Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#21

Post by Maciek416 » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 6:01 PM UTC

If you want to be the gravatar of badges, you need to make it just as quick and easy to implement.

To that end, you should have your partnering system working as soon as possible. Ideally, it should be as easy as clicking "become a partner" and copy + pasting some simple parametric URLs into your app (or something of that nature). Show someone how easy they can implement badges in less than 5 minutes.

I also agree with one of the other posts here, you should take reputation system management workload off the shoulders of your partners. Right now someone else does all the work and you get the benefit. It would be nice to be able to ping your system every time a user does one action towards the goal of some given goal.

Starts to sound a lot like conversions and goals in Google Analytics, doesn't it?

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#22

Post by rokhayakebe » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 6:06 PM UTC

hopeless wrote: post #3

vyrotek wrote: post #2

My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m ho…

ok, interesting idea and nice site but where's the business case? i.e., "show me the money!"

Kabadge, The FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) of the Social Internet.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#23

Post by michael_dorfman » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 6:53 PM UTC

jdrock wrote: post #14

hopeless wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, interesting idea and nice site but where's the business case? i.e., "show me the money!"

At scale, this site/idea could theoretically "own" the reputation market. There's definite value in that.

There may or may not be (monetary) value in that. That's why the business model is necessary. Popularity does not necessarily equal financial success.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#24

Post by waxpancake » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 7:43 PM UTC

Related: BravoNation http://bravo.yahoo.com/ -- an experimental site launched by a very small team at Yahoo! in 2007. I wrote about it on Waxy, describing it as "a web-native equivalent of XBox Live's achievement system, abstracted to work with any online community." http://waxy.org/2007/12/exclusive_yahoo/

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#25

Post by vdibart » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 8:42 PM UTC

amalcon wrote: post #17

vyrotek wrote: post #2

My goal is to create a service that allows users to carry their good reputation from service to service. The idea is to collect the achievements you have earned from many sites and make them accessible via a single API. These badges or achievements could come from many types of sites and service. Some example might be Stackoverflow.com, Plurk.com and Kongregate.com which already award their users achievements. I’m ho…

Ah, I see now. This strikes me as an idea that people will like, but I just can't see the use case. Maybe it's because I've never understood the whole "achievement" thing anyway, but I can't come up with a reason to care about them at all. I can't think of a reason to use a system that restricts access only to people with completely arbitrary credentials. I can't think of a reason to implement such a restriction, eit…

>> it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges.

I doubt anyone would make a (non-spam) system that rewards people just for signing up. The site creator would be careful to reward only meaningful actions. So this isn't realistic.

>> It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges.

That's the whole point of the badge itself though - encourage a particular type of behavior. I don't see this as a problem either.

>> bill it as a more generic hub for sharing information about what users get done in a given application

Very interesting take on the idea.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#26

Post by vyrotek » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 9:28 PM UTC

Thanks for the fantastic feedback everyone! I was hoping to respond and discuss things as comments were left but it was busy day. I hope to address some of the suggestions directly tonight.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#27

Post by vyrotek » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 10:03 PM UTC

waxpancake wrote: post #24

Related: BravoNation http://bravo.yahoo.com/ -- an experimental site launched by a very small team at Yahoo! in 2007. I wrote about it on Waxy, describing it as "a web-native equivalent of XBox Live's achievement system, abstracted to work with any online community." http://waxy.org/2007/12/exclusive_yahoo/

Cool, I never heard about this project. It seems like its a Peer2Peer award system, is that right? I considered creating a sort of peer kudos/badge feature as well but there are a lot of issues to overcome with that. Basically the same problems Twitter has. How do I stop people from giving the "free diet pills award!" :) Thoughts?

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#28

Post by vyrotek » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 10:14 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #10

vdibart wrote: post #4

It's an interesting idea but there are a couple of things you should think through before taking it too much further. I don't think depending on partnerships is necessarily horrible, but what I'm trying to determine is what the benefit for the partner is. In the Stack Overflow example, Stack Overflow has to create the logic of when to award the badge, create the badge asset (e.g. what it looks like), and call your se…

Integrate this with a selection of a few dozen no-programming-required badge templates and a badge/achievement designer, though, and you could have something. Example: there should be a quick fire-and-forget Javascript method to increment a per-user arbitrarily named variable that you keep track of, and then when you exceed some threshold of that, you get a badge. That allows you to use one system to support everythi…

I must admit, this type of thing as you and dflock have described has always been in the back of my mind. I kept tell the thoughts to go away because thats a pretty big undertaking. Fortunately, I actually have experience building customer facing rule engines.

This is dangerously tempting to work on. Should I go for it? Perhaps I would need to provide both methods of awarding badges. I dont see StackOverflow.com wanting to re-implement their badge system rules in the KaBadge system.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#29

Post by amalcon » Mon, Aug 31, 2009, 10:29 PM UTC

vdibart wrote: post #25

amalcon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see now. This strikes me as an idea that people will like, but I just can't see the use case. Maybe it's because I've never understood the whole "achievement" thing anyway, but I can't come up with a reason to care about them at all. I can't think of a reason to use a system that restricts access only to people with completely arbitrary credentials. I can't think of a reason to implement such a restriction, eit…

>> it would encourage people to create accounts on my system for the sole purpose of gaining these badges. I doubt anyone would make a (non-spam) system that rewards people just for signing up. The site creator would be careful to reward only meaningful actions. So this isn't realistic. >> It further encourages behavior designed to obtain badges. That's the whole point of the badge itself though - encourage a particu…

The problem is that it's very difficult to make badges actually encourage the type of behavior you want, unless that type of behavior is "spend a lot of time doing something meaningless".

For example, HN could have a "1000 Karma" badge, which would be meant to encourage thoughtful, intelligent submissions and posts. People could instead say majority-pleasing things. Even worse, people could collaborate to vote each other's posts up. Get 32 such people together, have each make 32 posts in a topic that left the "New" page without getting any votes, and presto! 1024 Karma for All!

There are many variations on these themes. Badges (in social/multi-user settings) largely fail at getting people to do what you want, unless what you want is for people to waste time getting badges.

Now, in a closed system, this can be minimized: people who would normally read and post on HN are less likely to resort to these shenanagins, and others just wouldn't care. The aggregator gives them a reason to care.

Re: Ask HN: Review my Startup - KaBadge.com - Achievements and Badges

#30

Post by MicahWedemeyer » Tue, Sep 01, 2009, 2:24 PM UTC

harpastum wrote: post #20

MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would never limit access to a feature on my site based on badges someone has earned on another site. It's like slapping a big sign up that says, "In order to use this site, you also need to sign up for X, Y, Z, ..." It's hard enough to get users to sign up for my stuff, let alone make them sign up for something else. Throwing in additional roadblocks is definitely not the way to go. That's not to say I'd be against…

I'm not exactly sure what legwork you're talking about for the 'consuming' sites. From what I understood of the description, the KaBadge site is the sole repository of badge information, with consuming sites pulling from that data when displaying a user's information (hence the API). As such, consuming sites will simply access that user's full or partial list of badges (possibly sorted by importance, or order of acqu…

The legwork is in determining which badges are available and applicable to your specific sites. Here's an example:

Publishers: WoW forum, StackOverflow, HotOrNot.com

Consumer (me): Hacker News

As HN, I obviously don't want to display the HotOrNot badges, probably just the SO stuff. So, I set it up to pull those. Not too bad. Now imagine that there are hundreds of producers, some that make sense, and many that dont. You probably have to do a fair amount of digging to find those that make sense for your site, and a lot probably fall into a grey area. Then, you may find that only 1% of your userbase uses any particular 3rd party badge-producer. So you have a choice: include lots of badges, most of which will mean absolutely nothing to 99% of users who see them, or include only the most popular badges, which means the service ends up dominated by a few big producers (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

I guess I'm having difficulty articulating, but I'm just thinking that as someone who runs a community site, I don't want to go digging through dozens of other sites' badges to determine what they mean and if they're applicable to my site. Plus, I don't want to have to re-do this every couple weeks to add any new badges that have appeared in the system. And, the only end result I see is being able to decorate user profiles with bling that is meaningless to the majority of the other users on the site.