Hey DEV Community! I'm here to share an exciting announcement with you 🗣️
Introducing...Community Wellness Badges!
We're excited to roll out a new badge for your DEV profile that we grant in exchange for constructive feedback left for your fellow community members in the comments of their posts.
Cool! How do I earn it?
You can earn your first of six possible Community Wellness badges by contributing two or more constructive comments to posts on DEV in one week. We didn’t want this to be a grind, and we deemed two constructive comments per week to be a healthy number that didn’t ask too much of folks in order to earn the prize.
For each week that follows, as long as you comment constructively on other community members' posts two or more times per week, you'll get another badge at the 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32-week marks. You'll max out at a 32-week streak.
PS — click here to take a look at the first Community Wellness badge you can receive for leaving at least two constructive comments in one week on DEV.
If you go a week without two or more constructive comments...oops! Time to start over! ⏲
A comment is assumed to be constructive unless it is flagged by a mod. Moderators may make mistakes, so you may want to err on the side of leaving a few extra good comments in order to qualify.
Why is this a thing?
We believe that the wellness of a community hinges on the health of its dialogue. We want to encourage everyone to understand the impact of their role in cultivating constructive discussions, and be rewarded with a bit of profile SWAG. 😄
Ok, but what are “healthy discussions”?
Healthy discussions are…
- In-line with our code of conduct
- Engaged
- Constructive
- Psychologically safe and culturally competent
- Well-moderated
- Happening every day in the comments on DEV!
Since it's key to our mission, we want to reward you for your participation in healthy discussions here on DEV.
And, as a reminder:
Healthy discussions are not...
- One-word answers
- Condescending, demeaning, or dogmatic
- Humorous at the expense of someone's feelings
- Full of shameless self-promotion
- Able to be automated using your favorite tech stack 😜
So get commenting! We can't wait to find out what you share, learn, and contribute along the way. 🌱✨
Top comments (69)
Fun to see folks excited about this already 😆
We're really focused on spurning on healthy discussions, and focusing on quality of overall site interactions. We hope this is a nice nudge to find the time to leave a constructive comment whenever you find yourself on the site.
Happy commentings!
So did I. It's really nice to get kind feedbacks
I Also received mine last week 😊😊
Super excited 🥳
It was a very nice surprise to get the 1 week badge the other day. This is a good ideal from the DEV team.
Here for this!
I'm not sure how, I thought that I missed 1 week at some point aka 4 Oct: I only have 1 single comment. 🤔
But I guess that it's computed a bit differently!
Anyway, I still got it! 💪🏻
Quite happy that I could have helped some new writers + gave feedback on other posts. 🎊
I hope it was helpful to all the bloggers, tried my best providing constructive feedback. 🙏🏻
Love this idea. Gamify constructive criticism! This is one of the friendliest communities I've seen. The work you're doing is paying off. Keep up the good work, staff! ☀️
It would seem that the act of sharing such a constructive comment in and by itself has been rewarding enough so far.
Curious to see if this'll lead to any shift in comment content or quality, and whether we might see some sort of "changing of the guards" with comment authors.
@ben If at all possible, it'd be cool if you could share some numbers on this in a month or so!
Yeah, we could definitely share something 😁. We don't know scientifically what improvements will happen, and it will be hard to isolate variables — but I like the idea of digging in and sharing whatever the most relevant results we can come up with are in a month or so.
Back in the phpBB forum days I've seen the addition of karma systems result in large shifts of active contributors more than once. Recalling those times prompted my ask :)
The karma feature those boards added appeared to have been enough of an incentive for some "lurkers" or more quiet members to crawl out of their shell and start participating, but then also it caused some of the regulars to leave (which could be attributable to the addition of this carrot-on-a-stick, the sudden change in people/content, or an infinite amount of other things).
In most cases the communities ended up neither better or worse than before, but rather they simply changed or evolved into some sort of new rendition of themselves.
I've seen this before too. People hunting for likes or points without actually contributing much except for overly positive comments. Which is better than nothing IMO.
There's a balance to it, but so far what I've seen here it's not a problem.
Great pokemon collection. Gotta catch em all.
This is an awesome idea! I'm going to get all the badges 😎
I just received two of them
Siked for this! And I love the description for "healthy discussions" 🙌
This seems like a great idea!
Now I get why I randomly got this badge lmao
You earned it before the announcement! Well done 😊
Thanks!
I didn’t even get the 1 week badge and went straight to the 2 week one!
Very good idea! ✨
Already got mine!!
Good luck getting the next one!
Gonna to get all the badges.🤩