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One size does not fit all

A study of badge behavior in stack overflow

Stav Yanovsky, Nicholas Hoernle, Omer Lev,Kobi Gal

Badges are endemic to online interaction sites, from question and answer (Q&A) websites to ride sharing, as systems for rewarding participants for their contributions. This article studies how badge design affects people's contributions and behavior over time. Past work has shown that badges “steer” people's behavior toward substantially increasing the amount of contributions before obtaining the badge, and immediately decreasing their contributions thereafter, returning to their baseline contribution levels. In contrast, we find that the steering effect depends on the type of user, as modeled by the rate and intensity of the user's contributions. We use these measures to distinguish between different groups of user activity, including users who are not affected by the badge system despite being significant contributors to the site. We provide a predictive model of how users change their activity group over the course of their lifetime in the system. We demonstrate our approach empirically in three different Q&A sites on Stack Exchange with hundreds of thousands of users, for two types of activities (editing and voting on posts).

שפת פרסום אנגלית
דפים 331-345
כתב עת Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
כרך 72
נושא מספר 3
סטטוס פרסום פורסם - 01.03.2021

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Information Systems
Computer Networks and Communications
Information Systems and Management
Library and Information Sciences
גישה למסמך
10.1002/asi.24409
קבצים וקישורים אחרים
Link to publication in Scopus