The "New Member of the Month" badge makes me feel somewhat queasy

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Hey guys,

So, I happen to receive the new user of the month badge and I have to say, I feel somewhat queasy about it. I like my companies straight with me. I am a consumer, I want to make educated decisions about what I am buying and the clearer my relationship with the company is, the better. This is why I stopped buying from DBrand in favor of less cost-effective accessory brands. Their branding, with the whole evolutionaro-behaviorist “push-pull” pseudo-theory (suggesting that you regard people showing disregard to you better then respectful or neutral people, as it would be a mark of superior value), got on my nerv, and humor did not help with that.

To me, Eve is a company about community, collaborative design and no-nonsense, and that’s what drew me to it. The advertising campaign with forum quotes linked to design choices has been pretty effective on me, even tho I could not wait for Eve’s release to get a mobile computing solution and ended up buying an underspeced Surface Pro (that disapointed me eventually). But this campaign led me here, to participate in the design process and be a part of the conversation. I don’t need a badge to feed the narcissist in me and flatter my ego. I need polls and nice conversations, like the ones happening on the design sub-forums, aswell as consideration to customer.

The company has a somewhat sketchy history, with shipping and production problems. I get why they happened. I am accepting your new business structure as safer for consumers and am willing to give you my trust and buy your devices anyway. I today am saving money to pre-order a Spectrum. But this trust is nevertheless somewhat tainted, and cheap community management tricks doesn’t reinforce it. Maybe this comes from me studying social psychology and zetetics, trying to be more aware of rationality skews, but that is how I feel. I’ll keep being a part of the conversation, at my pace, and let you take this into consideration the way you see and know fit, as I am no marketing or business management expert either.

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Well, I personally find that badge fine, considering the point of the community is to have users contribute, therefore, users who are very active right when they join receive the badge. Active members are crucial to a community like this, and rewarding active new users helps communicate that.

I personally joined the community but didn’t really become active until some weeks after joining, so I will no longer be able to receive that badge, and many users are like that

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Well, in all fairness, it’s fine, I don’t want to blow it out of proportion. I just like consistency. Reward is having your opinion listened to and considered, not getting a badge. I’m not saying we don’t get the former, I believe we do and that’s why I’m here. But that’s also why I’m questionning the actual point of the later, since it shouldn’t be necessary. Why add smoke and mirrors to an actual magic show ?

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As you have pointed out these badges do not affect the discussion, thus you may choose to ignore them if you prefer to focus on the content itself. I recognise these badges as a form of reward & a nice bonus to the forum activities.

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I think that one actually doesn’t really choose wether it ignores them or not. Biases and irrationnal thinking patterns effects are never really negated, only counteracted with awareness and signifiant conscious effort. When I’m interacting with an agent, I consider not leveraging irrationnal thinking patterns as a proof of its trustworthyness, regardless of the actual good-will it is effectively showcasing. I think trustfulness is a key component to Eve’s branding. Again, no biggie. I just like consistency.

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The new user of the month badge is not something we have created or set up. It’s by default part of the forum software we use, discourse. And since we’ve never had any complaints about it or seen any issues with it, we never disabled it.

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