3 ms·
I've definitely found that for myself, especially for smallish amounts of money. If it's enough money that I can justify it as freelancing, then it's a differen
by _delirium 13y ago
I've definitely found that for myself, especially for smallish amounts of money. If it's enough money that I can justify it as freelancing, then it's a different category entirely: I'll do a good job in return for being paid. But I'd rather do things I'm interested in without any money involved (writing Wikipedia articles, answering questions I know something about, etc.) than chase $2 bounties. That ends up making it feel not like an interesting hobby, but like a low-paid job, like spending all day on Mechanical Turk.
As a proprietor of such a system you also end up with a whole category of new bad behaviors, as people try to maximize their hourly pay by finding ways to game the system, getting the most payout for the least input.
- maaku 13y agoOne thing that does work is turning it into a game: non-monetary reputation points, badges, etc. No surprise, this is what stackoverflow has pioneered (and Wikipedia should take note).
- _delirium 13y agoI actually tend to find those pretty demotivating/bad-behavior-inducing as well. Reputation in the actual sense is one thing (getting a reputation for being a good contributor), but I really dislike karma/points-style "scorekeeping" and up/downvotes. Fortunately on HN nobody takes it seriously, or it could be a problem. Wikipedia does have miscellaneous scores and badges, of which I find the badges awarded by community members as recognition of a contribution most useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ABarnstars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ABarnstars There's also just raw counts of contributions, which everyone takes with a large grain of salt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_article_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_... You can also click "thank" next to specific edits, which just sends the person a notice that someone appreciated their edit. That I think is useful, but I'm not sure how useful it would really be to keep a score of "number of thanks" or whatever. The point is just to say "hey someone noticed you did a good job here and appreciates it" to give some encouragement, not to keep score of who got thanked more. And finally many people just collect vanity "hey look at what I've done!" lists, which can be a nice way of reflecting on your contributions and feeling good about them. Many people's User Pages are like that, or you could do it externally like e.g. http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume http://www.gwern.net/Wikipedia%20resume