| "people were rating thousands of deals for free to get on an anonymous leaderboard in a small game universe" This was something I observed on a project of my own (albeit slightly differently), and it was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, these people would increase their activity on the app so as to get more points and rank higher. It wasn't long before we got people trying to game the system (we didn't do a great deal to prevent it, there was nothing at all clever about our implementation), or trying to spam a few of our API endpoints. The result of this was the impression of increased popularity. Our counters would rise, and we'd look busier. Score. On the other hand, we got a massive bump in superfluous activity and little to no insight into real user behaviour (other than suggestions we had a bunch of spammers). This created an unusual situation where we didn't want to block the spammers, because it made us look good. But we wanted to block the spammers, because they were spamming us to get on the leaderboard (which offered financial incentives for placing highly on). But, other than that, this sort of 'gamification' was, to someone who'd never implemented or truly observed it, a revealing insight into what lengths some people will go to just to see their name at the top of a table, or on a page as the last active user, or whatever. I think I find my own experience has a fair bit in common with the author of this article's. |