In this post I am giving you an insight into my thought process for the upcoming gamification system of the 1UP system that is in development. It shows elements that are relevant for motivation, for balancing rewards and prevent abuse.
Octalysis by Yu-Kai Chou
In this Tedx Talk about Gamification there are eight motivating elements listed below. I have tried to find something that 1UP does for each element. It was inspiring and gave me new thoughts.
- Epic Meaning: Make Steem a place for quality with your 1UPs
- Development & Accomplishments: Level Up, earn higher rewards
- Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback: The 1UP-voter empowers creativity
- Ownership & Possession: 1UP Bounties, 1UP tokens, 1UP Rewards for Voters
- Social Influence & Relatedness: 1UP Rankings for Authors, Communities and Voters
- Scarcity & Impatience: Limited 1UP-votes, Community Levels are difficult
- Unpredictability & Curiosity: Timer Functionality, Special Random Reward for Voters (?)
- Loss & Avoidance: Daily participation for higher frequency score and to avoid missing rewards
First Ideas For The 1UP Level System
To make 1UP an automated voting system we must prevent abuse as much as possible. The 1-account-1-vote solution is too easy to abuse which is why 1UP will use a gamification system with several elements that calculate the value of the user for the platform. So far I have the following elements which each got a rating between 1-5 of how heavy I weigh them. These are merely the result of some brainstorming and still might need some thoughts and adjustments.
Elements to rank users
- Reputation (3)
With the reputation we can prevent new accounts from abusing the 1UP system. However, it is easy to push reputation up with upvote bots while legit users often don't get upvotes and hence don't rise in reputation. I weigh this element with a 3. - Account age (1)
Steemhunt is looking for their own Level system at the account age. I think that is an interesting factor to further give more credibility to a account. However, I don't want to exclude new users neither do I want to reward old users to much. So I weigh this element with a 1. - Frequent Use (5)
Without active 1UP-voters the system will not work properly. A user who uses 1UP regularly should be rewarded appropriately. This means spending the daily available 1UPs in the best possible ways. I weigh this element with a 5. - Trailing (3)
Trailers are a fundamental element for 1UP and a user should be rewarded according to the value of the trailing. The whole system is optimized for that process and it is one of the two ways to create value for the authors via 1UP. However, I don't think it should be overly high rated which is why I weigh this element with a 3. - Delegators (3)
The same applies here as well as delegators create the value for the system in order to make it run. A delegator will be rewarded for that levelwise but agai not too much. This is why I weigh this element also with a 3. - Spreading 1UP among communities (4)
In the past concept posts I was speaking of a dedicated amount of 1UP for each community. But for simplicity I think it would be better to have a sidewide maximum amount of daily 1UPs which can be spread among the communities. To avoid a concentration of 1UPs within a few communities it will be rewarded to spread them to as many as possible. To make this a relevant element I weigh it with 4. - Received 1UP (3)
Even though a 1UP-voter doesn't have to be an author at the same time it speaks for the quality of the user the more 1UPs have been collected already over time. I weigh this with a 3. - Winning a 1UP round (4)
Winning a 1UP round with the most 1UPs triggers the 1UP account. This is a sign for high quality content and will be rewarded with a level boost. I weigh this element with a 4. - 1UP-voters find new quality posts (2)
To help new posts to get discovered and pop up in the 1UP ranking we need users who search for the best content without any 1UPs yet. Although relevant, I don't want users to concentrate on new posts only so I weigh this only with a 2. - 1UP-voters found winning posts (5)
If a 1UP-voter gives a 1UP to a post that eventually ends up winning a round this is very valuable for the platform. It makes a difference whether it was the first 1UP or the last one given to the post. We will have to balance this but it makes sense to weigh it with a 5.
Elements to rank Communities
- Amount of Community Posts (3)
The more people create content for any community the more value and importance they assign to them. Popular communities and consistent communities will benefit from this the most. I weigh this with a 3. - Amount of 1UPs given (5)
The total amount of 1UPs given to posts within a community says a lot about the popularity and the quality of the content. Unlike with the amount of posts even smaller communities can receive a lot of 1UPs which will be beneficial for small and big alike. This is why I weigh this with a 5. - Trailing value (2)
If a community has a lot of trailing value assigned to from users then this shows the support as well as attractiveness for authors to create content for these communities. But since not everyone can raise a lot of trailing power I only weigh it with a 2.
If any of that makes sense to you and you have some ideas how to further weigh beneficial behaviour for 1UP then please let me know. I want to make 1UP a fun curation game for all Steem users