I don't know if I'm the outlier here, but gamification did nothing but harm in my life, I'm scared of being sucked into anything gamified :'(
It brought out the worst in me to try to maximize "points" and it made me hostile towards people I feel threatened by (people rising in points towards me) and then it brings out an unhealthy zeal to accumulate more points until I burn out.
Gamification is rarely designed in a way that's helpful to anyone playing the game but instead, the game is often designed to benefit the game designers or whomever pays them. Any help to game players is typically an unintended side effect and often results in changing the rules.
For gamification to actually provide benefits to game players, the game designers need to first be truly vested in improving aspects for the players of the game, not for meta goals outside the game. The second you see a process turned into some game/point system, ask yourself how that system could benefit the owner/designer of that system. Chances are, a meta goal exists and some sort of resource extraction from players exist (time, money, effort, knowledge, etc.).
If you understand a game very well and a weakness exists, it's possible for the players to extract winnings outside the game back to themselves but they need to understand the metagame and a weakness needs to exist that is realistically attainable. Game designers/owners are at an advantage because the game designers are often positioned to patch the rules of the game as weaknesses are discovered and exploited while the game players have no such power to adjust the rules.
hey, Chris here (one of the makers of HackerStash) - it's really hard to get this right for sure and we're thinking a lot about balancing the incentives! We removed a lot of the weekly challenges during beta testing that we felt weren't conducive to symbiotic participation...it's a work in progress though.
In terms of benefits our end, all money from subscriptions goes straight into the prize pool and back out to the communities favourite projects each week. The main reward at the moment is the times when we genuinely see people helping one another. In the future if it can generate income for us that would be cool but we don't really know how that would even be possible - for now so the community comes first :)
Loved your breakdown of gamification motives, it's a really helpful perspective, thanks. If you have ideas for how something like HackerStash could offer the benefits of gamification without risking incentives that eventual lean in favour of the company itself that would be awesome!
Is it just me, or does this seem like it's likely to be extensively abused by the worst kind of startups that make flashy presentations, but don't have any sort of worthwhile tech (and when you ask them about their software, they mindlessly claim "trade secret" to skirt that fact). At least in VC, the funders put some of their own people on the ground floor.
It seems so. Think about Theranos, would've been a breeding ground for that imo. There are many other startups who can leverage this and basically defeat the purpose of this idea. The idea is good actually though if you use it the right way but then again that stands true for most ideas that became bad, Chatroulette for example.
That might be more the case if it was a pitch competition, but those kinds of startups wouldn't do well in this kind of game if they're not making real progress.
When you've got good feedback loops in place and clear progress updates, being flashy without substance week after week just wouldn't work.
It might end up more in an escalating signaling/exploitation game, but in no domains is success formally provable in a way that doesn't depend on social consensus...
I like that the (potential) value prop for an individual user increases as more people join the platform. Seems like a pretty novel idea for the whole "flywheel" concept.
Seems like this might put focus in the wrong direction. Hacking for points from this community could detract from focus on client needs. IME a hacker type community will value things much different than GenPop and for sure your SAM/SOM.
The general idea is that for those that wish to bootstrap their business, and/or delay time before they take investment, they're odds of success increase significantly if they're able to show consistent progress, get support from peers and earn experimental or operational capital.
For example, our first winner plans to spend their funds as such:
"I'll be able to pay for the CI/CD pipeline for the next billing cycle, this lets me route the amount planned for that cost into the referral program which will, hopefully, help the platform acquire more users."
Essentially by choosing this project as their winner, the community has enabled the startup to cover some of their core operational costs so they can experiment with a new marketing/sales channels. This is exactly what we were hoping HackerStash could do :)
At face value 'points' can lead to distorted incentives, but we're working hard to ensure that altruistic behaviour is most rewarded. Second to altruism is evidencing clear progress in your own project, with some big features coming in the next few weeks to support that. In fact I'd say the later is our current weakness but not for lack of attention, just we've decided we'll learn and iterate faster with more eyeballs on the product, users in the contest etc.
Thanks so much for the feedback, also glad to hear you like the UI!
To be fair. It looks the idea itself is fine but if you are building a commercial product the only benefit it gives you is to finish your product. It's not going to help you make a good one.
At the moment we're definitely looking at IndieHackers and ProductHunt, but also using Pioneer's tournament aspect.
We have some basic weekly challenges right now that help boost your score to incentivise community feedback (these are only be visible to users). Adding competitions is not something I'd thought about, but it's a fantastic idea.
something akin to 'reward points', but yeah...it's a bit of a grey area! Cadoo.io is doing a similar thing with exercise and they treat it legally as 'loyalty points' but in reality it's prizes. It's one of the big unknowns about the model to be honest - we kind of hope that it will seen more like a community finance initiative or a business cooperative.
Thanks, this was a really helpful link. In the case of HackerStash I'm confident it falls within the definition of a contest, and not sweepstakes or lottery. There are a few areas where this could be tightened up and the article will help with that, but likewise we've met all the criteria set out in the article other than terms relating to 'what happens to prizes if someone dies'. We'll have something added there!
Curious about what you're working on now, feel free to come join HackerStash and share your progress ;) haha
Republic[1] kind of approaches this problem, but from a crowdsourced investor point-of-view. The funders don't necessarily have to be founders as well. There is a great incentive to join a community based bootstraping. I think the situation here is that gamification is a tool for collaboration or measurable value, which is a black-box. This is filling a gap for early stage founders that couldnt be achieved with IH. The breaking point might appear when there is a clear disparity between well performing startups and misaligned incentives, ie startups with different KPIs underperforming.
I am working with a partner to create something similar in a different vertical.
What is your tech stack? What payment processor are you using? Is everything automated, from payment to payout? I imagine as an MVP, some parts are manual. Love to hear more.
We use Flask and Python with Postgres, and for the payments we use Stripe. Basically everything is automated, apart from withdrawing your winnings. That part is still manual for now as we haven't had the time.
It brought out the worst in me to try to maximize "points" and it made me hostile towards people I feel threatened by (people rising in points towards me) and then it brings out an unhealthy zeal to accumulate more points until I burn out.