Reputation

For many sites which use crowdsourcing, offer a service, or form the basis of an online community, the rewards that are offered to their users are comprised of points, badges or labels that can be shared on an online profile, but have as their main focus building users’ reputations. “Reputation systems have both a descriptive role, providing information on content and user quality, and a prescriptive role, providing incentives for constructive behavior” (De Alfaro et al 2011, p. 81).

2.4.4.1 Communities of practice

Gamification and reputation are closely related, especially in a site which performs some kind of socially relevant purpose. Two such sites are Stack Overflow, the site for computer programmers to ask questions, answer questions, and vote on other users’ answers (2008); and Quora, the question and answer site for general users (2010). By allowing users to vote on the helpfulness and relevance of answers to questions, those answers are guaranteed to achieve a certain level of quality: namely, that they satisfy the needs of the community who asked the question in the first place; and secondly, the needs of the rest of the community that views the website subsequently, looking for answers to similar questions. Publicly displayed measures of the reputation of users of the site utilising game elements such as avatars and badges encourage those users to continue to post questions and answers, and to

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continue to vote on the usefulness of others’ answers. In this way, the sites are building communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) which employ game elements to foster the reputations of their community members.

In Stack Overflow expert users are given privileges on the site or access to previously locked content (Werbach & Hunter, 2012), along with badges and other bonuses (Movshovitz-Attias et al, 2013). Other users are able to see how to become expert users, with specific activity rewarded. On the site, “expertise and user participation is recognized and rewarded, (including rewarding) users who answer questions more than ... users who ask” (Movshovitz-Attias et al 2013, p. 886).

In this way, Stack Overflow is building a repository, an archive of questions and answers that users from the community have rated for their usefulness. Stack Overflow does not offer incentives to all users to return to the site, but is interested in motivating expert users to return and to continue to build the site into a resource that is used widely and often (Stack Overflow, 2008). Tabs on the page show questions that have remained unanswered, give profiles of users, show the various badges that can be awarded, and the tags under which users can search questions and answers.

Reputation systems can be:  “content-driven”

o more reliable;

o taking feedback from all users uniformly; o analysing all interactions;

 or “user-driven”

o which can “suffer from selection bias” where only certain users rate other users or the services and/or information they provide

(De Alfaro et al 2011, p. 82). Content-driven systems are “more resistant to manipulation,” because the feedback is derived from user actions, rather than opinions (De Alfaro et al 2011, p. 82). This is extremely important in sites that are based around a community of users and especially those, like Stack Overflow (2008) and Duolingo (2012), which present themselves as a repository of information. A site where the building of reputation among its users is important will differentiate itself from other sites with a less committed community at their core. “User reputation is consistently related to the perceived quality of their answer” (Movshovitz-Attias et al 2013, p. 887). This link between reputation and quality lends an air of authority to the site and encourages people to visit it as the answers are seen to be very useful explorations of the issues.

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Reputation systems take some of the elements of gamification such as rewards and badges, but don’t always take on the form of something to be played, or a game. By using the reward of social connectedness through displaying one’s abilities to others, reputation systems offer a drawcard for users both to return to the site and to engage with it in ways its authors wish to encourage. By allowing users to rate each other’s performances, the end product presented by the website is also seen to be a quality offering that becomes yet another draw for further visitors to use the site (Resnick et al, 2000).

The concept of reputation as incentive suggests that users like to be perceived as knowledgeable, and wish to see this ability rewarded in some way. Reputation is seen as both a “badge earned through past work (and) an indicator of future behavior” (De Alfaro et al 2011, p. 84). Rewarding reputation encourages users to continue to contribute, as they are receiving recognition for what they do well, and this suggests that they will return, continuing to engage in the same behaviour which has earned them this recognition in the past. Properly regulated reputation systems serve to keep the communities they rate honest. They are “the online equivalent of the body of laws regulating the real-world interaction of people” (De Alfaro et al 2011, p. 87).

2.4.4.2 Reputation building recognition

Different kinds of feedback, offered by users of a site, can be collected to “construct a meaningful history” of other users (Resnick et al 2000, p. 46). There are many reasons participants choose to contribute to various sites, but a common strand is that of recognition and awareness of their abilities, where effort and helpfulness are rewarded in some way (Robinson & Bellotti, 2013). Looking at Quora (2010), there is no financial reward for volunteers to answer other users’ questions, so the recognition given to those who answer well must fulfil some other form of criteria for those users to continue to engage with the site. It is argued that a sense of intrinsic motivation is built when certain psychological conditions are met (Ryan & Deci, 2000a; see section 2.5 Motivation). Reputation systems can tap into this desire for recognition and therefore fulfil some of these motivational considerations, and demonstrate to fellow community members which users are worth listening to, or worth seeking out, often by using iconography and mechanisms with which users are more familiar in game contexts.

The concept of being valued, and using this high opinion as a way of constructing connections, is highly desirable. Also, the possibility of building a good reputation, and communicating this throughout a particular community, seems to work as a motivator to individuals to use a particular site and abide by its community’s rules. It is possible to impress fellow users with the high ratings one has developed over time using a site, either through badges and other forms of visual recognition, or perhaps by displaying rewards in a profile or in-site bio (Paul et al, 2012). In some sites it is possible to offer privileges to expert or “power” users (Wang et al 2013, p. 1342). Perhaps site admin can choose to give extra qualities to specific users, such as maybe opening up a new type of avatar available only to these

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“power” users. Achievements can also be publicised using a social graph showing other users’ statuses; either orchestrated to show all users of the site, or specific groups or communities within a site. The integration of reputation systems using game mechanics thus greatly enhances the user experience on a site.