Exercise in social change (applying game theory to have more fun). After looking for a decent technical support forum I one day stumbled upon a site called Tek-Tips. The web site which I highly recommend for IT professionals is a place where anyone can go with a technical questions and receive answers from talented volunteers worldwide. The site is divided in forum for different programming languages and computer programs and uses a positive feedback channel called the star system. To give a star all you had to do is press a button and it showed to that person that their answer or post was helpful to you. The stars each individual receives is added up and counted by the site owners to create the list of each forum's top experts. Being in a forum top expert list is a much coveted distinction and silent competition happens to reach top spot. My brother and I decided to analyze the dynamics of this web site and see how we could beat a system in the fastest time possible. This story explains our attempts to reach top spot in our favorite forums. [kuro5hin.org]

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