When the experiment is over: Deploying an incentive system to all the users

Motivating user participation is an important issue for the survival of social web and social software applications. In our previous work demonstrated that a point-based incentive encourages contribution to a social networking site. This paper presents a follow-up analysis after a full deployment of the incentive mechanism to the entire user community. We address an issue uncovered in our previous experiment, we measure the long-term impact of the incentive mechanism on site content generation, and we replicate our previous result with a larger number of users. Our results will demonstrate that the incentive mechanism had a long-term effect on contribution levels and generated a second boost in contribution levels when released to a new set of users. The paper concludes with a discussion of our community’s reactions to the incentive mechanism collected through the site itself, company-internal blogs, podcasts, and forums.