9
Even after reading the community manager guidance in When Should I Vote to Delete, this still doesn't strike me as a high-value activity. Some might consider these questions "broken windows", but if the broken window is tucked away in the basement and you only see it when you specifically search for that kind of window, is it really that harmful to the site?...
8
There are such badges:
Favorite Question – silver, question favorited by 25 users.
Stellar Question – gold, question favorited by 100 users.
6
Indeed, the number you see in your profile is rounded up. You can hover over it to see the actual figure, or visit the question itself and check the stats on the right-hand side.
Also, note that barely any badges are awarded instantly, especially not gold ones. The scripts that award them run in various intervals, going up all the way to 24 hours. So even ...
6
Yes, indeed: you are now a Superhero, able to wield the mighty Mjölnir.
Notice the gold badge where the diamond would go:
6
All of us would love to see more good questions on the site. Creating a badge for good questions seems immediately like a good idea. So, on the one hand, I like it.
However, I'm uncertain if the bar for defining a good question (or questions, etc.) isn't being set too low. If all you need is >0, that might not only include, but even reward, a fair number of ...
6
Voting is a network-wide thing rather than an ELU-specific thing, and I think this is answered by an Meta.SE question, What's the difference between Suffrage and Vox populi badge. It's not possible to mark this question as a duplicate of that one because it's on a different site, but please do refer to it.
Suffrage: used 30 votes per day
Vox populi: ...
6
You may have also posted some other poor questions (downvoted, deleted) leading to not having a positive question record. The formula for one's question record is given in this quote from Meta:
A positive question record means you don't have too many Closed, Negative, or Deleted questions overall. The formula is (TotalQuestions - Negative - Closed - ...
5
Badges reward good behavior
The blog post that first announced badges describes their purpose thusly:
Our goal with the badges is to encourage people to a) have fun and b) use the Stack Overflow website in ways that make sense.
A second blog post about badges says something along the same lines:
Badges exist to reward and encourage the kind of ...
5
They are akin to getting "achievements" in computer/console games. Badges are one of many ways that Stack Exchange games you to participate more in it, as are points, privileges and the like.
5
The (possibly overlapping) reasons I can think of that might discourage people to edit less-than-optimally phrased questions are as follows:
1) The question is not interesting enough, or seems too parochial or restricted in its scope, to stimulate much desire to improve it.
2) Users might suspect that the question is so unsalvageable, or so off-topic, or ...
5
There's nothing wrong with encouraging folks to contribute to the site in new ways, but a lot of this question seems to be geared at highlighting that only a couple people are doing the bulk of the edits, as if that's somehow a bad thing.
Editing, deletion, tag cleanup, etc. - these are privileges that are earned and can be exercised when you choose to. ...
5
The Curious badge is awarded only when two separate criteria are both met:
Asking a question that is open, not deleted and positively scored on 5 separate days
Having a positive question record, which is defined as:
(total q's - negative q's - closed q's - deleted q's)/total q's >= 0.5
Note in particular that a question that has both a negative score ...
5
A couple of clarifications:
The score for determining a "positive record" does deduct a point from the numerator for each negatively scored questions, closure, and deletion. So if your first question trips all three, you will start at -2 ((1 - 1 - 1 - 1)/1). The penalty is particularly harsh on a site like Stack Overflow where such a reception occurs more ...
5
The user also has the Good Answer badge, but when you click through to it, it just says:
(post deleted or otherwise unavailable)
Apparently, this user posted one really good answer that caused him to earn all those badges, but it was later deleted (perhaps along with the question it was posted for). This caused him to lose all the rep gained from that ...
4
In regards to your concerns over the use of this feature:
I wish to note that we created this feature specifically for sites that get so many duplicate questions every day that it is not feasible for voters in the top tags to keep up with them. Generally-speaking, gold badges go hand-in-hand with this sort of traffic, but there will no doubt be exceptions ...
4
For the sake of completeness, and so everyone who doesn't have enough rep to see deletions might marvel at how such a thing were possible. (I would have added this to Ilmari Karonen's post, but felt it would be presumptuous to do so.)
4
Yes, badges are very much meant to come as a nice surprise:
Some of the badges are supposed to be surprises, not World of Warcraft style level grinds based on numbers.
I worry that if we provide too many metrics:
it becomes noise, like a bunch of inscrutable F-16 cockpit gauges -- how are all these numbers useful except for these specific ...
4
The badges are awarded algorithmically. As you can see, the curious badge is fairly rare, having been awarded less than 1000 times overall. According to this answer, the badge's criteria are:
Curious
bronze; awarded once
Asked a well-received question on 5 separate days, and maintained a positive question record
Any open question that is not deleted and ...
4
I am a compulsive tidy-upper and throw-it-awayer, so I jumped on the Delete Queue enthusiastically and voted to delete five questions I thought had no redeeming qualities. I was too hasty on one of them, because the f-word turns me off, utterly. Not a good reason, as @Mari-Lou A pointed out above. The answers were worthy of keeping.
Fortunately, I was ...
2
The fact that editing bumps a post probably stops 90% of my would-be edits. "Avoid trivial" is another 9%. -I would certainly love fix that spelt mestake for u, but they aksed me not too.
On a site with more than 2k, I'm very cautious about my instantaneously approved edits. On one with less rep I don't want to waste the time of an approver but I'm more apt ...
2
Update SEDE 20-11-2016:
There are now over 3.200 questions with a negative score.
There are now ~600 closed questions with a negative score and pending delete votes.
1
Stack Exchange already has badges for milestone achievements.
There's a gold badge for a great question which has earned 100 upvotes
https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/42/great-question
A gold badge for famous questions which have attracted 10,000 visits
https://english.stackexchange.com/help/badges/37/famous-question
There's also a gold ...
1
Just open the question in a new tab. The vote page will be there waiting for you on the original tab when you're finished looking at the question.
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My advice is simply to ignore the aspect of EL&U's game mechanics that you dislike. A number of users with high reputation scores at this site have observed that the scoring system favors short, trivial, clever answers over thoughtful, carefully researched answers—but unless you are focused on piling up reputation points, you're under no pressure to ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
