them in the comments.)
I thought it would be fun to talk through some of these ideas and have a somewhat one-stop-shop repository for them.
Some of these ideas could be implemented together and some are mutually incompatible. We'll start with my favorite set of ideas:
Colorful Hats
I've seen a few different ideas for coloring hats (some might even have been mine). Obviously, only one of these could ultimately be implemented. They all are aimed at increasing the signal of the cowboy hat, by adding an intensive measure of how much of a cowboy the wearer is.
Cowboy Hat Streak
I believe this was the first cowboy hat idea I encountered. As you extend your cowboy hat streak, your cowboy hat becomes a more impressive color. I can imagine a few versions of how this could work:
- Everyday your hat just changes color slightly. That's the easiest, laziest, and least fun option.
- Every so often you are notified that you found a new, more impressive hat that a less experienced cowboy would have missed. This would be more like a levelling system with days acting as xp and the differences between the hats would be more noticeable. The simplest scheme I can think of is just an exponential series: i.e. new hat, 2 days, 4 days, 8 days, etc.
- The hat represents your rank on the list of cowboys. Implementation would look much like the idea above. (I think moving up on the cowboy list should come with a notification, whether or not this idea is adopted, btw.)
Other Engagement Measures
Conceptually, this is very similar to the ideas above. The difference would be that color is based on some measure of stacking or spending. Some options for the color metric:
- All time stacking rank
- All time spending rank
- Previous day stacking rank
- Previous day spending rank
- Our super top secret trust scores (this one is my favorite)
Accessories
This is a neat category of ideas that could spiral out of control pretty quickly. I can recall three off the top of my head and I'll leave it there:
- A giant cigar for the cowboy with the longest streak. This was @siggy47's idea and he is that cowboy, so it gets top billing.
- A badge for the previous day's top zapper to recognize him (or her, I suppose) as the sheriff around these parts. This idea came with the complementary suggestion of displaying the sheriff streak when hovering over the icon. I imagine the star shaped badge being right in the middle of the hat, but there's a reason nobody pays me to do design work.
- A poncho: I don't remember what this was meant to signify. It may have just been an alternative to the badge.
Tilted Hat
Back in the days when people were zapping like one sat to each other, and resultantly losing their hats all the time (if that's still you, c'mon man), some kind of warning system was desired. This inspired the idea that the cowboy hat could be tilted, as though about to fall off, until the cowboy had secured it for the day.
Cowboy Hat Acquisition
It seems that bots have learned how to acquire cowboy hats and blend in with the population. Some ideas have been floated to change how hats are found that might make it more difficult for bots to find them or at least more beneficial to the SN community when they do.
- Just raise the threshold for earning a hat (whatever that might be).
- Randomize the criteria everyday, similar to what is done with rewards, to encourage a broader range of desired behavior.
- Limit the number of cowboy hats somehow. It's not clear to me what the best way to do this would be, because first-come-first-serve seems like a bad idea. However, the idea would be that current cowboys can always retain their hats, but the supply of available hats for the day is otherwise limited.
This post is starting to run long, so I'll leave it here and look forward to discussing ideas in the comments.