Call of Duty has a ‘Buzzkill’ medal, which you get for stopping someone who’s made several kills in a row. Thing is, the scoreboard doesn’t show you who’s on a streak, just their total kills. This means you can’t take any deliberate action toward being a Buzzkill (other than correcting people’s grammar over voice chat), it’ll just pop up when you happen to shoot the right target.
COD has loads of medals like this. So do many other games. They say you did a good thing even though you weren’t specifically trying.
At Just About, our mission is to prove that by properly recognising and rewarding members, we can generate activity and nurture better communities. Bounties are crucial cogs in our machine, but are not its totality; we always planned many other cogs just as important as bounties, and the next is spinning up as we speak.
Say hello to Organic Rewards! This is one of the biggest feature launches of our Alpha so far and it’s already live. Here’s how it works.
Reinforcement, not redirection
Each day at midnight UTC, enchanted carriages will turn back into pumpkins, and we’ll pay Just About members for the response to their contributions. Those who receive the most reactions on their discussions and comments will be in line (remember, all our reactions are positive).
Ultimately this will happen in each community, but for now we’re testing it on **Video Games** and **EVE Online**. We will fiddle with many dials, from the number of members eligible each day to the size of the rewards, but up front: we don’t intend the payments to be dramatic. We want to reward nice people for being who they already are, not get anyone to fake it for money. Reinforcement, not redirection.
Where bounties inspire active effort toward a specific goal, organic rewards are a benevolent chime in the background music. As with COD’s ambient medals, they’re a signal that you’re doing the right things, a token of thanks and encouragement that points communities toward health.
We also want them to have an impact on individual members. We know not everyone will fancy getting involved in bounties, so a way to reward folks for simply being helpful, kind, and positive was always integral to our vision. Be consistent over a long enough period, and organic rewards should add to meaningful sums.
Anti-gacha
We know these kinds of rewards can feel a bit manipulative when deployed the wrong way (though hopefully the fact payments are flowing out rather than in sets us apart from the average gacha game.) That’s why one of our core values is transparency, and why we use messages like this to be clear on what we’re doing and the rationale for it.
As always in our Alpha, this is only the first iteration of a major new feature. There will be bugs - in fact, there have been, with our first earners getting two notifications for one reward - and we know there’s a risk of miscalibration or exploitation. And even if nothing explodes, we’ll want to make adjustments based on your feedback!
All to say: expect the qualifying criteria, reward thresholds, and more to change as we go. We’ll start polls and discussions to get your thoughts once the system has had a chance to bed in, but don’t be shy in the meantime; let us know if you’re having any issues!
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