Overgamified? An Exploratory Study on Gamification and Crowdsourcing for Fake Accounts Detection in Social Networks

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In this exploratory research, a gamification approach for crowdsourcing fake account detection in social networks has been proposed and evaluated for the first time. Gamification usually tries to satisfy the users’ psychological needs. However, motivation could also be based on human physiological needs. Among these needs are health, shelter, and clothes. In the gamification world, we can translate them into monetary or cash rewards. We have investigated the effects of both these rewards on users’ motivations in participating and detecting fake accounts by conducting two in-the-wild exploratory experiments and two surveys. The experimental results showed that users prefer physiological rewards over psychological rewards, and an increase in the reward (0.75 euro in this study) resulted in a 365% increase in user participation and a 28.88% decrease in number of accurate reports in the first experiment. Similarly, in the second experiment, we observed that higher monetary rewards resulted in higher user acquisition and higher user engagement, but the quality of the reports was 10% lower than the low monetary rewards. This indicates that physiological rewards can potentially make users over-motivated or, in other words, overgamified. To tackle this problem, we proposed a gamification approach that benefits from both psychological and physiological rewards and gradually increases them. The evaluation results showed a 15% increase in the quality of the reports, a 26% increase in interaction time using the proposed method, and a 19% increase in user acquisition to lower monetary rewards. It also showed a 57% increase in commitment to participating in the survey compared with other groups. Both survey results show that around 40% of the users prefer to receive between 0.50 and 1 euro for their services. Also, women showed more quality responses and commitment in completing the participation than men.