

Google News adds Achievement Badges - xom
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/google-launches-sharable-news-badges-for-google-news-readers.html

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Eliezer
Achievement Badge: Add achievement badges to everything.

That was my second reaction. My first reaction was "Die in a fire."

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Aloisius
Soon everything will have a badge! I'll get a badge for emptying the trash. A
badge for adding a bookmark. A badge for gaining a badge. It'll be like the
boy scouts, except completely devoid of value.

Seriously though, a badge for reading news? That I can share with people? And
why would anyone care? Giving someone a badge for something that requires
little to no skill to achieve isn't rewarding. Especially if everyone has
them! It isn't something to flaunt. It doesn't even boost my ego.

Not that it won't work if done in a way that causes neurosis in users.
Effectively that's how modern "social" games work.

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scrrr
The Problem with badges, Farmville-dollars (or whatever they are called) and
similar things is that they are unreal things in an unreal world. Unless
there's anything useful that can be done with it (say, like with
StackOverflow-Karma that may help to connect people to open source projects or
get a new job), I wouldn't bother.

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sorbus
There was some discussion on this a few days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2765834>

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CamperBob
I could see it being interesting if you got achievements for scoring highly on
comprehension tests on the news stories you read. But not if they're just
awarding the badges for generating page hits.

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pavel_lishin
Yup, at first I was excited. They're gamifying and rewarding people for being
aware of the world around them, and getting involved in the world! And then I
realized that you could probably write a greasemonkey script to grab every
badge in a single afternoon.

I wonder if there's a badge for that.

