Thanks all for the super helpful insights - I find it fascinating that everyone has taken slightly different approaches/has different personal feelings about how things might work. But it makes me happy to because it suggests to me that communities are doing the right things for their end users and trying to understand how to motivate them best. So after all that great feedback, I'll share my thoughts on it. Only slightly validated, and largely anecdotal, but here's my take for the time being (to possibly proven wrong once I get a chance to do some real analysis): Largely my thinking is in line with @DanK in the sense that different approaches will motivate different types of users. Onboarding badges are important to reinforce initial behaviours (but I'm hoping to do a bit more of a nurture approach with the email copy to drive engagement at some point). I go back and forth on the numbering thing. If I'm a coin collector, and I have a new penny, do I get less satisfaction from adding my 50th penny? Depends how unique the penny is. For instance, the 50th accepted solution badge has only been granted to six users, that's a pretty special badge i think. If I get my 100th AS badge, I don't think that diminishes the value of the 50th one if it's still unique. I see badges as inspiration to the user who earns them - not so much as a reputation aspect, unless perhaps they are included in the users hover card. I would be curious to see page stats on the badges page as I have my suspicions very few users look at what others have achieved. So IMHO, if there are 5 pages of badges, what does it really matter? If it's driving the users behaviour to achieve the next level (which I also think is a helpful motivator - understanding how far i have to go), then maybe it's okay that it's a crowded space? All this to say, I don't have a firm stance, but I think that's okay too. I'm willing to learn from my users what they'll be motivated by. So to start with, we've gone with a set of 23 or so badges, 20 auto-assigned, 3 role based. And we'll see where we go from here! Really helpful discussion here for me anyway, so thanks to all who've taken time to chime in!
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