> For me gamification turns some things into a slog.
same for me. i admit it still feels nice to "watch the number go up", mostly on content platforms with a social component to it (hn, reddit, stackoverflow) as you feel whatever you've said has either been useful to, or at least resonated with someone. as social creatures it's only normal to seek some sort of validation.
i think the only gamification set of features i've fallen for in the recent years has been duolingo, which has me practicing every day, even if just for 3-5 minutes. the way they've done it is quite interesting as they have what i'd call different levels of gamification you can buy into. the most basic one being your daily streak but then you have stuff like daily quests, monthly badges, league standings, friend quests and probably more stuff i can't remember now.
the article does cover quite a few examples and i like how the author hints at the chance that, at times, he'd probably be better of not maintaining his streak as that alone ends up resulting in an output that's not desirable (eg. stackoverflow answers with little value). however he left out some cases where gamification is tied to a normally positive impact like step counters (ignoring the data collection).