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In other words, introduce a community moderation system like site currency or up- and down-moderation, and suddenly the incentive shifts from writing quality content for standard social and creative reasons (garnering respect of one's peers, the fun of writing, etc.) and becomes a game to earn the most points. This impacts the quality of the posts in a negative way.So after reading that article, I'm leaning away from implementing any sort of site currency or community moderation system (other than the existing flagging system). I'm actually reminded of an article I once read at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html titled "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator". The basic premise is that introducing an external incentive to do some creative act (such as writing an employer rating) can cause any intrinsic interest one has in the task to decrease. External motivators also tend to put a damper on creativity, thereby killing the quality of any creative endeavor.Now, this does raise a rather interesting question about motivation as it relates to software development. If external motivation tends to quash creativity and intrinsic interest, and writing software is inherently a creative task that requires intrinsic interest to perform well, then how can an employer motivate coders with cash?The short answer is they can't. Either you're interested in the coding problem you're solving or you aren't. Cash is sure a nice perk, and a company underpaying its coders won't have the good ones around for long. But cash in and of itself can't make writing a boring web app more interesting. It can only make your life slightly more tolerable while you waste it writing the boring web app.By the way, I'd like to mention an IRC channel for discussion of MicroISVs. (That's a micro independent software vendor, to you.) The IRC server is irc.freenode.org and the channel name is ##microisv. Don't forget the double pound. See you there!
blog - moderation and motivation
posted by witten on March 04, 2007
One of my friends suggested that to encourage Coderific users to provide content in the form of employer ratings and forum posts, I should look into implementing some sort of site currency like the "Geek Gold" present on the http://boardgamegeek.com site. The idea there is that when people provide good content, users can "tip" them with Geek Gold. Anyone can tip, as long as they're logged in and have some gold to spend.Initially this sounded like a cool system for Coderific. I was thinking that users could tip other users for well-written, interesting ratings or forum posts. Each post could indicate how much in tips it has generated, to give you a general idea of how much people liked it.However, as I thought through such a currency system, it became apparent that there were some practical problems. If new users started out with some currency (or we were using a LETS-based currency model where currency could go negative), someone could create a bunch of accounts and funnel the cash toward the user of a particular rating, driving the score for that rating artificially high. Even starting new users out with zero cash would mean that someone with a bunch of fake accounts could earn a little cash for each fake user (perhaps by posting some pithy forum responses), and then would still be able to funnel cash towards one user and drive up their rating's score.The way that most sites work around this problem (Slashdot, Reddit, etc.) is to allow both up-moderation and down-moderation. In other words, not only can you tip someone in order to say "wow, that's a great post", but you can do the opposite, and detract from the score. This cuts down on potential abuse because even with a bunch of fake accounts up-modding a particular rating, people will hopefully see the artificial score inflation for what it is and down-moderate accordingly. Of course, down-moderation is kind of difficult to do with a tipping system. You can't very well reach into someone's tip jar and take money out.Anyway, as I was searching around for articles on site moderation and thinking about potential solutions or workarounds to these problems, I came across this article by Derek M. Powazek: http://designforcommunity.com/essay8.htmlThis was the point that really stood out for me, and changed my mind on the whole prospect of site currency:
I assert that any time you manufacture a reason for people to participate in a community area, you corrupt the usual altruistic motivation for participation, in turn corrupting the content itself. Instead of trading in social capital, members begin to trade in a fake currency with no real bearing on the content of the community. When that happens, you invite your members to treat the community like a game.
In other words, introduce a community moderation system like site currency or up- and down-moderation, and suddenly the incentive shifts from writing quality content for standard social and creative reasons (garnering respect of one's peers, the fun of writing, etc.) and becomes a game to earn the most points. This impacts the quality of the posts in a negative way.So after reading that article, I'm leaning away from implementing any sort of site currency or community moderation system (other than the existing flagging system). I'm actually reminded of an article I once read at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html titled "Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator". The basic premise is that introducing an external incentive to do some creative act (such as writing an employer rating) can cause any intrinsic interest one has in the task to decrease. External motivators also tend to put a damper on creativity, thereby killing the quality of any creative endeavor.Now, this does raise a rather interesting question about motivation as it relates to software development. If external motivation tends to quash creativity and intrinsic interest, and writing software is inherently a creative task that requires intrinsic interest to perform well, then how can an employer motivate coders with cash?The short answer is they can't. Either you're interested in the coding problem you're solving or you aren't. Cash is sure a nice perk, and a company underpaying its coders won't have the good ones around for long. But cash in and of itself can't make writing a boring web app more interesting. It can only make your life slightly more tolerable while you waste it writing the boring web app.By the way, I'd like to mention an IRC channel for discussion of MicroISVs. (That's a micro independent software vendor, to you.) The IRC server is irc.freenode.org and the channel name is ##microisv. Don't forget the double pound. See you there!