Badges and awards work together to achieve short-term and long-term success. Awards are given freely by other users from within any conversation. They affect the weight of a single contribution. Badges are earned by users over time after enough awards are earned. Both are seen next to your avatar but your name and contact information stays private.
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How Badges are Awarded​
Awards carry varying weights which are applied toward badges. The clout of the assigner of that award further influences the weight of each award given. Contributions which violate our code of conduct or simply don't add to the conversation may negatively influence the awarding of badges.
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Positive Badges
Visionary sees things in different and often very creative ways.
Earn this badge by posting insightful comments.
Negative Badges
Earning a negative badge may cause you to loose auto-approval of contributions and removal of positive badges. Fortunately, with constructive engagements, negative badges are removed. Due to possible inaccuracies with AI analysis, when confidence is low, human review becomes part of the process.
"Even when liars tell the truth, they are never believed." --Aesop.
When a user marks a comment as inappropriate it may go under administrator review. If the comment is found to be appropriate, than the user who marked it as inappropriate may receive "The Wolf" badge. This is someone who has has unjustly called other participants' comments inappropriate a multitude of times.
The offensive badge is earned when multiple inappropriate or compromising comments are made. Receiving this badge means that you are not trusted, and all of their comments require approval to be seen. Possibly, your ability to comment is removed and our highest repercussion is the removal of the entirety of a person's past contributions.
Awards enable users to give special recognition to contributions they find particularly noteworthy. Awards are a way to express appreciation beyond a standard upvote or "like."
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Key characteristics of awards
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Symbolic acknowledgment: Awards are a form of social currency that recognizes a user's contribution to the community. They can highlight content that is funny, insightful, helpful, or emotionally resonant.
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Benefits: Receiving awards has many benefits for the recipient and some for the grantor.
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Increased visibility: When a comment or post receives an award, it often stands out visually, possibly changing the meritocracy order which draws more attention from other users. This is a way to help quality content rise above the noise.
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Creates a reward loop: The act of giving and receiving awards encourages further high-quality engagement and participation. It incentivizes users to create thoughtful comments or posts, and rewards them for doing so. However, we do look for trends which may identify an attempt to game the algorithm.
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Value: Awards can come from any user but no two users are alike. Each user has various scores for trust and clout. These two scores influence the value assigned to a recipient of an award. Meaning the giver is as important as the award itself.
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Expresses nuance: Awards can help convey a more specific emotion or reaction than a simple upvote.