We're back again with more badges! 🙌
These new ones are exclusive to DEV Moderators, and thus can only be earned by those with Trusted Member or Tag Mod privileges.
So, without further adieu... 🥁
Introducing Our Thumbs Up Milestone Streak Badges!
These badges are awarded for giving thumbs ups (👍) to a variety of posts across DEV.
To be clear, each badge is awarded as folks reach the corresponding 👍 milestone — 100, 500, 1000, 5000, and 10,000. As noted before, this is a mod-exclusive badge and so can only be earned by those who are part of our team of moderators.
Why did we create these badges?
With these badges, our primary goal is to show some love to our most helpful DEV mods. In particular, we wanted to highlight those behind-the-scenes folks who assist us by promoting good content on DEV.
Every time a DEV mod leaves a thumbs up on a post, it boosts that article's feature score. If several mods leave thumbs ups on an article, it becomes heavily weighted making it more likely to show up in folks' feeds and be discovered. We trust the wisdom of the mods to help us uplift the best content on DEV.
NOTE: if you're a moderator hoping to earn these badges, we're taking into account all of your previous thumbs ups. So, if you've regularly been boosting content in this way, you'll be rewarded for your past activity. 🙌
Wrapping Up
And that's pretty much it!
If this is you ☝️, just keep on thumbsing up any good posts you come across and the badges will come. For those folks who are interested but aren't mods, take a look at our Community Moderation page for more information about how we choose our moderators and consider applying to be a Tag Mod.
As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback! If you have any ideas for badges that you think we should add or actions you feel would be worthy of rewarding, don't hesitate to share your thoughts in this post.
Cheers,
The DEV Team
Top comments (31)
Sounds a good idea but ... it can be harmful because some users will want to get such badges by "thumbs up" as much post as possible (even bad content). Maybe we can have a limit of "thumbs up" per day?
I am saying this based on my long StackOverflow experience where we have a ton of badges and it's difficult to resist the gamification system and you will try to earn all of them by any means.
Hey Temani,
Good concern to bring up!
We'll absolutely consider the thumbs-up per day limit. That's a pretty cool idea!
We really don't want gamification to encourage disingenuous 👍s.
We're setting up a a query to pull together all of the thumbs ups given and who gave them, so that we can manually double-check that folks approach this in a fair, genuine way. This way we can call out anyone who appears to be abusing thumbsups to get a badge.
In general, the overall system should stop this from being too impactful. While every mod's thumbsup does count toward the feature score, no one mod's moves should be able to shift things too much. We're trusting the wisdom of the crowds to pan out in our favor.
But again, we're gonna be keeping eyes on things! And I really do like the thumbs-up limit idea, that would be a good gate... I'll be bringing this up with the team.
I think that Temani is right. This badge could turn into a nasty diseas similar to the one Stack Overflow has. Good catch!
One change though...
Instead Of:
Limiting the number of times one can click thumbs up...
Just:
Make it so that, when a user clicks thumbs up a certain number of times within a given time period a high ranking mod is notified. Then, the notified mod can check to see what posts have been given the thumbs up. If it's obviously bogus, the offender is warned and/or penalized.
This idea fixes one problem with Temani's thought. If you have a prolific mod, who really does a good job, you will lose much benefit from their work if you limit them. Also, all someone who wants the badges by fair means or foul really has to do is just regularly thumbs up until their told they've reached their limit, whereas, with the system above suggested, they don't know where the line is. This way, offenders will actually be stopped, not just slowed down.
Oooo this is a really good idea — thanks for chiming in!
So, since writing this post, we have improved our detection systems for discovering when mods might be misusing their reactions. These systems will flag us admin about suspicious behavior via Slack. So, it's not actually being reviewed by a top-tier group of trusted moderators, but it is still kinda similar to what you're talking about!
I totally agree with ya that we don't wanna limit those mods who go above and beyond OR penalize folks who are trying to get the badge honestly. Manually reviewing folks actions is the best way to try and tell their intentions.
I think we (us at DEV) could probs give a bit better direction as to what's allowable... for instance, I have mods ask if it's okay for them to upvote their own posts. We do allow this behavior even though it seems a bit cheap, haha! 😅 But, we're not total sticklers here... we allow folks some leeway. Anyway, that's just a side note.
In any case, we're regularly rethinking and trying to improve these systems. I'm going to share your feedback with our Product Manager just so their aware. It's possible we could further improve our Slack flags or at some point even extend the reviewing to our most trusted mods in some way.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us!
Good. Thankyou all for making effort to keep Dev a useful and pleasant place to use.
Sounds fair enough
If you rewarded 👍 and 👎 equally, then the user is more likely to give an honest opinion rather than just trying to click 👍 as many times as possible.
Yes, the destructive content is spread around dev.to and we should try to encourage quality content for once
I prefer thumb up/down with comment. Then we can use spam detector to remove invalid thumb up/down.
This is indeed a must. ✅
Nice idea 👍🏼
Woot woot! Glad to hear you dig it, Thomas.
I'm pretty siked on this one. Happy to give all y'all mods more recognition for the awesome work ya do! 🙌
Is there a way to see how much 👍 I made?
Are the 👎 taken into account, also?
Also to make sure, you are talking about this right?
As the thread is old, I summon a DEV bard @michaeltharrington
That's a really good question!
Unfortunately not yet, but I have been advocating for us to add mod analytics to the Mod Center. My goal is to make it so that you all can see things like how many 👍/👎/🚩 you've done over a given time (day/week/month/year/eternity... or maybe a customizable filter) + I'd like to make it so that y'all can see how many action the total group has taken. This way you'd know how much you are contributing to the overall pool of actions.
I'd also like to make it so that y'all can get a more drilled-down view of what exact actions you've taken and have the chance to undo them if you wanna. For example, let's say I 👎 Sloan's latest post here, but then I have a change of heart for whatever reason... I'd have the ability to go and remove that thumbs-down.
To be clear, I've made these requests, but they're a bit of a difficult thing to deliver on and so we've not been able to act on them yet. In any case, I'll flag this again to the team and see if we can get any movement here!
Oh and one more thing... eventually, we plan to make various updates to badges. Included in those updates, I think we'd like to show some sort of progress bar for folks who are working on badges like this. I don't know exactly how granular this would be or what exactly it would look like, but this should also help you if you're trying to work toward earning a Thumbs Up Milestone badge and wondering how far along you are. Again, I've not got a timeline on this, but it's something that we've talked about several times and I know we'd like to deliver on this one.
For the time being, I can use my analytics tools and pull how many thumbs ups you have. I'll email ya with this info!
Thanks for the complete follow up.
I won't ask you for my statistics yet. First reason, it's a vanity metrics. I don't need it. I was just curious. And then, if you accept to send me the analytics/metrics. You would the Pandora box, everyone might ask you for them.
I really appreciate that Christophe. 💚
Also, I realize I missed a question of yours... the thumbs downs are not counted toward this goal currently. Our main reason is that we lean more in the direction of encouraging positive behavior than negative. We do think the 👎 is a necessary tool for pushing down lower-quality content, but we don't want folks going too overboard with this one if that makes sense. Meanwhile, we're more okay with a little too much 👍 — though don't take that as a license to thumbs up everything willy nilly, haha! (To be clear, I know you won't; it's clear to me that you are a thoughtful person. 🙂)
Anywho, appreciate your questions and hope we can pull these features together sometime in the near future to give you better insight into what all you've done!
OK, thanks for replying my point on 👎 count.
I'm using it often when I see posts without value.
And flag inappropriate content (spam/ads)
I'm a bit surprised you to say using 👎 is not important, or at least necessary.
I also use the experience level tagging: novice…expert
I understood you appreciate me, don't say it publicly. You will get caught for favoritism.
Oh BTW, I asked for a favor here as I'm fun guy github.com/forem/forem/discussions... 🤣😂
I'm gonna keep this short because I'm running low on time... but, don't put too much weight into my explanation above. The thumbsdown is important and you are using it correctly! Experience level is also good to set!
We see the potential for these badges to be gamed. A mod could go in and thumbs up or thumbs down a bunch of things willy nilly. To be on the safe side, I'd rather encourage thumbs ups than thumbs downs because if someone feels really encouraged and goes wild, the effect won't hurt anyone. That's all!
I will do my best to check out your request later on today! Catch ya later. ✌️
👍🏼
Awesome, keep this cool feature coming!
👍
okay I really liked this
Nice, but only for thumbs-up ? Mods improve content quality by giving thumbs up and down. If only thumbs up are rewarded, this could introduce a biais towards them...
This will not be the case for me, but I wonder if it was taken into account...
Yeahhh. It got mine 2 days ago! Really cool to see getting a badge for something I already like doing. 😄
Could we please also get a thumbs down (it could be hidden from others!), so that we can downvote bad content? There's a lot of really bad articles here that should maybe get some algorithmically punishment.