Or perhaps better yet, they could just scale back a bit on the gamification.
I suspect the real root of the issue here is that there's a lot of karma points attached to the green checkmark, so that the gamification system effectively punishes people for not checking one regardless of whether it's really appropriate to do so. And someone noticed that, and got as far as realizing that the problem came down to the gamification system was slightly out of phase with where users were actually finding value in the site.
But then they had a brain fart and decided the best way to fix this wasn't to tweak the gamification system to fit humanity, but instead to try and tweak humanity to fit the gamification system.
I suspect the real root of the issue here is that there's a lot of karma points attached to the green checkmark, so that the gamification system effectively punishes people for not checking one regardless of whether it's really appropriate to do so. And someone noticed that, and got as far as realizing that the problem came down to the gamification system was slightly out of phase with where users were actually finding value in the site.
But then they had a brain fart and decided the best way to fix this wasn't to tweak the gamification system to fit humanity, but instead to try and tweak humanity to fit the gamification system.