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SO literally gives you a reward in the form of a badge for your profile the more you flag questions! They give you a badge for downvoting, a badge for editing..
by gaius 8y ago
SO literally gives you a reward in the form of a badge for your profile the more you flag questions! They give you a badge for downvoting, a badge for editing... The root cause for all these behaviours lies with whoever dreamt up those badges and chose what to award them for.
- yifanl 8y agoWorse than the badges is that the more points you have, the more features you get on SO. Which could be a positive (it certainly makes sense that the most engaged people should be the community moderators), but when combined with how points are earned, it would naturally lead to weirdness like the swaths of downvoting, reporting and totally unnecessary grammar edits.
- wool_gather 8y agoThere's a (fairly low) lifetime limit on receiving points for edits. Once you've earned the editing privilege, you no longer earn points. And you lose a point if you downvote an answer.
- mark-r 8y agoHow many people use badges as incentives? I completely ignore mine, except for the gold ones that let me mark a duplicate without waiting for anybody else. And I'm always careful to be 100% sure before I do.