Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: What is your favorite way to reward your community members?

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ildi profile image
Ildi

For the short period of time that I spent running my Forem community, I did not get to use badges but I totally support the idea and would like to experiment with them in the near future.

I think running contests and doing giveaways can also be valuable. I really like how at the end of a year, Forem + DEV mails out thank you letters and really awesome stickers as a reward for being a highly engaged user.

One idea I've been exploring is the creation of a community token (erc-20, using a cheap gas chain like Polygon which can also be bridged back to Ethereum). This obviously turns off some folks who are totally against crypto, but it could be a useful way to reward engagement/participation. The token can also be used for governance and collective decision making. The community I am thinking of building would be invite-only and when you first join, we airdrop you a certain amount of tokens. After that, when users earn new badges for different achievements, we can also airdrop tokens to them. The more difficult it is to earn a badge, the more tokens you get. From there, it's possbile to provide more utility to token holders but i'll leave that for another discussion.

Side-note: the new community I want to build is called Indie Artists and the domain I got for it is indieartists.xyz (not live yet).

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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

Rewarding people with special badges or stickers is for me a very good idea.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

@thomasbnt I've noticed a few people on DEV recently expressing frustration at how easy it is to game the system for certain automatic rewards, like posting streaks. What are your thoughts here? Do you prefer to receive badges which you have earned by working towards a goal, or do you prefer to receive random badges?

I can see pros and cons for both, so I'm curious what you think. Also tagging @ildi and @lee and @ben in here, since you've all shared some of your own favourites 😊

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thomasbnt profile image
Thomas Bnt

I had already seen some discontent about this a few weeks ago but I didn't think it would have been followed up.

Personally, I prefer to have rewards manually, because automatically it gives a feeling that the task is not so important and that it's just a bot that gives you the prize.

After that, I doubt that doing it manually every day is an easy task. It would depend on which category. Indeed, if it's streaks, it's encouraging to produce more posts, but is it really good articles or only content published to get the next badges?

You see as I do the concern for automatism.

Encouraging, but can be a way to spam.

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ildi profile image
Ildi

I think the community does need to set some rules and explicitly state that low quality content may not be counted and badge rewards can be revoked if a user is found to be gaming the system by making spam posts just to get badges. But this can be subjective because the line can get blurry between what is and isnt low quality/spam content.

With that being said I think there should be a balance between automatic + manually rewarded badges. As an admin, I would carefully think about how someone can game the system and do stuff that discourages those actions.

I guess we should ask, what are some really good reward systems within websites/apps/platforms? In particular im interested in finding out which systems do automatic rewards that users really enjoy. Im personally not overly excited about Reddit karma or their new Community Points. On Discord it seems like rewarding users with unique roles is a popular way to incentivize members.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Im personally not overly excited about Reddit karma or their new Community Points.

Lol, same! Even so, it appears that enough people are that they write posts for it. I guess every system appeals to somebody? It's just a question of who your community's "somebody" is (or who you want them to be πŸ˜‰

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ildi profile image
Ildi

I've mostly been a lurker on Reddit, so maybe that's why i do not see much value in their karma system. Would be interesting to speak with someone who does enjoy their system.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Loving the side-note! Please feel free to tag us in for any assistance we can provide here.

I gotta admit I'm a sucker for a giveaway. What have you won in a giveaway that you've been most excited about? I'm gonna see whether some of the Forem Team have any stories here - @carolineschettler and @jamie ? Best giveaway prizes ever?

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ildi profile image
Ildi

Im glad you liked the side-note πŸ˜‡ couldn't resist teasing Indie Artists on here, but i've been planning and I will be sharing more info with you soon!

Some of my favorite giveaways have been things like books, music albums, merch, and event/concert tickets. I remember back in 2009 I won this giveaway that included a book by Eminem, The Way I Am, featuring private reflections, drawings, handwritten lyrics, and photographs. To my surprise, the giveaway also included a CD copy of every single official album release by Eminem up until that year. Im a big hip-hop fan so this was a really awesome reward for me!

Another one that stood out to me was back in 2018, I was accepted in YC Startup School Online program and they gave us $20k+ in credits to use on services like DigitalOcean. The credits had to be used within 12 months but I remember putting them to good use, so that was very helpful.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

a book by Eminem, The Way I Am, featuring private reflections, drawings, handwritten lyrics, and photographs. To my surprise, the giveaway also included a CD copy of every single official album release by Eminem

This is a really dope surprise! The book itself was a good prize, but it was amazing that you got all the albums too (and in 2009, CDs were still everything)!

$20k+ in credits to use on services like DigitalOcean

$20k on DO in 12 months is a lot of stuff!

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carolineschettler profile image
carolineschettler

I won a first gen iPad at a school raffle in the early 2010s! Felt super cool - it was my first way to connect with the internet outside of a desktop.

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ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

I love the #tbt vibes we're getting from these prize retrospectives!