One size does not fit all: Badge behavior in Q&A sites

Stav Yanovsky, Nicholas Hoernle, Omer Lev, Kobi Gal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationACM UMAP 2019 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages113-120
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781450360210
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Jun 2019
Event27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, UMAP 2019 - Larnaca, Cyprus
Duration: 9 Jun 201912 Jun 2019

Publication series

NameACM UMAP 2019 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization

Conference

Conference27th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, UMAP 2019
Country/TerritoryCyprus
CityLarnaca
Period9/06/1912/06/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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