Been off the radar here since July, I apologize for that. I have to admit that it is difficult for me to stay consistent with community platforms and curate them. Although I would love to and know about the power of a thriving group of people focused on the same interest topic. I'll need to figure out how to go forward. But until so....here more amunition from the research area: A Stanford team around Susan Athey ran a randomized trial with about 10,000 Indian schoolkids on a reading app. Half the schools got a three month reading contest: leaderboard, book prizes for the top 1,000. Classic points and prizes. My expectation would have been a spike during the contest and a crash below baseline once the prizes are gone. That is the crowding-out story I have told for years. Twelve weeks after the contest ended, the contest kids were still reading more than the others. Roughly 0.7 stories per child versus 0.4, and the share of active users went from 6.5 to 9.6 percent. Small absolute numbers, real difference, and it held for kids who never won anything. So the prize does not seem to be what persisted. Something else did, maybe a routine, maybe the discovery that the stories were worth reading once the contest had pushed them to open enough of them. The contest was the excuse, the habit was the residue. Which moves the design question somewhere I did not expect: not whether to use a contest, but what is left behind when you take it away. Have you seen a reward mechanic leave a useful residue? Or the opposite, a crater?

I'm genuinely not sure how widespread this actually is outside of the client work I see, so I'm curious what you're noticing in your own world. Everywhere I look right now, teams are being handed the same diagnosis for going quiet: burnout, capacity depletion, too much on their plate, prescribe rest. And in some cases, that's exactly right. But I keep running into cases where the person still has plenty of energy, they just cannot locate a reason to spend it on the work in front of them, and no amount of recovery time touches that, because rest fixes overload and does nothing at all for a system that quietly stopped making the work worth caring about. Have you seen the two get mixed up in your own teams or clients? What tipped you off that rest wasn't the answer?

Here is the tension I have not been able to resolve: For almost all of history a signal was believable in proportion to what it cost the sender, the way a peacock's tail is believable precisely because a sick bird could never grow one, and the way a company buying an enormous expensive advertising campaign was quietly telling you it expected you to buy again, since nobody knowingly burns that much money promoting a product they expect you to regret. What unsettles me is that we now live in the first environment in human history where signals have become almost free to produce (also posting here), where a testimonial, a trust badge, a confident claim of quality, an entire brand voice can be generated in seconds at no real cost, which means the ancient reflex of trusting the costly signal no longer protects anyone, because the cost has simply been engineered out of it. So the only honest move left seems to be doing something that still genuinely costs you, like publishing the channel where people complain about you in full view, or offering a trial so long that it would ruin you if the product could not actually hold attention over time, or producing content that proves to be timely and costly. I am curious what costly signal you have personally paid that you believe earned you real trust, and whether in hindsight it cost roughly what you expected it to.

Hey guys, I hope you are all doing well. Here is something that I build exactly for people like us: interested in making interactions more effective by making them more engaging for the job-to-be-done at hand. Therefore I created this System Analyzer that helps us to analyse a current situation and figures out its actual motivational design logic and also its required motivational design logic. The system can give you the audit of the gap between these two (if there is one) and a first apporach on how to improve it. you will get a web report and also a more advanced donwloadable PDF report. It would mean the world to me if you try it and give feedback. If possible, do it here in the community for a fruitful exchange. https://assess.engaginglab.com Have a great day, cheers, Roman