Gamify PauseAI activism

Gamification means tricking the brain in doing things by making them more fun and rewarding. This is a huge deal in UX design, as you can use it to get people to do specific things. For us, this means: sign up, send emails, join a protest, organise an event, share materials, be active in the discord, etc.

How can we use gamification

Keep track of things people do
Attribute a score to certain actions (e.g. attend an event, sign a petition)
Give achievements for completing goals
Share a (optionally public) profile of how people contribute, their score, achievements.
We have a list of (regularly updated) actions, like "reply to this post"

## Reasons why we might not want to do this

Extrinsic motivations can kill intrincic motivations. I'm not sure how this balances for this type of activism
Cumbersome to set up, takes time and skill, could be more useful for something else.

## How to realize this

This should probably be part of the pauseai.info website. We need some back-end for persisting and collecting profiles + events, calulating scores and achievements.

Examples

HumaneLeague Fast Action Network: https://thehumaneleague.org/fast-action-network

## How you can help

Share inspiring examples
Come up with ideas
Help out with designing or building this

hurt-tomatoOP•11/22/23, 3:02 PM

Thanks to @Liron Shapira and @Tyler for sharing various ideas about this

urgent-maroon•11/22/23, 3:36 PM

you would have to add some sort of user authentication section in order to be able to store the achievements. would need to see if we can come up with enough achievements to make it worth it as well

wispy-yellow•11/22/23, 3:39 PM

Cool! Excited to see this happening. I'm hoping to add this to www.themidasproject.com/action-hub as well, and will ideally track what actions people have completed so that they can be "marked as done" and it always shows what actions are new since they were last online. It does seem like user accounts is the way to go.

hurt-tomatoOP•11/25/23, 1:52 PM

@William Baird will help out with finding suppliers / tools / examples

sacred-rose•12/22/23, 7:00 AM

A simple thing that can be done for this is adding one of those bots that track xp and levels of the members if they participate. Anything else that comes to mind doesn't seem that cost-effective.
And even that could be a proxy problematic if it gets optimize idk.

hurt-tomatoOP•3/25/24, 2:52 PM

@Chris Gerrby has some awesome ideas on this

dead-brown•3/26/24, 6:54 PM

!track

ProjectBot•3/26/24, 6:54 PM

Project Tracker: https://maximolog.notion.site/Gamify-PauseAI-activism-6688cc0dc0cc4f048cbb9e5e644cd587

Maxime Fournes's Notion on Notion

Gamify PauseAI activism | Notion

How can we use gamification

Keep ...

full-green•6/17/24, 6:37 PM

Ok I´ll look into this.

full-green•6/17/24, 6:37 PM

and @Will Petillo I guess will join in

full-green•6/17/24, 6:40 PM

Now the #did-a-thing-

is serving some of the function of this idea... but its doesnt really build a structured list of achievements like a more automated badge/achievement thing can make possible. I am not experienced with airtable, but maybe it can be used to track achievements?

full-green•6/17/24, 6:42 PM

The key is to make a lot of it fully automatic.

awake-maroon•6/17/24, 6:47 PM

I think @firinn strongly opposed more gamification at some point, maybe useful to discuss that here

full-green•6/17/24, 6:56 PM

ok - I am open to listening to Fabians inputs.

wispy-yellow•6/17/24, 6:57 PM

BTW, the action hub at The Midas Project (www.themidasproject.com/action-hub/), (screenshot attached for those who don't want to login) is explicitly modeled on the fast action network from the project description.

My hope is that one day I can add complex features like having actions marked as done for logged in users, contributing to a user "streak" for taking actions, maybe daily/weekly/monthly leaderboards, etc. All of that is too complex for me to implement though, so I'm waiting to have money to pay someone to do it.

I could imagine a similar platform at pauseai.info. If someone wanted to build it, I'm happy to share everything I have so far.

full-green•6/17/24, 6:59 PM

For me personally the motivation for for why it would make sense is that that we want to facilitatevery scalable “self serve” self-onboarding and self-activation to prompt those who join towards what things we would love our activists to do, that they could easily start doing. We would like some of the tasks to be very low bar super easy, some medium, and some more ambitious achievements.

full-green•6/17/24, 6:59 PM

So the low bar things should be fully automatic... the really high bar things could be manually verified.

full-green•6/17/24, 7:01 PM

Started a google doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qii1WTOytEaK_iBvLK7lidXg9gcXs_MUL90duWsJu8s/edit

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:06 PM

It would be cool to make people get a fraction of the points that the people they onboarded/helped got.

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:07 PM

It would be really easy to implement something like that

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:07 PM

cons: People would accuse us of making some kind of pyramid scheme tho

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:08 PM

I mean, if we argue that we don't give money, just points for it, could we silence that criticism?

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:15 PM

But I'm really in support of this project in general, if you can find a way that we can verify things... I think if we base the system in trusting participants too much it has a date expiration date of when the game will start to be gained.

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:16 PM

But it could be useful until then also

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:21 PM

Maybe if you lie about something you get indefinitely banned. From the server and leaderboard. That could be a pretty good incentive

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:23 PM

And changing our priorities could be as simple as changing the points that tasks give you

Ssacred-rose Maybe if you lie about something you get indefinitely banned. From the server an...

awake-maroon•6/17/24, 9:37 PM

creating a game were people can cheat and then banning them if they do would be a really dumb way to lose people

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:51 PM

lose cheaters

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 9:52 PM

Or dishonest people who didnt pay attention to the clear rules about how if you cheat you get banned

awake-maroon•6/17/24, 9:55 PM

I’d say don’t setup a game where people can be tempted to cheat in the first place

sacred-rose•6/17/24, 10:55 PM

I guess that I believe that a really small percentage cheat, and more when it's for activist points. I guess if a lot of people end up cheating we could unban them

dual-salmon•6/18/24, 7:53 AM

Meta-level consideration to just have in the back of mind for all design decisions here: gamification serves as an interactive tutorial first, the incentive structure is secondary. Points are a channel of communication for designers to imply how helpful various actions are. People go after points because of what they represent, which ideally is helpfulness. If points are tied to something else--status being the most likely to be relevant here--that's when we have to start being more mindful of incentives.

Aawake-maroon creating a game were people can cheat and then banning them if they do would be ...

full-green•6/18/24, 9:46 AM

Agreed.. we are all sinners to some extent. Permanent bannings seems overly harsh. Maybe at some point a person was drunk when they cheeted. Should that person be forever banned?

full-green•6/18/24, 9:49 AM

I think since the score you get here is mostly "karma-status".. and not some direct material benefit like money or voting power it is likely not going to bring out "the worst" of competitive brutality, but rather a more benign friendly competition for most people

full-green•6/18/24, 9:50 AM

And there will be different categories of badges celebrating rather different types of contributions.

full-green•6/18/24, 9:50 AM

Some are for showing up, some are for doing organizing, some are for creating something (like a blogpost), somer are super simple and can be done by everyone, some require significant skill ...

sacred-rose•6/18/24, 9:44 PM

btw @YAGPDB.xyz already has a manual reputation system that is deactivated I think

sacred-rose•6/18/24, 9:45 PM

and @Statbot already is keeping up with activity in most in the channels (since we add it) if we want to register who messaged more in the #did-a-thing-

or #projects-

channels

awake-maroon•6/18/24, 9:46 PM

Previous discussion on leveling bots (in the private moderators channel) https://discord.com/channels/1100491867675709580/1240829137254486056

awake-maroon•6/18/24, 9:46 PM

The objections still apply imo

sacred-rose•6/18/24, 9:48 PM

which are..

awake-maroon•6/18/24, 9:48 PM

I think rewarding people for sending more messages in discord is the opposite of "impact-focused"
That's "talking-focused"

awake-maroon•6/18/24, 9:48 PM

was the last one

sacred-rose•6/18/24, 9:49 PM

yeah, I think if we add points for messages in those channels they should be really really small in comparison with other actions

awake-maroon•6/18/24, 9:50 PM

We definitely shouldn't use an off the shelve leveling bot and if we decide to do some voluntary / opt-in gamification Discord messages shouldn't be included at all imho

sacred-rose•6/18/24, 9:58 PM

maybe relevant: I think people from AIS are working and have a bot available that give people trust through a complex system https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fu7bqAyCMjfcMzBah/eigenkarma-trust-at-scale

EigenKarma: trust at scale — LessWrong

Upvotes or likes have become a standard way to filter information online. The quality of this filter is determined by the users handing out the upvot…

full-green•6/19/24, 4:08 PM

I think to not waste too much time discussing all sorts of details before we know that the organization wants to do this, we should put the rough proposal as outlined in the doc forward for a leadership decision or vote. If there are significant objections going forward with the idea we can «pause» it indefinately. If we get a go we can explore the details further. @Joep Meindertsma is there a process or a leader group that can make a decision on a project?

hurt-tomatoOP•6/19/24, 4:19 PM

Having a project like this seems good, but the problem is: who will do it? Who will build it? Would you be open to lead this project @Jan-Erik Vinje?

full-green•6/19/24, 5:10 PM

Yes I can be the project leader. End of July/ start if August is when I hope to have more available time, but I could start in a small way now in remainder of June.

hurt-tomatoOP•6/19/24, 5:10 PM

That's great!

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