Scratch

Yahoo has design patterns for website makers, where they advise others based on their experience.  Here's what they say about user points and ranking:

Yahoo wrote:

Points

Maintain and display a cumulative count of the number of points user has earned within a community.

The points generally come from performing specific activities on the site.

Points are best-awarded to congratulate performance rather than merely to acknowledge activity.

What Problem Does This Solve?
In some communities, participants want a tangible measurement of their accomplishments for personal satisfaction and to make comparisons with other competitors.

When to Use This Pattern
Use this pattern when the community is highly competitive, and the activities that users engage in are competitive in nature (e.g., player-vs-player contests, or coaching a fantasy football team).
Points are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, such as fantasy sports or games.

Specifically, don't use this pattern when
- The activities that users engage in are not competitive in nature (e.g., writing recipes, or sharing photos).
- The awarding of points might demean or devalue the activity that they're meant to reward. By pinning an arbitrary incentive value to an activity, you may unintentionally replace a user's satisfying intrinsic motivation with a petty extrinsic one.
...
On the Yahoo! network, Ranking and Leaderboards are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, as with Fantasy Sports or Games.

read more here and here.  I think the same applies for Scratch, which I think should be encouraging collaboration instead of competition.

We do already have top viewed, top loved, and I think those do more to make a few users popular, and is like a ranking system for the entire site, instead of helping scratchers find projects they might like, and other scratchers with similar interest that will be more likely to help each other out.  (cough, cough, favetags, cough...
Although FaveTags may encourage some competition among some of the more popular tags.  But I think, the community will branch out into more specific tags they like, and will move the focus from wanting to be popular to the whole site, to just people interested in similar things... where there will be less competition and more collaboration, hopefully.)

Last edited by JTxt (2010-07-07 13:51:34)

Thanks for suggesting!  I do like that you put thought and work into this suggestion, and even made scores.  I hope I don't sound mean.  Something like this may be better than what we have now, but I think we can do even better.

Zap2it wrote:

I kinda get what you mean. But usually 50th place doesn't get publicity, now he/she does.

I'm saying I don't think we should have a ranking system, for the reasons stated above.  Because Yahoo said so. 

Ranking encourages competition-- which would be good for a game site, but scratch is a creative site. (which makes games, (among many other things) perhaps a ranking for scratch games might be good, but that's another topic.)

We already have top loved and views and post counts in the forum.  I don't think these encourage creativity and collaboration.  It encourages people to chase after a number, fame and the front page--- and it becomes less about making projects because they like to scratch, and help people because they want to.

People complain that there are not enough games, art, or something else on the front page.  I think we've out grown the front page... we're too varied now.  Make it easier for people that like art, games, and/or whatever to get together.

(I think a solution is to allow the organic forming of mini-communities as tags.  Let people with similar interests get together more easily, by making tags more powerful.)

Last edited by JTxt (2010-07-07 23:56:41)