I'd like to dig in here if you don't mind. What amount of competition is good? What can we expect to see when there's too much of it?
I think competition is fine as long as it's more about fun and learning.
Imo, SN should be like a football game between friendly teams where learning how to get better is the reward and not actually winning. So it shouldn't be like a world championship where winning seems to be the only thing that matters (at whatever cost).
For example, games have this common problem where players "optimize the fun out of a game". The fun is no longer playing the game but finding the best strategy and exploiting it until it's no longer fun.
Comparing MSM to a "world championship" is a hyperbole but I hope it made my point more clear.
Do we have evidence of this or is it a hypothesis? I think it's a reasonable hypothesis, but if it's more than that, I'm curious where/how stackers are getting toxic toward each other.
I didn't bookmark the threads where I noticed this (maybe I should start) but imo a prime recent example is this post and this reply from @siggy47.
Maybe @siggy47 can share more of his experience of MSM if he doesn't mind? I think he was the prime target in this discussion since everyone suspected him to be hiding at the top.
So you could say I have evidence while it's still a hypothesis since I can only guess from @siggy47's comments how "toxic" MSM was and v2 might still be.
That's certainly an example, although I think there was too much of a mutual respect among all of us for it to really get ugly. I consider those guys my friends. But it's a good point to raise. I could see things from their perspective. There seemed to be a lot at stake. From my perspective I had chosen to hide my stats a few months earlier. Nobody cared until MSM.
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 2 Apr
I think competition is fine as long as it's more about fun and learning.
It seems like competitions are never only about fun and learning, but the competition SN probably wants should maximize both. So perhaps the answer to "What can we expect to see when there's too much of it?" is that fun and learning decrease.
I'm curious how that would show up, good or bad, on SN.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek OP 2 Apr
So perhaps the answer to "What can we expect to see when there's too much of it?" is that fun and learning decrease.
Ah yes, I didn't answer that question directly but I agree.
I'm curious how that would show up, good or bad, on SN.
I think it shows up indirectly when there is consistently more discussion about rewards.
However, it's hard to tell if the current increase of discussion about rewards since MSMv1 is really related to less fun and focus on learning since naturally, there will be more discussion right after changes and the bigger the changes are, the longer the discussion continues.
Since v2 isn't that big of a change from v1 compared to v1 to daily rewards, it will be interesting to see how the amount of discussion evolves over the month.
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I think it shows up indirectly when there is consistently more discussion about rewards.
I guess we could count the number of posts and comments about MSM. I'd love something more direct though. The line between the dots of something specific being discussed often and the site being less fun and educational is faint for me but I also don't have suggestions that aren't indirect in their own way. Most of the suggestions I'd make would be the indirect measures this post correctly identifies as indirect!
The challenge is interesting though. How can we measure fun? How can we measure learning?
I've discussed measuring learning here before, but I didn't have any great ideas. The best one I had was measuring the deviation of people's zaps from their personal standard in comment threads.
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