this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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User engagement is important, and karma is one way of driving that engagement. Pretending something's not important from your high horse because you don't understand it just makes you look like a spez.
gamification does drive engagement, though not necessarily the right kind.
In my obervation things that incentivise people to produce lots of simple content to please the masses (and hence net lots of social-media-game-points) significantly decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the site, with the result that when people are actually trying to find some information or figure something out (rather than just seeking mindless entertainment) they have to wade through lots and lots of meaningless. ignorant and low-effort fluff to find it, and it might not even be there because the kind of people producing the quality (measured in knowledge terms, not "production quality") content have left.
Just look at Youtube.
User engagement is important, yes, but since we do not have ad targets here, I think most people are okay with less content as the cost of the overall quality being higher. At least that is my hope.