[IxDA Discuss] New beta.ixda.org ready for community to use and evaluate

[Christian Crumlish]

On 5/29/07, Jeff Howard <id at howardesign.com> wrote:
> Christian, I'd be interested in hearing more about the "harmful"
> incentive comment about the leader board on the members page. Do you
> see appearing on the board as a _disincentive?_

No, I meant it the other way around.

My general sense is that any leaderboard encourages (some) people,
subtly or otherwise to climb the list. If volume of contribution is
the most desirable metric, then encouraging volume is no problem.
Given that people now have a way of indicating favorite threads (or
posts?), maybe a "most favorited" metric would be more about
maximizing signal vs. noise?

> I saw it as a way for
> those who contribute to the list to get some credit, particularly
> those who don't normally post comments but might be encouraged to
> undertake some tagging.

It wasn't clear to me that tagging would also count toward the
contributions "score" - that's interesting. I was more concerned with
the idea of power-law reinforcement. In most lists there are a handful
of people who do the most posting. (On some  lists there are
individual contributors who post an order of magnitude more frequently
than anyone else.)

> There are other ways to approach it. New
> members, popular members, random, etc...

I think highlighting new folks might be interesting. Not sure how
popularity would be measured. Have to think about random....

>
> There are some people who will almost always be on the "active"
> board. But I also hoped that it would keep members in check, so that
> when someone new comes along and posts 98 threads in a week they can
> see that they're outside the community norm.

That's an interesting point too. Well, no matter what it will be an
interesting experiment, with ample opportunities to fine-tune it.

-xian-