65 sats \ 10 replies \ @Scoresby 1 Apr \ parent \ on: Million Sat Madness v2 meta
This a good point. But I'm curious why it should be the case that rewards are designed to benefit top users.
Rewards are a great way to get a light, infrequent user to turn into a more engaged community member. At least this is how it worked for me.
I only posted on SN occasionally for the last few years, but a few occasions of getting rewards got me to pay a lot more attention.
This is especially true with zapping others and commenting.
Why do gold medals go to the top performer? Top-heavy rewards incentivize everyone to try harder.
I only posted on SN occasionally for the last few years, but a few occasions of getting rewards got me to pay a lot more attention.
I definitely relate to that. I would prefer if they reinstated some sort of daily rewards.
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Top-heavy rewards incentivize everyone to try harder.
I don't know that this is true.
I can see gold medals incentivizing some people to try hard. But a lot of people don't think a gold medal is realistic for them, and they just ignore top-heavy rewards.
Top-heavy rewards might be good at incentivizing people to be the best stacker ever, but SN might be a better online forum if it incentivizes fewer all-stars and a more general "add something to the conversation when you have something useful to say."
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Fair point about the gold medal example.
It just doesn't seem that hard to get into the top 100. From there the rewards need to increase with rank, so that everyone has something to strive for.
This whole topic sort of confuses me, because good posts and comments make money on their own. That's financial incentive in and of itself for people who want to engage on SN. It certainly was for me. SN isn't a faucet, after all. Rewards are there to incentivize zapping and to give an extra bump to good content.
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Exactly. Rewards are a way to help people be more engaged and not just blasting their "content" at the forum.
Rewards incentivize zapping and commenting. It's a very cool way to move people from posters who only really pay attention to their own content to community members.
But in the case of zapping and commenting, it seems like there isn't a need to have a few all-star zappers, but rather a bunch if stackers who aren't afraid to heavily zap the things they find interesting.
Zapping turns us all into moderators, but the benefit is not in finding the best moderator ever and having that person do all of it, but rather making an incentive so that a wide diversity of people will meaningfully play the moderator role.
Where moderators on other forums are gods compared to the users, zaps make us moderators without god powers.
(Sorry I used the word rather so much, I font normally...)
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I love the word "rather". Let it fly!
I don't have a great feel for what the range of moderator power is like. Are there only a few all-star zappers? I don't think there's any technical reason why that has to be the case.
I'm sure there are valuable tweaks that can be made to all this stuff. The devs always seem interested in thoughtful suggestions.
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The question is whether a top-heavy reward scheme like MSM1 (March) incentivized a few stackers to zap content or a lot of stackers.
I think the OP says that they had more stackers earning, but doesn't say anything about unique stackers zapping.
The expansion of the leaderboard for MSM2 from 64 to 100 implies that SN wants reward incentives to be more broadly spread across stackers.
If we think that the main purpose of rewards is to provide an incentive for stackers to zap good content, it would seem that top-heavy rewards did create an all-star zapper incentive.
It should be pretty easy to test though: if we do MSM for a few months and # of unique zappers decreases, it might mean that MSM is not incentivizing stackers to zap unless they think they will be on the leaderboard.
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MSM is not incentivizing stackers to zap unless they think they will be on the leaderboard.
I think we agree on this statement. People should interpret this point the other way, though: i.e. "If I zap big, often, early, and well, then I will be on the leaderboard."
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For a non-SN-addict user who maybe doesn't come every day but jumps into the conversation when they are here, the zap big, often, early, and well advice may not be so good during MSM months. Whereas during daily rewards, it was pretty awesome advice for every SN user.
SN isn't a faucet, after all
Well said sir.
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