It's a horrible word, isn't it? (Rhetorical question)
However, it is supposed to be A Good Thingtm, in that it increases "engagement" (I'm happily married, so what would I know about engagement?).
So here on this forum, gamification is applied to the trivia of creating a biog (here, have a badge), tagging some one in a post (have another badge), you liked someone's post (haven't you got enough badges yet? Joking! Have another one!) you used an emoji (Here! Have this Lamborghini. Just kidding - they're reserved for those who actually read the posting guidelines).
But, do something actually useful for the community, like moving the posts that people start in the "uncategorised" section, a strange nothingness.
Tumbleweed.
Is this what it feels like to be a moderator?
Existential crisis here - what is the point?
Or should I be mature enough to be above the puerile nonsense of gamification?
I'm willing and able to disable or modify specific badges if there is a good reason for doing so and the community supports it.
Here is a good example of a proposal to disable a set of badges based on the fact they generate a lot of notifications for long standing members:
The feedback from the community indicated that these badges are wanted so they were not disabled, but perhaps people will feel differently about other badges.
Something to note is that the link badges discussed in that topic are distinct in that they are granted repeatedly (with the user receiving a notification for each grant). The badges you mentioned specifically ("Autobiographer", "First Like", "First Emoji") are only granted once. As Ballscrewbob indicated already, these are part of the new user experience. They will likely be a distant memory at most for those who participate in the forum over the long term.
I honestly don't care either way - that's why it's labelled "rant".
(Actually, that's not the reason - the forum decided that "gamification" wasn't a long enough topic title, so I added "rant" for giggles, and to give the nanny forum software the middle finger)
If gamification serves a purpose, it should serve a global purpose.
If it doesn't serve a global purpose, it should completely go down the plughole.
I am of the same opinion. I am not a fan of the general idea of gamifying the forum, but I don't see that the badges actually have that effect to any significant extent. I'm certain that most of the community doesn't assign any value to what badges a user has. The badges are not prominent in the forum UI so it's likely that others will never even see the badges you have. Maybe a few users actively try to earn badges, but I doubt it is very many, or that they pursue it for long.
As was discussed in The forum is spamming me with "earned popular link", some of the badges can provide a useful feedback mechanism by indicating which of our posts seem to be especially impactful. I would argue the same goes for the forum's and "linkback" notification features, which could also be perceived as "gamification".
All users are new users at one point, and even once we get past being new users we continue to interact with those who are still new. So something that has a beneficial effect on new users directly does have a global purpose because it will also benefits the established users indirectly. Whether some of these badges actually do have such a beneficial effect is certainly up for debate.
I thought the badges were useful for pointing out the features of the forum--If the owners thought it was important enough to make a badge for it, it might be worth looking at.
Beyond the basics, are the badges worth anything? It's not gamification like you can trade karma hearts for weapons to attack the other players, right?
I use to take into account a combination of the karma and the number of solutions. Those together can give a good sight of the interlocutor capabilities. All the other badges are funny but not very useful.
There are two sets of custom badges created by Arduino in order to somewhat migrate the user data from the "gamification" features of the SMF forum framework used by Arduino Forum before 2021:
All the other badges are default parts of the Discourse forum framework currently in use by Arduino Forum:
In the case of those badges, it is not so much that the "owners" thought they were important, but that the architects of one of the world's most popular free open source forum frameworks thought they were important. Of course, the Arduino Forum owners could have disabled those badges if they thought them unimportant, but I'm not sure whether they ever did an evaluation of the individual badges (we did discuss the idea of badges in general while preparing for the migration) as we have always had the full set of default badges enabled.
I think there is three good things about the badges:
To guide newbies to things they should know.
To see if someone is 'experienced'. Someone with 1000 likes that is a Shannon member might know better than a newbie that was forced to post something to the forum to get his first badge ...
To encourage people to give positive feedback (hearts).
One like or 1 solved or 1 post says nothing. But the helpers that have 1000 of each are very likely to know what they are talking about.
I agree that the quantity of different badges is quite over the top...
The badges were originally designed and created to encourage active participation from new users on the site. Naturally, in a technical site like Arduino, which attracts a specific user base, the basic badges hold less value compared to a site where cooking recipes are discussed. This is why there are several default badges that can be enabled or disabled as desired. By default, there are certain badges that are disabled but can be particularly useful on a technical site, such as the badges assigned to users whose replies have been marked as (1, 10, 50, 150) Solutions.
Yes, it is possible to create badges that can be assigned for interactions made in one or more categories by creating specific SQL queries.
The only thing to always keep in mind is that when SQL queries are executed on a site, they have the potential to create performance issues, especially on an active site like this one. That is why we always prefer our specialists to create the queries or at least review the code before enabling them on a production site.
and "linkback" notification features, which could also be perceived as "gamification".