Abstract
The online social communities employ several techniques to attract more users to their services. One of the essential demand of these communities is to find efficient ways to attract more users and improve their engagement. For this reason, social media sites typically take advantage of gamification systems to improve users’ participation. Among all the gamification services, badges are the most popular feature in online communities which are massively used as a reward system for users. Therefore, the recommendation of relevant unachieved badges to users will have a significant impact on their engagement level; instead of leaving them in the ocean of different actions and badges. In this paper, we develop a badge recommendation model based on item-based collaborative filtering which recommends the next achievable badges to users. The model calculates the correlation between unachieved badges and users’ previously awarded badges. We evaluate our model with the data from Stack Overflow question-answering website to examine if the recommendation model can recommend proper badges in an existing real community. Experimental results show that the model has about 70 per cent true recommendation by just recommending one badge and it has about 80 per cent correct recommendation if it recommends two badges for each user.
Highlights
The user experience of video games as well as models, methods, and heuristics which had been developed by researchers for the usability or playability of games [1] has become a notable topic of discussions on social networking websites [2]
The use of badge incentives is a new trend in online social websites, it has a huge effect on user engagement and participation
We evaluated the model with the Stack Overflow badges dataset to see how well it can predict future user behaviour
Summary
The user experience of video games as well as models, methods, and heuristics which had been developed by researchers for the usability or playability of games [1] has become a notable topic of discussions on social networking websites [2]. Some social networking websites use the badges as separate milestones for each user, some use them to exhibit each user’s skills, and some award badges to users for doing certain actions [10] This latter use of badges is the main functionality we have worked on in this paper, because as an incentive by recommending certain badges which have associated with certain actions, websites can control users’ behaviour and make them eager to participate more in the society. As the main contribution of this paper, we first develop an item-based collaborative filtering recommendation model for badges which are awarded to users and record their behaviour according to this recommendation model.
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