I think one thing that we need to do is start thinking about personal reward systems. All participants are not created equally. Instead of thinking of each action as a “count” I feel we should start thinking of them as a particular action that has a particular response. There are so many factors that can be used to alter the results of each action.

Another problem is participation by people who are paid to participate in networks, blog comments, whatever, on someone else’s behalf. After exploring the online freelance writer market I was shocked at the dozens of new solicitations every day for ghost writers of such content for SEO rather than real participation. How do you weed them out of the assessment of a network?

Needless to say, countless discussions & email threads were exchanged trying to figure out how we could encourage the desired behavior and create “social proof” around or service by highlighting select members, while at the same time discouraging the gaming element Lisa mentioned.

A couple key takeaways from our experience:

1. Keep it agile: reputation management is ticky so start with something simple, see if it does in fact encourage the desired behavior, and then take small incremental steps over time to improve your treatment.

2. Create a reputation system that jives with your target audience: I agree with Evan that stackoverflow is a great example…but our question was, would the mainstream users of OUR service (from all walks of life), gravitate towards a badging methodology in the same way a developer community would?

Time will tell! Will keep you posted

This is a problem of naively interpreting quantitative data. Maybe you’ve seen data that shows that pages with lots of comments are more likely to be commented on, so you incentivize commenting. But that’s a simplistic interpretation of the data that assumes that all comments are equal no matter why they were added. Incentivizing commenting changes their purpose from intrinsically- to extrinsically-motivated, and that changes everything. If the users believe that people comment to just drive up their scores, why bother reading them?

So I think you have to make sure that incentives enhance existing motivations rather than supplementing them, even if the new motivators create more activity.

Another dimension is the attitudes of your user base. If they are primarily young men and boys, competition and leaderboards might make sense. But I have personally witnessed leaderboards fail disastrously because the user base was K-12 educators. For them, humiliating your friends in competition was seen as something to avoid.

- $100 for the member with the most confirmed friends in GenealogyWise.
- $100 to the owner of the group with the most members.
- $100 to the owner of the surname group with the most members.
- $100 to the creator of the genealogy-related video on GenealogyWise that has been viewed the most times.
- $100 to the member who has uploaded the most historical photos.
- $100 to the person who adds the most genealogy-related videos.
- $100 to the person who has the most popular blog entry (most page views).
- $100 to the most active member in the forums.

While some appear to be awarding ‘good behavior’, this probably isn’t quite the case. Will members start spamming and harassing each other to ‘View my blog post’ or ‘Join my surname group’? Collecting the most friends completely devalues the system of friending others.

I’m not an active member, but the quality of GenealogyWise service has just plummeted in my opinion. Time will tell….

It takes work to truly gauge the quality. A rating system is another alternative, allowing the other members to truly rate the usefulness of the different features, but that is also flawed given the nature of trolls and others who want to ‘compete’.

I think the balance is three-fold: 1) Quantity (how much is the user doing), 2) Quality (what is the user doing to add value to the service), and 3) Checks and Balances – where you as the site owner need to constantly gauge quality, as well as allow the users to do the same. It’s a tough mixture to get right (and this is a simplified view of something very large).