Online community best practices: Reward your top users

Yelp is a great example of how to reward users.<p>They have multiple metrics for most prolific, from complements , to reviews, to friends to followers. There is yelp elite status which allows users to filter for just elite reviews and elites get invited to special elite events.<p>Related are what I call achievement systems or interesting thing is ways to keep your most prolific users entertained. Usually cosmetic rewards (a different symbol, a larger number) for jumping through hoops.<p>Some examples:<p>-World of Warcraft (larger number for doing random tasks like killing 10 bunnies within 1 second)<p>-Call of Duty (you level up from 1-55 in the game, but at 55 you can choose to reset your level to 1 for a different symbol that allows other users to know you are hardcore and have reset your level up to x times)<p>-FullTilt Poker (rewards for completing a number of random tasks like folding two pair on the flop)<p>-Kongregate.com is a great example (you earn achievements for playing games)<p>Creating ways for your most prolific users to show to others that this is "their house" is a great way to keep them coming back.

This can be a double edged sword, though. You don't want to reward your top users in a way that alienates your news users.<p>That is, you don't want to accidentally create a class system where top users are given enviable privileges that new users feel like they can't attain. When that happens, you end up exacerbating the 99/9/1 problem even more by making it very hard for most new users to get into your community.<p>As an example, I've been a moderator at a number of forums over the past 15 years or so, and at a few we've rewarded people with special privileges based on the number of posts -- such as images in their signature, special badges under their avatar, additional private message space. Some of those rewards are hidden (like PM space), but some are very visual (like special badges) and had the effect of creating a class system in the community. People will special badges were seen by new users as special and their contributions were assumed to be more important -- even though that wasn't the case. Eventually, the divide was so great and it was so hard for new users to catch up that we ended up with just a small number of active users -- those who had been with us a long time and already had a high post count.<p>(I'm not talking about any forum community in particular, but have seen this happen on more than a couple.)

There was a TED talk about this which was very insightful. I was unable to find it, anyone remember what I'm talking about? He talked a lot about Flickr in particular.