Punished by Rewards

Sabina and I were talking about points systems on websites, such as Blip.fm's blips, and whether this created negative social effects. She argued that the existence of such systems prompted users to play it as a game/play purely for points, and also explained to me the secret of getting props and being uber-popular on Blip. I was excited because I thought she was going to reveal to me which bands are the hippest or something, but actually the secret is to reblip the popular and prolific people, and blip a lot yourself, and follow the popular folk. However, what really prompts people to play blip.fm, or another service, as a game?

Is it the appearance of metrics? Yet, LJ also has metrics: comment count, and # of people friending you. I certainly use comments as a metric and believe getting them does measure my 'success' in some manner. Probably blips were created to be a game, to get people to use the site more, rather than as a metric of discerning who is the best blipper. Also, while blips are infinite (because they aren't based on putting $$$ into the system), they are also finite (you don't have unlimited blips to give others directly) and transferrable.

This began to remind me of Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards, which argued that rewarding students causes them to devalue learning itself and simply work for the reward. Extrinsic motivators diminish intrinsic motivators. I've read the book: the research cited is IIRC fairly convincing, although I'm not sure the theories can be implemented in a large scale in schools.

Yet, I don't think the system I was discussing in the last entry ([this is good]) really falls into the category, because it works more like comments, like a very short, pre-made kind of comment, or like a poll result.

Anyway, in other news, I see that DW is planning cross site authenticated RSS reading. The bug reports says: " you won't need to create a feed account for every account you want to follow. You'll
provide us with your authentication information for the LJ-based site you want
to read the friends page of, and we will take what the protocol returns,
perform magic, and intercut it on your DW reading page." I wonder how this would work... Well, maybe I wouldn't be able to understand it anyhow.

(no subject)

getting_started is a comm dedicated to helping new users do stuff on Dreamwidth.

So it seems there are many who are saying that they don't want to use Dreamwidth because it is perceived as being a fandom-only service, or "for fans, by fans." (Untrue perceptions)

I'm not sure how Dreamwidth users can combat this perception. Perhaps one way of doing it is to... publicize Dreamwidth among non-fandom communities on LJ. Perhaps if there was DW buzz in non-fandom communities, DW would be perceived less as a "fandom project." Perhaps it would also help to publicize DW among non-media fandom properties, such as book fandoms.

Also getting beyond fandom, it might also make sense to forge links with those who create original fiction/art/whatever on LJ, or even on other fora.

On the other hand, although part of the DW mission is supposed to be IIRC, that it's for those who create things (like written works, art, etc), I'm not sure the LJ code is very good for displaying creative things. CMS is probably the way to go, and the LJ code's weak archiving features... eh, well, there are so many sites when it comes to drawing, like Deviantart and Yaoi-gallery; both of these are optimized for displaying art, and also have blogs as a feature. When it comes to written things (as opposed to pure blogging) I'm not sure what the social networking/mass archive style sites are. Stuff like ff.net, I suppose, but I'm not sure what there is for writers of original fiction.

Actually I think one thing that DOES hold the LJ code back from being used by those who create is that it doesn't allow persistent domain name usage, just redirects. Someone I know was complaining about this on LJ and made a suggestion about it. This does make it very hard to use LJ code sites to maintain a blog that is your 'brand.' Tumblr allows you to do it, and I wonder if maybe that isn't part of the reason they've become popular among artists and designers.

I can't watch Basara

I just received three invite codes! No idea why, I guess they're just randomly handing them out or something. I've sent out all three. ^_^

manticore was watching Sengoku Basara. I will NOT be able to watch this show. >_< Sure, Samurai Warriors/Sengoku Musou 2 messes around with the timeline and kind of has people the wrong ages, and Yukimura was too young to be at Nagashino, BUT, I don't know, Basara is a bridge too far and it offends me that they don't have Sekigahara in it, weo. I can't believe this game is more popular than Sengoku Musou 2.

That reminds me that I really have to finish reading Sekigahara. (novel by Shiba Ryoutarou)

Random video of the day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkLlVzUBn4