Quantifying the impact of badges on user engagement in online Q&A communities

Abstract

Among the myriads of online communities, questions-and-answers sites have a special place because of their contribution to knowledge creation. Since users participate in these communities voluntarily, it is utmost important to incentivize users to maintain consistent engagement. Gamification seems to be a solution to alleviate the incentive problem. This paper examines the value of badges on user activities in an online Q&A community, namely StackOverflow.com. We find that quite a number of badges seem to motivate users to contribute more in all types of activities. Surprisingly, we find that activities that are not specified in the requirements of earning a badge are also affected by the status of getting the badge. Furthermore, we find that even earning the negative badge (i.e., posting many unpopular questions) is correlated with more user activities.