I'm not sure about psychological studies as I am not familiar with them nor do I have a degree in psychology, so I am not going to try and be an arm-chair psychologist.
I can say that based on my own anecdotal experience I feel pretty good when I receive a rep, and I also feel good when I give people rep. Others who have used pplrep have reported similar experiences. And I think that's a good thing. Certainly better than dealing with the drama that occurs on other social networks.
Sorry, just saw your reply. Well, the studies show that people well feel good about rewards when they are unexpected. But once it becomes part of a standard routine it turns out to lower intrinsic motivation.
I recommend signing up and getting your friends to sign up and use it. It's indeed a very good feeling when one of your friends reps you for something you may have done. It does feel good. And I'm not drinking my own kool-aid. I've been repped a few times, and it does feel pretty good.
The color we are using is actually "blue iris." It's a mix of blue and purple, and we think it looks great. It was pantone's color of the year 2008. Heroku looks great, too, so we'll take that as a compliment ;).
We don't plan to, no. Your info doesn't matter to us outside of us figuring out how people use the site in order to better improve it. At any point, you can just delete your account, and it'll be permanently deleted. There are no soft deletes here. You delete your account, and all content you create is deleted everywhere.
Not really. We still haven't implemented any caching. Probably will in the next week or so. And we're gonna need to figure out a way to scale the leaderboard soon. Probably gonna use redis for that.
Hi, I am the author of the app. Thanks for your comment.
There's a limit on how often you can rep a single person (once every 24 hours), and if you are to spam different people with rep, your rep is likely to be deleted by the person's profile, which will take your score back down two points. Since a person's profile is public, they likely don't want their profile filled with spam rep or to like their reps are fake. We are hoping members will play their role in moderating in their own profiles.
It'll likely end up working the same way it does on LinkedIn and Twitter. On LinkedIn I get strangers wanting to connect all the time so they can increase the surface perception of the the size of their network. And on Twitter it's similar: people who follow an implausibly large number of people in the hopes those people will follow back end up following me temporarily, hoping I'll follow back.
Is the amount of rep a person gives out visible on their profile? That would be useful in gauging how genuine their motiviation is.
I can say that based on my own anecdotal experience I feel pretty good when I receive a rep, and I also feel good when I give people rep. Others who have used pplrep have reported similar experiences. And I think that's a good thing. Certainly better than dealing with the drama that occurs on other social networks.