I mean, does anyone really care about “first emoji” or a “first quote” award? My notification is filled with these awards. I mean, can i redeem them for something practical? What good do they do? Feel like kindergarten and gold stars.
I keep thinking I got a reply to my post/comment but its just a whole bunch of awards that serve no useful purpose spamming the notification.
Anyone else feel the same way?
Are you new to the concept on internet points? Are you a new internet user?
They are just there to make you feel good about your participation here and on similar platforms and to implicitly thank you for being an active member on forums adding value to it.
So kindergarten and gold stars then, gotcha.
Could you tell me which popular platform does it to this frequency and volume? Not new to the internet but new to this.
A lot of the badges are to do with learning to use Discourse (the forum software), so after the first couple of weeks, you really don’t get them all that often.
I think the badges you get later on are a nice way to recognise your positive impact on the community. Badges like “Nice Reply” and “Popular Link” can be obtained unlimited times.
You can dismiss all your notifications if you like.
I don’t want to dismiss ALL my notification, just the “awards”. Still want to see actual interactions. Is that possible (because i don’t see how)?
Look specifically at the replies category rather than all notifications.
I dont mind them, and I do think that learning discourse is valuable.
I’ve run some Discourse forums before and I find that it helps to make these incentivize value creation from the community over time.
[1,5,10,50,100]th Privacy Article Written Badge
[1,3,5]th Software Recommendation Badge
Also creating other ways for recognition is generally a good thing to keep people engaged as privacy isnt the most exciting practices of all time.
Those early ones are intended to be easy and educational. If you start doing really valuable stuff in this community with your time and don’t just lurk and leech help, then I look at badges as a clear log of indicators to trust this person and builds up social capital, which honeslty becomes more important than money, especially when fewer and fewer have materials to trade, but knowledge and trust.
The badges maybe feel a bit patronizing, but maybe if you look at them as community involvement logs that can be inferred as good will data points, then just think if it like that.
If the PG team gets Sillicon Valley money then they can litter you with swag but only after they get all your marketing info to target you with ads.
Update:
Proposal for @jordan rename badges to “community involvement logs” to match the privacy vibes, and add some funny badges like:
lmao
Useful in this case but shouldn’t it be next to the name?? Instead of having to go through the hassle of clicking on the profile of each member to find out their legitimacy? And even went you do that, it’s not like there there is an instant clear indicator…nope…you are presented with an opportunity to click some more to only finally arrive at this cluster (what are we even looking at here?? Do i have to break out the calculator to tally up the points to see who is more legitimate? 
).
I’m sorry but the UI fails at efficiency,
Some badges like “Helper” and “Regular” can be placed next to your name. These badges communicate trust more than random badges like “First Emoji” so I think this makes sense.
Yeah, the default Discourse experience is rather generic as it’s a tool used for a wide range of communities (i.e. not just tech like I’ve helped folks in the Discourse community who have a paid golf community). So it just takes time for admins to tweak these details, especially since PG is nonprofit and otherwise volunteer based.
That said, a lot of this experience can be customised by the admins and is something that they can do when they want to experiment with new ways of getting folks to contribute. Customizing the experience is a big strength of Discourse.
Modern social media might want us to play virtue calculus but I see these activity logs as a slightly better solution for vanity metrics that simply aim to reduces authority to a numbers game (followers, likes, views, impressions, # comments, shares, etc…). It’s always a balance between capturing activities and successfully displaying those metrics with storytelling.
On one end of the spectrum, you can look at someone’s actual activity log. Take GitHub for example (GitHub commits, issues, and PRs) if you’re interested in understanding what real contributions they’ve made, what they’re into, if they’re a nice collaborative person, how well they communicate, and if they do work vs talk you can learn a lot from these logs. Most of my jobs I no longer apply for because my GitHub and social network is my resume.
In day-to-day community interactions, most people don’t want to take that time to dig into people, so they rely on conventient vanity metrics. Another meme on Twitter is going around of some exec that looked to a profiles green activity log on GitHub and said, “we hires them for a $600k salary with no questions asked.” To which everyone links to their programs that generate GitHub activity to make their activity chart green or patterns.
Badges (if you extend them beyond the default ones from Discourse) offer a solution in the middle of vanity and activity logs, as they provide a way to signal what is valued in a community. Based on the needs of the community (e.g. community members writing privacy guides or updates or keeping people up with the news) is now the social blockchain. They then become their own sort of language and social currency specific to that community as opposed to vanity metrics with the same boring story of the influencer model:
More followers = more important > more visibility > more authority > more followers
With the hidden axioms of:
More money > more followers
More money > algorithmic incetives
Follow the algorithmic trends > more followers
Which degrades to:
More money > more authority
In summary, badges are simply a tool to incentivize helpful behavior and most importantly grow a healthy community. That is, a community that one day could theoretically function outside of a centralized nonprofit group. That said, I still think theres always value with the non profit to coordinate but avoid oversight. But basically you minimize the financial incentives and move it closer to an economy of trading help and expertise.
Edit: spellcheck
Update: If you wonder why I care about this so much, I’m a community manager and think about these problems a lot. I believe platforms and systems of economy shape how we view others and collaborate and we need to find new alternatives and experiment with incentive structures and social currency to move us away from capitalistic conditioning.
Entering in the PG’s forum and reading about someone complaining about the awards notifications was definitely not in my bingo card.
I think we need an award for that
