Product

In what situation does gamification  make a product worse￼?

Trying to decide for myself if it’s a useful heuristic with wide reach for building all kinds of products.

of the network | /golflow /mythril |
kyan.li 
~watdur-dopsut

Product @gelatonetwork -  casterbites.com - Builder 🔊 

Are you talking about those in app gimmicks to farm engagement on Asian Ecom platforms? What’s the worse one you’ve seen lol. It’s PDD for me.

When it becomes the product - I’ve seen it a lot in Asia

Finding order in chaos. Product @Hyperbolic. Prev MetaMask

Gamification is a useful mechanism only if it gives the user a tangible benefit. This could be forming a useful habit, such as learning. Or earning rewards that the user cares about earning.

Otherwise gamification becomes either ineffective or worse, annoying.

All good engineered environments are games

Gamification doesn’t make a product worse; more it’s a sign of a bad product when it’s tacked on because it’s missing at the core

Where you care about the people and relationships on the app in question

Eg if my Farcaster experience became gamified, I would delete

In most situations imo. The only exception I can think of is when they user has and meaningful personal goal in mind - ie. Duolingo. 

Any case of gamifying “activity” to boost product metrics makes the product worse.