Solved: Starting now: No more points for likes on comments...

former_member181931 · ‎2014 Mar 05

Hi everyone,

In an effort to further encourage the creation of quality content, we are making changes in point assignment.

Effective immediately:

The author of a reply in a discussion thread will no longer receive 2 points when this reply is liked by someone.
The author of a comment to a blog post or document will no longer receive 2 points when this comment is liked by someone.

When we decided to give these points a couple of years ago, we wanted to encourage feedback on meaningful replies and comments, but we see that the desired effect is not happening.

We see comments or replies being written solely for the purpose of getting these like points
Some of these comments or replies do not add any value and may not be encouraging for the author either
There are groups of people who appear to be liking each other's comments and replies in order to earn a large amount of points quickly.

Please remember that SCN is a professional community and we are looking for added value. What is adding value? It's making contributions - a perspective, content, etc. - that are original, insightful and helpful to others in this community.

If we find that points are encouraging low-quality contributions in other areas (for example, copyright infringement in blogs), we will consider changing the points awarded further, and could consider eliminating points completely.

Whenever the Rules of Engagement are not respected, we will continue removing points and disabling accounts.

I hope we will all see value in this change. Thank you for your attention as always.

Laure

Former Member · ‎2014 Mar 06

Anyone else appreciate the irony that everyone replying to this wonderful post are those who won't actually be affected by the change, and those that it is targeted at are conspicuous by their absence?

Cheers,

G.

Former Member · ‎2014 Apr 03

One thing I have noticed in the aftermath of this decision (which I wholeheartedly support) is that it becomes even more important that people properly mark helpful and correct answers to questions. I get lots of likes to answers, even from the original poster, when a helpful or correct answer would be more appropriate. I've also noticed that related, and sometimes unrelated, questions get asked in comments and answers to those can only be rewarded by likes since only the OP can award helpful or correct answers. These answers no longer earn you points.

I wonder if we need to find a way to encourage more awarding of helpful or correct answers? And if anyone has any suggestions for how to deal with the "related questions" problem...

I'm not especially driven by the need to accumulate points, but if the points system is meant to encourage people to contribute obviously some people are so motivated and the points system needs to work properly.

Steve.

former_member181931 · ‎2014 Mar 07

Hi everyone,

Thank you all for the feedback. It is mostly positive and I appreciate the support and replies.

A couple of comments:

you are spot on. It is, indeed, sad that we are removing points for replies liked in the discussion forums. I thought these like points would be a good way for anyone (not just the original poster) to express their appreciation for good content that helped them. But unfortunately there was so much cheating that the negative impact was perceived as greater than the positive impact. Unfortunately this is life. C'est la vie. People with good intentions suffer for decisions made because others don't respect the rules. This doesn't just happen on SCN, right?

To be honest I'd rather see less noise in the forums - and maybe less helpful content - than all the point cheating that was recently going on. But I'm an observer and community manager, and I don't rely on the SCN forums to solve my problems at work, so maybe I have no right to say that!

Thank you for mentioning Stackoverflow Henrique, because I'm a big fan. In case you don't know it yet. Stackoverflow is where I think we should go, and it's been the topic of discussions when we talk about reputation systems. Stackoverflow is a true reputation system, and it works: giving certain rights to people who have accrued reputation after posting quality content… This gets my vote any time!

interesting thought that has already crossed our mind: showing only badges and levels. Audrey and I had discussions and that's all I will say for now 😉

More generally there have been discussions here and there around the content of messages and replies. Is "thank you" valuable or not? I don't think we'll all ever agree on this, and my opinion is that it depends on the context. And as you can imagine it's difficult (impossible!) to automatically sort between the useless comments/replies and the useful ones. Recently I was reading Vijay Vijayasankar's post published on his personal site when he left SAP, and I couldn't help but notice that he was replying to every single comment, sometimes with just a few words. On SCN this may sometimes be perceived as "noise" when it may just be courtesy. In general I would advise everyone to wait a bit (a day or two) and observe comments received on a post, and then reply to more than one person in one comment/reply - like I'm doing it. It reduces the notifications and - hopefully - pleases people worried about the noise. Nowadays with the speed of internet and everyone connected via mobile, we expect others to reply to us right away. When there is no urgency, why rush? OK, I'll have to say it... I used to pick up the phone or wait a few days to get news from my friend in Paris when I was in high school. Yeah, it could take a couple of days to hear from her via - hum - a letter! Some of you remember these days, I'm not nostalgic but I think we can still pace ourselves. We're going very fast now and may miss important things in life. (oh my I'm getting too philosophical here).

To finish on this, the context is what matters. If I'm a newcomer on SCN and I publish my first ever blog or document, a Thank You for someone will mean a lot and encourage me to continue.

Happy to debate on this last paragraph, maybe over a beer/glass or wine than on this thread, since we could digress 😉

If you feel a question in this thread has not been answered, or you want to hear from me, please let me know by replying here! There's quite a lot of things to read here 🙂

Greetings from Sunny California (today at least).

Laure

Jelena_Perfiljeva · ‎2014 Mar 07

I agree 100% with everything said above. Rather disappointed about likes in the discussions (which was a great way to reward someone whom the OP forgot to recognize), but as we say in Russian "so is the c'est la vie" ("такова селяви").

Also great point by (finally someone said it out loud!) - many members confuse SCN with a chat and it does create a lot of "noise" and, most importantly, blasts out emails to everyone following the content. I doubt everyone expects a personal thank you note for every comment, so let's keep niceties within reasonable limit. Also check out the item number one on 's blog.

Of course, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to throw "let's get rid of the points altogether" into the mix, but what if we had, say, a "point-less" month on SCN? I wonder what would happen...

henrique_pinto · ‎2014 Mar 07

Hi Laure,

while I do agree with the overall concept behind these changes (I've been a long supporter of "quality over quantity" on SCN, as one can imply from my personal comments in the Moderators private space), I do think you've got two different situations and applied the same solution, which still leads to a non-optimal scenario.

One problem is the "point for comments" hunting in the articles, blogs and documents. Some people basically post comments with the intention of getting likes and, while several comments do add value to an ongoing discussion (and some blogs even ask for them), the objective of these kind of content (articles, documents and blogs) is to share what was posted in the original content in the first place. Hence enforcing (i.e. giving points) to any additional comment is not really necessary from a community engagement perspective. The main aspect here, from the gamification perspective, is to properly pay forward the original author and not the commenters.
A discussion is a completely different kind of engagement. On these, you want (actually, you need) to have the replies. The main purpose of these contents is not justified on the question alone; a discussion is only complete if there is, well, discussion. This implies that, from a gamification perspective, you want to enforce (and thus pay forward) both the author and the repliers, since a question without replies is not really a good discussion, no matter how good the original question was.

We know that both scenarios might potentially lead to point gaming, and that's why there is need for a robust community platform, that provides tools for the community managers to fight that.

While I agree that simply removing the points for likes on comments is a viable approach for solving point gaming issues in scenario 1 above (since paying forward the comments was not really necessary from a community engagement perspective), it is not the optimal solution for the outlined scenario 2, since it might potentially lead to less engagement on the very core requirement of the discussions. Less replies mean less good discussions (since a discussion is the final result of a good answer and one or more good replies), while less comments does not mean less good blogs/documents (which are whole by themselves).

Thus, IMHO, simply removing the points for discussion replies might solve one problem (point gaming) but could potentially lead to a very undesired side effect (less community engagement on discussions). Hence I do believe that a more sophisticated solution is required here.

One very elegant solution (and that has been overwhelmingly proved successful in several other online communities) is the dislike button for replies in the discussions. This has been discussed for ages on the Moderators private space (i.e. to follow StackOverflow's pointing system) and was formally proposed in the Idea Place by (link: Dislike / thumbs down button : View Idea). With that, you give negative feedback capability to the community and, with it, the capability to auto-regulate. Point gamers might still attempt it, but in a healthy community (which SCN is) the number of negative votes on any hunting reply would kill and gaming attempt without any community manager intervention.

Anyone with an engineering major knows that any system with only positive feedback tends to the chaos. 😉 In order to be controllable, a system demands negative feedback, and that is what we're talking about here.

That being said, I do understand that in the real world, we have to work with the existing limitation of Jive and try to solve the additional problems on a demand basis. As a temporary solution, I do believe that disabling points for replies is better than leaving it indiscriminately activated, in order to solve the urging point gaming situations we're facing now. Kudos for you and the team to embrace quality over quantity as we have been demanding for so long. But this must be seen, as I've said, as a temporary solution. Letting points enabled + the dislike button (or any other solution, for that matter, that enforces the engagement of both authors and repliers on discussions while giving the community a way to autoregulate and eliminate point gaming by itself) is mandatory on the long term for the community to stay healthy and really perform close to its full engagement capacity.

Sorry for the long post.

I just had to let go what was in my chest. 😉

Best,

Henrique.

PS: again, kudos. Quality over Quantity FTW.

former_member182378 · ‎2014 Mar 06

Members,

Sometimes in a thread, I ask "connected" questions, when a members gives quality input to my query; I would like to give him/her well deserved points - by press the Like button.

Now, my appreciation would not give him/her the points!

anshu_lilhori · ‎2014 Mar 06

Wonderful decision Laure Much awaited one..Really appreciate..Hoping that the noise will be little less than earlier..Some people just commenting on each and every blog to get those 2 points.Sad indeed !

This is a technical forum and the focus should be more on answering the queries of the OP rather than earning points just by commenting on blogs--Good doc..wonderful blog..Nice document..Oh come on.

One more thing i just want to share if we can make Pay It Forward Badge unrepeatable mission.I can witness some people getting the badge twice in a day that simply means misuse of the mission.

Regards,

AL

Colleen · ‎2014 Mar 05

Hi Laure

Wonderful news on this one. I doubt it will stop the endless thanks but will cut down points gaming.

I'm starting to wonder if blogs needs a "thanks for contributing" button (separate to the like) and put a counter there instead of everyone writing 'thanks' and 'well done'

Regards

Colleen

custodio_deoliveira · ‎2014 Mar 05

Hi Laure,

As I said on Twitter, it's definitely good news, but I would rather see the down voting option.

Cheers,

Custodio

Steffi_Warnecke · ‎2014 Mar 05

Hello Laure,

Julius will be thrilled!

It is sad, that is has to come to this, because this platform should be - like you said - used in a professional manner, but I am really glad that the team behind the gamification on SCN is reacting to the issues and I think, this is a good reaction.

It kind of feels like a warning shot, too, and maybe some users will now start to re-think their motivation for posts and use their time more wisely.

Regards,

Steffi

Former Member · ‎2014 Apr 04

Hi,

Thanks for the updation in LIKED points sharing,

Earlier i have seen the OLD SCN Version having three stage points distribution that support Answer,Helpful Answer and Answered with points 2,6 and 10,

You could also update such point distribution status,

Best Regards,

Devendra

Florian · ‎2014 Apr 04

Perhaps a mission aimed to the Like is a possible scenario.

I imagine something like 200 likes for helpful or correct answers in all spaces (without coffee corner) offers a badge.

But the hole SCN team are doing a great job and I'm looking forward.

~Florian

Former Member · ‎2014 Apr 03

For me this is great, I already have found a guy that have more then 1000 points in just posting in Coffee Corner and receiving Likes in his comments. It will be very helpful to have a more realistic score in profiles.

former_member183073 · ‎2014 Mar 20

Nice to hear that, a good step towards better SCN.

former_member182378 · ‎2014 Mar 18

Earlier when I got some value from a post, I expressed it with a "Like" (which also meant some points to the one who "helped" me)!

Now, there are no points for Like, I feel obliged to write Thanks!

which in a way increase the noise which this initiative was created to stop; in the first place (also to stop points cheating).

former_member212941 · ‎2014 Mar 14

Hi

in these intresting you prefer no points and many like you question which may lead to points

and but everyone need some reward and little push when they do good job

and many consultant take the issue posted by other and try the issue in their ides like there own issue

so in that rewarding point is must like motivating and making a helathy competation

points should not be reduced

but little restriction can be made

regards

Leo

umashankar_poojar · ‎2014 Mar 12

Very good decision and initiative, let points be removed for liking the comments & discussions(replies) but keep the button. So that it will give/highlight the real purpose (if the comment/replies is informative and encouraging).

Hope SCN don't remove the points (which author gets if somebody likes the blog)?

Normally I use like button to encourage the person who comments and that is the way to say 'Thank You' for taking time to comment & it encourage them too instead of commenting back and saying 'Thank You' :-).

Also I use like button to discussion when it is really good answer/out of box solution.

Conclusion: I agree to remove the points on liking the comments (in blogs & documents)/replies (in discussions). But keep the button.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks,

Umashankar

former_member182098 · ‎2014 Mar 11

Now it is the time to donate the whole points. I feel like donating my whole points and start myself at zero. My two cents here.

SAP should wipe out all the points of all the members at the end of each year. This gives an inner strength to each member how to start afresh in life. We would clearly see how many passionate and committed people left out on SCN.

I do not comment on the decision, but, I strongly believe it is something good for the Community, only quality stuff would prevail. Unless, SCN takes a drastic steps like this, it would humanly impossible for moderators to control the postings on SCN. Sometimes, I feel SCN is becoming like sister of Facebook

Let us hope this change would help us to build a quality SAP Community Network.

Best Regards,

Ravi

former_member182997 · ‎2014 Mar 11

Hello SAP Mentors and SCN moderators,

With due respect i would like to express thought of mine.
I think its an important step taken by moderators to restrict lavish distribution or gain of points in terms of likes in comments. To some what i too thought and agreed yet to confess to all of you i am not happy. (may be there exist many I's)
So with no motive to disregard your decision
I want to present you an idea of mine. Lets not this point assignments be not stopped in terms of likes in a comment. But let it go on and go on in a different methodology

I thought this way:- for a comment which gets at least two likes 1 point is assigned. And if the same comment gets 4 likes assign 2 points or any such assignments. ^^
Which will mean that the comment which really contains value content will be liked multiple times and the author in that way is rewarded for his/her valuable input.
So this will be motivating for the authors and all who would comment further.

So Moderators I know
and other respected Mentors please do suggest what you think of this.

Regards,
Aparajit

former_member182354 · ‎2014 Mar 11

Fantastic decision!!

Sure some point hunters would be disappointed by this decision.

Raghav

former_member182378 · ‎2014 Mar 10

In the yesteryear, everyday you login with an excitement...to see how slowly but (almost) surely your points increase! and then the excitement of searching which post (recent or old - nevermind) gave me those 2 points...(if time permits) reading that post and probably the entire thread.

Those days are gone...unlike the ticking of time...points have stood still! Not even a feeble breeze of a 2 point increase.

Anyway...let me wait a little while longer...maybe by some stroke of magic a member would mark my post as helpful or (let me be really optimistic) as correct!

moazzam_ali · ‎2014 Mar 10

Hi guys.

I just want to know that now when we are not getting points on likes then how do we know which of our post has been liked by someone? Before this we could see that in our reputation page but now how can we check this? Is there a way?

Thank$

bruno_esperanca · ‎2014 Mar 08

So, if I like a comment or reply there are no more points?

Wouldn't it make sense to remove all points from liked comments/replies to people?

Regards,

Bruno

srinu_s1 · ‎2014 Mar 08

Really it is welcome decision for some areas.However, because of this we may also lose some valuable documents prepared by experts in their respective technical Forums, they may feel that when there is no motivation why should we need to waste time.

I feel these likes should not be applicable in technical forums and also those who are giving valuable inputs for the OP question where OP might ignore updating the Tread after he/she is getting the relevant inputs, this is happening with many cases.So in this case at least those who are giving valuable inputs which can be liked by many others even though OP ignores updating the tread with correct answer/helpful answer, at least some other may like the useful inputs so that the real/knowledgeable contributor will get motivated.

I feel if this( no points for likes) can be exceptional for the technical forums would be nice.

Thanks,

Srinu.

Message was edited by: Srinu S

Prasoon · ‎2014 Mar 08

Hi Laure Cetin and team,

Wonderful initiative!. It was irritating when we see only likes and comments from some 'persons', without any value addition to SCN. Now it got resolved!!

I would suggest to have "Dislike' or 'Disagree' button too in the discussions, which can be used if it is an irrelevant / wrong answer!!....what is your opinion?

Regards,

AKPT

Former Member · ‎2014 Mar 07

This is what makes SCN so unique..!

Better than anything out there.

moazzam_ali · ‎2014 Mar 07

So we can use this Like button now without having any interruption from moderators? Thank God

In my opinion points should be hidden for users. SCN should calculate and maintain points on background and show only badges and levels. May be some day they will think about this.

Thank$

hasan_ahmed1 · ‎2014 Mar 07

Hope no point system will serve the purpose.

To be honest as a new comer I wish points reward system would have continue.

former_member184657 · ‎2014 Mar 06

Wooooohooooo!

former_member182997 · ‎2014 Mar 06

Mixed Feelings ... ...
Even not sure to how like this change ...
But one thing came into notice, the points aggregation has suddenly stabilized..or has become stagnant rather lolz..

regards,
Aparajit

former_member184473 · ‎2014 Mar 06

Very good change Laure!

Starting now: No more points for likes on comments/replies

Know the answer?

Need more details?

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