OK, I'll bite!

What do we ultimately want the engagement challenge to accomplish? And while contemplating that what lessons can we pull on from the past?

If you think about it, this is really looking at the gamification of social media which is a large part of the entire core principle of Steemit.

What makes for actual participation? People love seeing their name in print on ”leaderboards” and ”rankings.” Perhaps this angle most success

@pennsif, I think you might remember what was perhaps the single most successful engagement initiative Steemit has seen, which was active some years back when @abh12345 ran the weekly ”Steemit Curation and Engagement Leagues.” It started as almost nothing but soon there were hundreds of participants every week and everybody’s efforts were ranked according a fairly complex algorithm that took into consideration original posts, comments, length of comments, ”conversations”, votes given, penalties for self-voting and more.

I vaguely recall some analysis run on the weekly total engagement, and sometimes the League participants would generate as much as 6-8% of all activity in the ecosystem. We’re talking may hundreds of posts and thousands of genuine comment. And people were mostly doing this mostly just to ”see their name in lights” because the prizes were actually pretty modest, all told, including SBI shares, modest liquid Steem and some modest week-long delegations.

We have a different structure now, and (perhaps) the benefit of having one of the top SC accounts sponsor such a thing with the value of 2-3 100% upvotes weekly, divided into smaller percentage prizes after some equitable formula.

The point here is that people used it, and they participated, and the initiative wasn’t overcomplicated by some huge number of required rules and what have you to follow. Even getting into the weekly list of the top-100 often required leaving upwards of 80-100 real comments and perhaps 3-4 top level posts.

I have watched some of the initiatives run in more recent times, and two things strike me:

1. Too many rules and regulations to follow, limiting original creativity. That tends to make things a bit formulaic, and dull, after a while.

2. Not really that oriented to actual interaction between users. That lowers the sense of ”being part of” something… and that also becomes boring.

If part of the objective is to present a thriving community to the greater world, formulaic is not the answer.

Those are just some initial thoughts…