Top Contributors

Thousands of Community Notes contributors dedicate time and effort to keep everyone else better-informed.

Rewarding this activity is tricky: We've been careful during the product's development to keep motivation intrinsic, so that people participate out of a sense of purpose, rather than an external return.

We've tried to avoid "gamifying" the product too early with meaningless badges and rewards, instead trying to understand the what actually makes people feel good about their contributions and impact in the real world.

With Top Contributors, we had to find balance: In one hand, it does give people an external reward to look forward to (a profile badge), but it also unlocks new features that empowers high-quality contributors to multiply their impact.

The design also provide other contributors with a nuanced target for quality: To become a Top Writer, for example, people need to achieve not only a minimum score, but also a ratio of helpful notes. This means that people can't simply write infinite notes hoping to get the badge, their note-writing needs to be thoughtful and precise.

It was fun building this through the chaos of Twitter's rebrand to X. It can be hard to prioritize quality-of-life improvements when the sense of urgency is in other projects, so I'm really happy that we managed to push this one through.

Next up, we'll think about rewarding Top Raters.

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