The introduction of badges changed Reddit for me. The psychological need to continue using Reddit to continue my daily streak is strong.
I noticed this after the first few badges. 5 days 10, 20, 30, etc. I wanted to keep going because I was getting notifications that I was completing something special.
After earning a couple badges, I found myself forcing myself to use Reddit every day just to keep my streak alive. Then, badges started to become more rare in quality as the streak day count increased. I wanted to collect them all! I wanted to see if I could earn the legendary ones. 365 days? 500 days? Hell yeah!
I don't particularly care about Reddit all that much. Most days I'd be fine just reading. I don't need to upvote or downvote. Or at least I thought I didn't? Badges changed that for me.
I see this with my children, especially my daughter. Her and her friends all use Snapchat to communicate. She cares about keeping her streaks alive with friends. It's a silly little indicator in Snapchat, just like Reddit, that keeps pulling people back in.
I know that we all recognize the issues with legacy social media. I know these tactics are meant to keep bringing us back, so that the algorithms can keep us enraged and engaged, to steal our attention. We can do better!
It's no secret that user retention is horrible across the Nostr ecosystem. Could a Nostr client implement something similar to these streak badges without the negative aspects to keep people coming back? Definitely.
Nostr doesn't have evil algorithms. (Someone could build one though. It's an open protocol!) I believe a developer could implement a similar feature to draw people back into their application. We have a badges spec. The badge could be automatically assigned and displayed on the user profile as their engagement increases.
I guess technically this doesn't even need to be implemented by a specific client. Someone could essentially write a DVM for this, right? This would be a large task though. The DVM could use the nostr.band API or search.nostr.wine API or something similar to do this and assign these streak badges automatically across "all of Nostr" or even just a specific set of relays. Relay operators could implement something such as this too. It's all possible.
Thoughts?
