I definitely don’t expect the money to be directly rewarding in a standard monetary sense. (In general I think prizes do a bad job of providing expected monetary value). My hope for the prize was more to be a strong signal of the magnitude of how much this mattered, and how much recognition reviews would get.
It’s entirely plausible that reviewing is sufficiently “not sufficiently motivating” that actually, the thing to do is pay people directly for it. It’s also possible that the prizes should be lopsided in favor of reviews. (This year the whole process was a bit of an experiment so we didn’t want to spend too much money on it, but it might be that just adding more funding to subsidize things is the answer)
But I had some reason to think “actually things are mostly fine, it’s just that the Review was a new thing and not well understood, and communicating more clearly about it might help.”
My current sense is:
There have been some critical reviews, so there is at least some motivation latent motivation to do so.
There are people on the site who seem to be generally interested in giving critical feedback, and I was kinda hoping that they’d be up for doing so as part of a broader project. (Some of them have but not as many as I’d hoped. To be fair, I think the job being asked for the 2018 Review is harder than what they normally do)
One source of motivation I’d expected to tap into (which I do think has happened a bit) is “geez, that might be going into the official Community Recognized Good Posts Book? Okay, before it wasn’t worth worrying about Someone Being Wrong On the Internet, but now the stakes are raised and it is worth it.”
Helpful thoughts, thanks!
I definitely don’t expect the money to be directly rewarding in a standard monetary sense. (In general I think prizes do a bad job of providing expected monetary value). My hope for the prize was more to be a strong signal of the magnitude of how much this mattered, and how much recognition reviews would get.
It’s entirely plausible that reviewing is sufficiently “not sufficiently motivating” that actually, the thing to do is pay people directly for it. It’s also possible that the prizes should be lopsided in favor of reviews. (This year the whole process was a bit of an experiment so we didn’t want to spend too much money on it, but it might be that just adding more funding to subsidize things is the answer)
But I had some reason to think “actually things are mostly fine, it’s just that the Review was a new thing and not well understood, and communicating more clearly about it might help.”
My current sense is:
There have been some critical reviews, so there is at least some motivation latent motivation to do so.
There are people on the site who seem to be generally interested in giving critical feedback, and I was kinda hoping that they’d be up for doing so as part of a broader project. (Some of them have but not as many as I’d hoped. To be fair, I think the job being asked for the 2018 Review is harder than what they normally do)
One source of motivation I’d expected to tap into (which I do think has happened a bit) is “geez, that might be going into the official Community Recognized Good Posts Book? Okay, before it wasn’t worth worrying about Someone Being Wrong On the Internet, but now the stakes are raised and it is worth it.”