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Comment by methodin | Hacker News Reader

Or you could look at it as a form of addiction similar to how WOW and other MMORPG games have you do mundane tasks to get a reward which is in and of itself meaningless. The more they can get you to read articles the more it benefits them. For some people it takes incentives other than knowledge to perform the act of learning.

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The way I look at it, if a technique works for getting myself to learn stuff I'm happy to take advantage of it. E.g. if fantasizing about using obscure physics knowledge casually in a conversation is going to help me learn physics, and I want to learn physics, I'll fantasize away.

I don't see much utility in reading the news though. I'd much rather see this on a video lecture site.

"For some people it takes incentives other than knowledge to perform the act of learning."

That there is the reason why I'm happy about it. At least it's for a good cause. Making reading news more fun for a large fraction of people isn't a bad idea...

"The more they can get you to read articles the more it benefits them."

While it is an interesting idea, it seems more likely that the badges will just encourage people to click on random links in order to game the system and level up, rather than actually spending time and reading. Google needs to find a way to encourage depth and not breadth.

These badges encourage people to click on articles, not necessarily to learn anything from them. Maybe they will still learn, but maybe it will encourage them to skim (even) more.

You can sometimes obtain very unexpected results if you provide an incentive for something which is almost (but not quite) the thing that you want to favor.

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