How stars helped motivate users

Hello.

After reading the title, you may unwittingly think: “is it about horoscopes?” No, not about horoscopes. It will be about quite earthly and understandable, how to make the user perform the actions you need on the site.

Developing the mechanisms of the site, we are building a possible model of user behavior, based on our own experience of visiting resources and, perhaps, on any statistical data. In any case, these are only assumptions about possible behavior in practice.
')
A lot of problems can arise from inept planning and simple mistakes in calculations, users may not visit those sections of the site that they found incomprehensible to them, or they do not see any benefit for themselves in visiting them. Anything can be considered a benefit, from monetary reward to satisfaction of interest. And the task of the developer is to create a trap for the user. Or better to say - dessert, sweet, which will be served immediately after the basic actions needed by the developer.

When I launched my project, a problem arose - users did not want to rate the work (I wrote about this in a previous post ). Not that they didn’t want, they just did it not very actively. Evaluation exhibited only good work or the work of their friends and acquaintances. To increase the activity I was offered to do all sorts of tricks, the main idea of ​​which was to force the user to vote. But in any case it is impossible to force, thank God, we understood that. And then an idea arose that has been successfully working to this day, for a year and a half for sure.

The specificity of our resource is that the creative works that the user exposes on it are subsequently deleted. Remain the best. The best moderators choose. But it is clear that no amount of moderators will be able to objectively evaluate the work. The voice of the people is one of the most truthful tools and most of the modern social-thematic communities are built on it.

Therefore, it was decided to allow users to “save” their favorite works. Any user could put a "star" to work, and when the work gained a critical mass of "stars", it became inviolable to moderators.

In turn, the stars were not distributed just like that. They could be obtained by performing a small and simple action - to vote for all the same work. I voted a dozen times - I got a star - I went to put it on my favorite work. Everyone is happy, and the authors of the "star" works, and users, and administration.