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With all the buzz around this new “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter” People Reached stat in the new profiles, I think we're due for some new badges! What say you? Perhaps something along the lines of:
Impressive - Reached ~500k people.
Impactful - Reached ~1 million people.
Monumental - Reached ~2 million people.
* Badge names and numeric values for illustrative purposes only.
I also like this idea. This will encourage people to ask more good-quality questions and write some very nice answers.
Like other badges like Famous Question or Publicist, it's primarily on luck and making smart choices. Of course, it's quality that matters though. In the haste to earn these badges, some people will avoid new and old questions altogether. They will go straight to some really popular question and answer it. Simple. Traffic will go up for popular posts and down for those who are not so lucky...
The advantages though are amazing. No one really seem to care a lot about how many people they helped, just their rep count. For people needing encouragement to make posts, these badges should help them out a lot. Anyways, like a lot of these badges, you have to do something to get the badge, which is by helping out people via posting.
There could be some improvements though. Not every one can be Jeff Atwood (yet), who has helped 2.7m people. The number of people helped to earn the badge is kinda high. Not even Nick Craver could get that badge. I suggest lowering the amount of people helped and maybe changing the names of the badge:
Bronze Badge - Hometown Hero - Helped 5k people
Silver Badge - Sidekick - Helped 50k people
Gold Badge - Superhero - Helped 300k people
TL;DR;
We have to work out the fact that badges such as those proposed here do not scale accordingly to sites traffic before creating new ones.
No
The traffic varies highly from one site to another. Unless there are different requirements for badges on all the different sites, maybe according to their registered population, we can't have a badge that would work out well on all sites, being either too hard or too easy to obtain on most sites.
For example, the numbers in op's question would fit well on stack overflow, even though I feel the gold and silver badge are too low (many, many people would gain the silver badge right on badge implementation).
However on music.stackexchange, they are skyhigh, almost impossible to get on such a small traffic site. The higest reputation user there would not even get the silver one.
Wrap-up: No, no new badges unless they have adaptive numbers, and I think we should wait to see how things go out with the new stat before doing this.
That being said, Monica point's out that we have other badges that present this problem. I'd still favor not adding new badges to the lot and waiting for a solution before creating new badges.
I like this idea. Like Famous Question, it is to some extent a matter of luck, but not entirely. A "pls send me the codes urgent" question will never earn Famous Question, no matter how lucky the author is. You need a quality description of, or answer to, a problem that recurs a lot.
I know, you never know what that problem will be. My highest voted answer on SO is for How can I tell if I have Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2010 installed?. Four years ago I would not have guessed this question had legs. But is has almost 30k views, and 84 of those people have paused to toss me an upvote. Lucky or not, that question is filling some sort of need in people's lives. Similarly, I have almost 40k views on SU for How do I turn OFF Windows Narrator? though only 7 upvotes. I'm guessing a lot of people type that exact string into Google. (I've only asked 5 questions on SU and two have Famous Question which tells me that SU has amazing traffic, and that I ask fairly common questions but I either ask them early or phrase them well.)
And like a number of other traffic and vote based badges, there is something you can do to help yourself get the badge. You can share links to your questions and answers and drive traffic to the site and to your contributions specifically. In this way the badge encourages good behaviour. It also gives the "People Reached" stat some value and causes people to look at it more often and watch it grow.
Given how the value of people reached is calculated (details in the stat announcement post) and that by nature it is dynamic - meaning the value can go up or down, and quite significantly at times (though that is rather unusual), I feel this isn't suitable for a badge.
If so they should be somehow tied to reputation or more directly votes. For instance, a person with 1 million reach needs only add an answer to about 15 already existing questions.
Either a hard limit (ie, 500k people and 5k rep) or only those questions where their answer has at least x votes are counted towards this badge (ie, 500k people for questions where the user's answer is voted 5 or more, or is one of the top five voted answers to the question).
Or make it very meaningful and only count numbers where their answer is accepted.
I don't think any concept but the rep+helpful will be acceptable, though, since you'd have to show the number actually used for the badge. I may have 5 million users helped, but a much lower number once you only count those where I'm voted 5+.
I can't speak towards whether the badges have reasonable limits as described in the OP - I'd get all three on SO, but only a bronze here. Might be reasonable, might not.
