Meta Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for meta-discussion of the Stack Exchange family of Q&A websites. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
How are users modifying their behavior because of Winterbash 2014? What have you seen, positive and negative?
I've seen some comments on various Winterbash posts about the behaviors the hats encourage, and I thought it would be useful to collect those observations in one place.
Fascinating
Fascinating, Ma'am
I Voted Today
Saint Lucia
Imitation Crab
Red Shirt
Several hats encourage voting and, unsurprisingly, I'm seeing an increase in voting. Injecting reputation into a site, especially smaller ones or younger betas, seems helpful -- but we do have to be careful that the votes are deserved and not just robo-votes chasing a hat. On the sites where I'm active I haven't seen "WTF?" voting so far.
A couple hats encourage downvoting, which users are often reluctant to do for reasons ranging from "oh no, my 1-rep penalty!" to "it's not nice".
Gelt
Stocking Hung by the Fire
Major Award
We have several hats related to bounties, and on sites where I'm active I'm seeing an increase in bounties being offered (and chased) as a result. I count this as positive; bounties are a good way to bring attention to older posts, help "uplift" deserving users whose posts didn't get the attention they deserve, and invite new answers.
Time Lord
This hat has caused some mass edits of old posts. See discussion here about excessive amounts of this on one site.
Editing old posts to improve them is good, and bumping old posts from time to time is helpful, but when too many are edited at once they push newer posts off the front page. On the trilogy sites no one would notice, probably, but on smaller sites we're used to things staying on the front page for a day or two, and people therefore don't tend to use the "new" tab instead of the default "activity" tab.
The Bill Lumbergh hat encouraged me to post lots of answers in a short amount of time this last Saturday here on Meta. I provided the best answers I could for the questions I found that were still unanswered (even though they didn't have to have 0 answers for that hat), and that I could answer reasonably well imo. I think it was a positive for the site, and especially for me since I really wanted the Office Space hat. 3 of those answers I left out of about 6/7 are already accepted by the questioners. So yea, if it weren't for that hat I probably wouldn't of answered any of those questions to be honest.
The Major Award hat got me to answer 1 or 2 questions that had a bounty on them here on Meta that I probably wouldn't have bothered answering during the off-season (non-hat season). I got some upvotes for my answer and also received the bounty, which was awesome to get a cool leg lamp. I felt so proud, just like the dad in "A Christmas Story" or whatever movie that is. I showed off my leg lamp to make sure people were jealous of my clean shaven lamp. I think this was also a positive for the site and for me.
I also earned the Imitation Crab and Red Shirt hats, which was no big deal since I cast way more downvotes on SO then upvotes. Some sites I don't use downvotes that much so helped me to use my voting power more. I think it's good for the sites b.c there is a lot of things that should be downvoted more that don't, so it's good to encourage people to downvote when they see downvote worthy posts.
The Sumo Judge hat seemed to get some people upset. Some rooms seems to have strict star guidelines and didn't like all the random stars. Stars are cool though, so I don't think it hurt the site at all, but just upset some regulars and chat room owners.
The Hairboat hat definitely caused some very unusual behavior by lots of people. But considering it's all just on one persons posts/comment replies, shouldn't be too hard to clean up the nonsense. Abby probably has enough evidence to show the judge to file restraining orders on at least a couple dozen users now.
Resolution
This hat encourages people to delete no-longer-relevant comments, which is good. However, it also encouraged them to remove their side of a conversation and then flag the other side for moderator handling. One comment at a time. All over the place. And only moderators can handle those flags.
As a moderator I'm not entirely amused, even though I got the hat.
Seems appropriate for me to throw in an answer here, and some of the lessons I learned. I managed to 'earn' at least one of each of the hats, and hat-season did modify my behaviour....
Fascinating Ma'am
... as an active member on a small site, I found that I 'earned' all the easy hats just by doing what I normally do. But, then I found out that I could not seem to get the secret Fascinating Ma'am hat. At the time, word-on-the-street suggested I had to vote on a +25 question with an accepted answer. Well, on my regular site I had pretty much already upvoted all of those questions.... and, upvoting the ones that I had not already +1'd did not earn me the hat either. I knew something was amiss.
I hunted that hat down (Fascinating Ma'am) and discovered it was +25 and 10K views that mattered.... Once I knew that the accepted answer was not important, I found a good, and qualifying question on Code Review and 'earned' the hat on that. In the process of 'earning' the hat, I upvoted about 30 different questions on 15 different stack sites, carefully 'testing' (and adjusting) what criteria were required for the hat. I earned it on two other sites I am a regular on as part of my regular activity.
I was careful to only upvote questions I thought were well presented, and there were a number of questions I skipped, but, in fairness I would never have seen these questions otherwise:
Treasure Hunter I did not really expect to earn this hat, but I got lucky with a 'populist' answer. I did not earn this hat on my "home-site".
Eureka - Once I figured out the 10K views portion of Fascinating Ma'am, I also earned the Eureka hat.
Then, the hunt.... suddenly I realized with the Treasure Hunter, and Eureka, I had a shot at the site-wide leaderboard. The remaining hats were a case of just 'working' for them.... the hunt was on.
App hats: not-a-cherry, tablet, etc.
I regularly use android on a tablet, and my phone, but had never posted from them. I 'monitor' things from them, and occasionally chat. I have to say, though, that posting from them is a sorry disappointment. Copy/paste of code, formatting, and typing are a real pain in the derriere. I would not do that by choice. Asking/answering Code Review questions is not a real proposition for me. Sites where the answers/questions are shorter would be a more realistic option.
I will not post again from the android app unless I really have to. Sorry, but mobile apps suck still.
To get 'not a cherry' I installed the app on my daughter's ipad, and did the bare minimum, then uninstalled.
Mistletoe - I set an alarm. Really.
At that point, it was the only hat that was time-critical, and to miss it would be a shame. For those people worried about stars in chat, see: Dec 31 and Jan 01. Code Review chat regulars essentially scheduled a star-fest, and everyone was welcome.
"Pizza" hat
This one I gamed, slightly. I devised a good, on-topic question. On Code Review you post code that gets reviewed, so I asked a question that encompasses a number of facets that different people I knew to be active on the site would find interesting. I asked it at essentially the most active time as well. I mentioned my attempt in the site chat room too. A simple problem, with a presentation layer, in Javascript, HTML, and CSS. Give it a catchy title, and you get: Who's in the fellowship? When are Frodo, and the rest of the gang, together?
Naruto
This is a hard hat for a person with a high-profile to 'earn'.... I could not bring myself to give marginal answers, an accepted post on Code Review with a not-upvoted answer would be impossible for me to earn without gaming it somehow. I did try, but failed.... I figured the nature (volume, not-so-vote-happy) of Stack Overflow made it a better venue for me, so I went on an answer blitz. I answered 6 questions. I set up a query to only find questions from users with < 15 rep (who can accept, but not upvote). I worked off page 3 or 4 of the results, questions that were a little 'stale'. All the answers were what I consider to be correct answers to decent questions. I answered the questions at a time when SO was quiet, and hoped that no-one would find and upvote my answers..... I got lucky from that first batch, otherwise I would have had to stay up late on other days too.
Of all the hats, I think this was the worst... by design, the hat requires behaviour that is against the principles of stack exchange. You should be providing good answers that deserve upvotes, not targeting new users and giving them just enough to get an accept, but not an upvote.
Kofia - an interesting one. First post on a site. Thanks "Android Experts". It was a real question and it has helped. The timing was 'held back' for a day or two so I could ask it in the hat time-frame.
In all, I 'played the hat game', and it worked out for me. I had fun, and did things I normally would not do. I helped people with answers they found useful. I went places I don't normally go.
Like Monica mentioned in her answer here, these hats encourage downvoting, which is something that is not done as often on SE sites as upvoting is.
I'd like to add that when I decided to chase hats, I thought that Red Shirt would be difficult to get on purpose -- how would I know if a post I voted on would be deleted or closed? Then I realized that I have close votes and flags, so I went to one sites list of questions and answers, found the lowest-score Qs and As, and DVed and flagged/VTCed, if I decided that that post was deserving of that action.
I never realized how much material could accumulate at the bottom of a site's Stack, and I'm considering going back to the bottom of the list in the future, to close/flag for deletion those posts that don't deserve to live on my sites.
( However, I draw the line at gaming the Fear and Loathing hat, because no good thing comes of deleting and undeleting an old answer of mine. I'll get that hat if and only if I need to delete an answer for a good reason...though I have seen some people confess to gaming that one {I don't currently have a good link for this. If you have one for me, I wouldn't object to having it edited in}. )
I never realized how much material could accumulate at the bottom of a site's Stack its something that I've occasionally found and went "eww" at looking. Before I went on a massive down vote campaign on them on SO, I was finding old closed stuff with one up vote that... well, more work needs to be done there.
On RPG.SE this shirt had a very perceptible result: we had a lot more downvotes for questions that were getting closed, when normally we have one or none.
RPG.SE's community members are usually pretty generous with their upvotes, and careful and precise like a surgeon with their downvotes. They rarely feel the need to downvote a question that's going to get closed, instead leaving it at 0 or -1, or lower if it actually didn't do research effort, is unclear (e.g. totally unintelligible), or isn't useful. Our downvoting and close-voting are very much disconnected.
In the first half of Winter Bash, things were different in the way you might expect: all the questions destined for closure were getting downvoted to -3, or past -4 and taken right off the front page. This was regardless of whether the question was well-researched, useful, and clear — it seems some users were just slipping in a vote to get closer to their Red Shirt hat. (Hat-shirt? Shirt-hat?)
Not sure if this is a good thing or not, but that happened. I'd wager it's not a good thing, since we shouldn't encourage people to treat downvoting and close voting as things that need to happen together.
(That said: I suspect this specific hat was a social experiment on behalf of the SE staff, and I'm glad it happened, and doing it as part of Winter Bash with a hat was probably a very good way to execute it. If it wasn't deliberate, it was a pretty good accidental experiment to conduct!)
I don't have stats on how the apps are used, but I have seen some discussion (1, 2, 3) about people using the apps more than they would regularly.
I can say for myself, that I rarely use the app (I prefer typing on a physical keyboard, and like using a lot of links in my questions, which is harder without a keyboard, or access to my favorite userscript), but I deliberately used the app here to get two hats....and now I find myself considering using it more, just to read posts and vote on them, but not necessarily to post (for the reasons mentioned above).
....and I used it again today, to get the "Tablet" hat. If I would have known about that hat in advance, I might have pushed off my first tablet question until today, so that I could score three hats from one post. Oh well ;-)
Mistletoe
Tam o' Shanter
The Mistletoe hat encouraged several people to post comments in chat between 11:55 and 12:05 UTC as well as give a star to just about every comment during that time interval. As a bonus, people who made their star earning comment between 11:55 and 12:00 got the Tam o' Shanter hat as well.
This was kinda silly, but I don't think it had any long term negative effects.
