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Imagine No Points!

Once again one of my newer favorite voices on SCN has caused me to launch the ultimate response to his question:

The post was about why have the number of active contributors measured by points dropped and do we care. My answer is I would love to see that number drop to zero. Whoa.. you mean no contributions on SCN? Actually what I mean is that points are no longer rewarded period.

Y'all know if you are reading this how points evolved on SCN. The problem is that in order to move the community forward we need to grow beyond points for contributions. We must acknowledge to grow quality contributions we need to eliminate the point motivations.

Now everyone is going to say points are a currency or points motivate people, or without points things would stop happening. Guess the sky won't fall if we got rid of the points and figured out a new system of exchange.

What I propose is that you need to earn the right to ask by sharing. The system is simple to consume/retrieve content you need credits. Each consumption to unlock the content requires 1 credit. When you join the site you get a monthly allowance of credits to view content. This is prevent gaming of earning the credits. To earn credits you can do the following:

- Answer a question
- Rate an answer or other content
- Provide content in forum of a blog or wiki or article
- Participate in community driven events online or in person

Credits can also be traded or given to other members as needed. You might give a fellow member a credit to view the content that you just created.

Sweet now we have community where you have to participate in some fashion to gain full access. Technically this would be probably hard to implement and keep track of, but this would give the incentive to participate without asking people to achieve any type of artificial goals.

Like my favorite song title "You get what you give" this would truly require all of us to participate in order to get a benefit.

I'm posting this on my personal blog, because honestly this is more of a revolutionary statement, than working within the system.





