קובי גל

אקדמי בכיר

One size does not fit all

Badge behavior in Q&A sites

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 paper 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, and we discuss the implications for system designers.

שפת פרסום אנגלית
דפים 113-120
סטטוס פרסום פורסם - 07.06.2019

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Software
גישה למסמך
10.1145/3320435.3320438
קבצים וקישורים אחרים
Link to publication in Scopus