litphoria

I like encouraging people to endorse things, but I don't really like the idea of any kind of profile ... gimmick, really. This is why we don't have things like view counters here.

Could always just keep them tied to the account and not displayed on profiles then I suppose.

I can take or leave points, but they have to be done right. Some of this feedback is in the right direction, some is not. I have a lot to say here.

The consequences of Gamification, and doing it right.

Introducing point rewards will mean we're gamifying parts of the site. People will play the game, and some will focus on it heavily. Gamification alters peoples' behaviour^. We have to consider what means for us. Ideally gamification funnels peoples' energy toward something positive, and we have to consider: what happens if they do that thing, a hundred times, with no regard for quality or anything but points? How much damage will they do to the site, or how counterproductive will it be, and what deterrents and defences do we have in place for this happening?

Usually this comes down to rewarding people for contributing to site health, and usually that means points have to be earned: from other people who verify your action is positive, or the system when an action is guaranteed to be positive. Some sites pull this off in a way that points are actually fairly meaningful. (Personally, I only like point systems when they are both earned and meaningful.)

^ This tends to happen whether they like it or not. Our brain will go "wow! you got a shiny thing! have some dopamine, do more of that thing you did!" - and we either play into the gamification or spend mental effort counteracting it. I have left sites because their gamification was doing things to me that I didn't like, or making me spend too much effort counteracting it because it was for stuff I didn't care about.

The bits where points will get destructive

These actions can be done unlimited times for free. If I do them over and over while primarily motivated to get points, it can get destructive. Because of that, these shouldn't reward points:

• Endorse feedback: People begin endorsing every single garbage feedback or auto-suggestion, not because they want it or think it should be in the system, but because they get points for doing so. The system fills up with profile features nobody really wanted, the roadmap becomes less representative of what people actually want.
• Upvote roleplays: People just upvote every single roleplay, because they get points for doing so. Whatever this adds up to - scores? - becomes meaningless because who knows how many of those upvotes are actually authentic.
• Suggest new feedback and interests: People take to filling the system with all the garbage they can get away with, not features they actually want or think would be good quality. Whoever's active in feedback catches the brunt of this, and will probably get burned out and uninterested.
  • However, if this feedback actually gets endorsed, or accepted or implemented, that will mean you made a positive contribution. Good job! Have some points!

(For the record, I don't think any of this is all that unrealistic a conjecture.)

Stuff that might work better

Taking a spin on these though, we can go with stuff like:

• Suggest feedback that gets endorsed or accepted (maybe each one separately as its own reward). That means you made a positive contribution! Good job! Have some points.
• Create a site room that becomes active, or something.

(I am not actually sure how many actions we have here that should necessarily be rewarded.)

An alternative that might be suitable for some/all of this: badges

Alternately, some of these actions could be better off with a one-time reward. On Stack Exchange, there's badges you earn for exceptional achievements or for simply learning how the site works. The learning badges are exclusively one-time.

Learning badges could be awarded here for the first time you: endorse something, post in a roleplay, create a roleplay, create an ad, create feedback, file a bug report that goes into review [to mitigate garbage bug reports].

These encourage people to tinker with parts of the site they might not otherwise, or just rewards them for something neat, but doesn't reward them for doing the same thing over and over.

Moderate rewards could be given for significant milestones. like a highly upvoted roleplay past a certain threshold. Not sure I want points on roleplays though, see below.

Various levels of badges (from basic to fancy to super-fancy) are a thing that's super special even if you have only one of them for doing something, and ones you can earn multiple times might be a more appropriate way to reward good behaviour here. They're just points in disguise, but they feel different, and you reward more awesome behaviour not with more points but fancier badges. So, major achievement badges could be totally appropriate for stuff like making active rooms, or providing high quality feedback.

Totally personal stuff past here

These ones I have a problem with for personal reasons:

• Have a roleplay with over 2,000 words: will make people upset 'cause some people will simply never do this. This isn't actually a site contribution. It will be taken as preferential treatment of certain roleplayers, and a signal to other people who don't earn points this way that they're roleplaying wrong. Further though, I don't think anyone needs encouragement for this - I don't roleplay for points.
• Getting your roleplay upvotes: I wouldn't ever want point rewards on my roleplays; I don't want that distraction. For me roleplaying is its own reward, and points shouldn't mean a thing to me, but my dopamine receptors will see to making them meaningful. If I begin to care, and I will eventually at least a little, I'll be variously confused or a little offended when things get upvoted or not and it mismatches with my opinion of what I wrote. I really just want to roleplay for its own sake and not have to worry about this at all. (I left Fitocracy, a site where you record your exercise and get points for it, because it began to piss me off for this kind of thing. I would go and do an exhausting and intense hour of taekwondo, and have a peaceful ten-minute ride there and back. Fitocracy gave me magnitudes more points for the bike ride than the taekwondo, to which I began to think: well, fuck you for that, you don't know shit about the effort I put into that taekwondo session.)
• Giving other people points: Makes them less meaningful because I no longer know why people got their points. This has no connection to positive behaviour, we don't have much reason to have this, and it creates a psuedo-currency we don't have a need for.
  • If we do have a site currency, it should probably not use the same thing we use to represent site contributions. Points and currency could be earned for some of the same actions, though.

Overall badges and points could be pretty neat though. I like the idea. They just need to be done well.

Point systems, based on contribution, are a wonderful idea. However, they are the precise reason that I will never join any of those unnamed doll making / rp sites. I feel like there are people out there with so many point, and so much clout, that no matter how hard I worked, I could never catch up to them. Moreover, the site(s) are demanded to offer ever newer and better things for those people with massive point stores, things which I could not 'afford' after many months of constant activity, thus leaving me feeling inadequate again. While points can effectively encourage activity, they can be a massive turn away to new users, and a demand on WA that has nothing to do with actual role play.

The most important thing with any system like this is incentives. Good incentives and perverse incentives.

Where there's the potential for perverse incentives, it'll be exploited. Because that's just how things go.

So, for example, the idea of upvoting roleplays. If points are handed out for upvoting, then some people will naturally just upvote everything to get more points. Perverse incentive. On the other hand, if you can earn points by having your roleplay upvoted, this encourages you to 1. write more and share more public roleplays, which makes the site more attractive to visitors, 2. bring in more people to upvote your roleplays, increasing the community, and 3. increase the quality of your play to get more upvotes. All generally good things.

For endorsements, it definitely makes sense to only award points when endorsement points are refunded for an accepted suggestion. As well, you can give points for suggestions. That means that people participating will look to only put their points into those ideas they think are most likely to be accepted, ie those that will improve the site the most.

On the topic of what the points do, I think that being able to trade them would be cool, if only for the kind of emergent behavior it might create. Users could show their appreciation for talented players, "commission" a roleplay, and act out prostitution style play with fake money.

Cosmetic bling on the other hand is a bit controversial. It can appeal to people, but it can be a turn off to others.

On the other hand, if you can earn points by having your roleplay upvoted, this encourages you to 1. write more and share more public roleplays, which makes the site more attractive to visitors, 2. bring in more people to upvote your roleplays, increasing the community, and 3. increase the quality of your play to get more upvotes. All generally good things.

I don't want any of those things there! When I'm in a roleplay, I just want to do the best I can for the person I'm with. I don't want judgment. I don't want to do anything attractive for anyone but my partner.

I would seriously be driven away from ever publicly roleplaying by this so that this stays the hell away from me, not encouraged to make better public roleplays.

This is seriously deeply confronting stuff and I want to see none of it in my intimate experiences I do solely for myself and the others I'm with and nobody else.

Well, like most things on the site, things like this should be optional. You could disable voting on your roleplay, or simply keep the roleplay private.

Yes, if I happen to own that roleplay. And I would keep things private.

What I'm suggesting is, if you want people to roleplay publicly to support the site, instilling a feature that will drive them into private is counterproductive.

I want to roleplay publicly in places I feel comfortable with, without running into a feature that introduces extremely uncomfortable background concerns.

Well, to use an example, there's Literotica, probably the most popular erotic story site on the internet. There, when people submit a story, they have to decide whether or not to allow comments and voting on the story. Overwhelmingly--more than 99%--people choose to allow voting. People generally like feedback and appreciation.

What you seem to be saying is that you believe that such a system here would drive people away, because even though it'd be entirely optional, the idea of it would be too stressful. That sounds a little bit like the idea that gay marriage is going to cause straight people to stop getting married.

We have a balance to strike here. It is important to encourage people to make at least some of their plays public - the more public plays we have, the more the site is supported in enumerable ways. Shows up higher in search results, more people will be convinced to join in, more can find value out of the site without actually finding any play on their own ...

But there are some people who are private. Clearly, most of the roleplay on this site is private. If we push the public angle too hard it might repulse people.

Literotica is a site where I would be writing for an audience, and be like any author who wants feedback on their work. On here, I'm writing for my partner first and foremost.

What you seem to be saying is that you believe that such a system here would drive people away, because even though it'd be entirely optional, the idea of it would be too stressful. That sounds a little bit like the idea that gay marriage is going to cause straight people to stop getting married.

I don't think that analogy has any relevance.

I am saying voting on public roleplay and quality rewards would drive people away from public roleplay, except for the few who love and embrace the idea of doing things for a readership audience as major focus.

The thing is that optional features will be turned on in various rooms. Let's suppose I were to join you and Ayla on something: I absolutely never want points. What if the room already has points? What if one of you doesn't want the points disabled on your roleplays?

I don't want this thing to be a concern to begin with. "Its optional" doesn't make it no longer an issue.

So to be very clear on my position:

• the desire is that people will roleplay publicly at high quality.
• they will already roleplay publicly when they want to.
• they will already roleplay at high quality for their partners or the audience they already know are there.

Adding a reward for high quality public roleplay is unnecessary, and creates negative effects:

• people uncomfortable with judgment will be driven away to private areas instead.
• some will be motivated to roleplay publicly when they otherwise might not.
• conflicts between these two types will arise.
• the net benefit is unknown, the total cost unclear, for a feature we didn't need to encourage people to do things they were already doing.

And lastly:

• if one group of people is operating under pressure for monetary reward, and another group is not, then for any task that requires mental effort, the second group performs better and the group working for reward performs poorly.

.... Which is a lesson that has several companies just get performance-driven pay off the table entirely. Either this affects us not at all, or it does and we make people roleplay worse for points.

("some will be motivated to roleplay publicly when they otherwise might not." Is not a negative effect despite being in that list, it's positive, but the only positive effect)

I'm not entirely sure the data right now supports the notion that people who roleplay privately are just waiting for the right time to do something publicly. Right now, we have a very small subset of users (a hand full, really) who are responsible for basically all of the public activity on the site, yet several people who have even concluded private roleplays without ever touching anything public.

We would expect to see these people move to more public avenues were they just needing to get more comfortable or find better quality, but we do not. We instead find the same people who post publicly consistently, and the same people who post privately consistently, and I do not feel without any external motivation to those private folks that they would move to a more public setting.

This is not necessarily a problem, but it does significantly weaken the site's position. If we can't get enough public play to seem active, the site will have a very hard time continuing to grow.

people uncomfortable with judgment will be driven away to private areas instead.

People uncomfortable with judgement will either keep roleplaying privately or not allow voting on their roleplays. What you're suggesting is that people would have public roleplays, and then not just forbid them from being voted on, but pull them into private just so that they wouldn't be in the same area as roleplays being voted on.

some will be motivated to roleplay publicly when they otherwise might not.

Yes.

conflicts between these two types will arise.

I don't really understand what sort of conflicts you have in mind. I've played with people in public and in private, done both with the same partners. It's all about user preference. It causes conflict in the same way that a gay man and gay woman will come into conflict when setting up a roleplay.

the net benefit is unknown, the total cost unclear, for a feature we didn't need to encourage people to do things they were already doing.

Public roleplay and the endorsement system are both not really be used very much.

I don't really understand what sort of conflicts you have in mind. I've played with people in public and in private, done both with the same partners. It's all about user preference.

I'm talking about "I want points for this" vs "I don't want points to be involved in this".

I'll roleplay in public when I have a reason to, but giving me points for doing it is the best way to guarantee I won't.

Please do find any other reward for public play other than "people will evaluate you noticeably and give you points if they like it".

But it's entirely optional.

That said, as an exclusively private roleplayer, would would make you want to engage in public roleplay?

A partner who's interested in doing that, or who tends to do things that way.

And a safe atmosphere in which to do it. Currently this site is that.

If there is something the site can give me for it, I'm not sure what that is yet. Maybe something small for creating a roleplay that's public and reaches some easy to achieve milestone like 10 IC posts?

I am objecting so heavily to being rewarded based on performance because it makes things unsafe and for the last time it being optional does not make this cease to be any less of a concern for someone like me. I get it already, ok!? I don't want to deal with a site where the question is up in the air of whether I can/should be getting monetary reward for good performance in the perspective of people who don't matter. I don't want my partners to want that. I don't want either of us to worry about that and so I don't want that to even be on the table as an option. Instead of reminding me it's optional and would surely be fine and never affect me - I've spent hours considering this. Please spend some time considering why I might be so insistent about tbis instead of responding again with something dismissive.

The judgement factor, of points for plays is really uncomfortable. Outside certain people not wanting to be looked on for their role playing skills, as is already being discussed, there are other problems.

There is a serious potential for increased elitism and cliques being formed. For small groups to upvote everything that anyone in their group does, while paying no attention at all to the works of newer users, or anyone outside their group.

There would be people who play the system, and feed into what is popular, rather trying to create high quality rp that their partner would honestly enjoy.

And then there would be those who make public plays, and because their themes are not as popular, would never get the votes, thus leaving them feeling inadequate and less likely to play in public or invite others to play. I honestly see far more potential for issues from this than for the gains.

Thank you. All of that and more is going on my head when I consider this. It hugely changes the roleplaying environment and makes it something ugly in a lot of ways. Then there's people evaluating each other based on their points, not just what they're into. I don't want that to ever possibly even have a chance of being a thing either. But it will, because if points are connected to "I like your roleplay!" then people will use them for evaluating partners. Me, the dude who will have few points because he makes a point of avoiding all of this BS, will be kicked in the ass for it.

Let's keep in mind this suggestion is not actually the one that talks about upvoting/rewarding plays. That's something else, which is actually not controversial and popular.

Okay, I understand you don't like that. But what you're advocating is scrapping any kind of system entirely to cater to the sliver of people who would roleplay publicly, but not if there were points. It's a sliver so small that you're not even one of those affected. And if such a system encourages you to keep roleplaying privately as you have been doing...that's a-okay. The site should support all styles of play.

As for this forming cliques, that's going to happen regardless. As for people being elitist, that'll happen anyways. Roleplay isn't exactly a meritocracy, but people are only going to play with people they enjoy playing with.

As for people feeling unappreciated, that's the system we have right now. People can publicly post a roleplay, and the only way for a reader to give feedback is to send a personal message to them, something that's really intimidating and a lot of mental effort for people. Making it easier for a reader to immediately show appreciation is a good thing.

Let's keep in mind this suggestion is not actually the one that talks about upvoting/rewarding plays. That's something else, which is actually not controversial and popular.

That one has not garnered the same concern for me because it seems to be more about objectively gathering good examples of what an interest is about. A solid bondage story will be held up as that example. It is not about evaluating the roleplayers themselves or motivating them to be better.

If it is about the same things, that will be very bad and earn my objection.

The idea here as I take it is to:

• Track certain activities that you do on the site
• Reward those activities with points

I have expressed strong concern against displaying these points publicly, so this would just be another thing that you would fill up, like profile completion.

WA, points three and five of the initial list specifically talk about giving users "points" for both giving and receiving votes. While I have no issues with voting on role play being allowed, the introduction of a 'reward' for this voting seems like it would open the door to a lot more cheating than support or encouragement for actual and functional play.

Griz, while I know that elitism and clicks will happen, we do not need to actively facilitate and encourage them to happen. These tools would make it happen more quickly and more extremely. Even the idea of 'commissioning' role play with someone, seems really skeevy to me. It would turn the points into something of a monetary system, and some core of people would feel special and bloated for all the points they had, and would then charge large amounts for the right to play with them, perhaps even demanding upvotes and further playing the system.

Why do the core of people who currently play publically need the kudos points? It seems like this would be more for them than anything that would encourage others to do the same, and those people are already playing in public, so do not need further encouragement.

Okay, I understand you don't like that. But what you're advocating is scrapping any kind of system entirely to cater to the sliver of people who would roleplay publicly, but not if there were points. It's a sliver so small that you're not even one of those affected.

Thank you for understanding. But no, that sliver isn't necessarily small, and I would be affected. If the nature of the site changes because of some kind of point system, that is going to affect me regardless of how I engage with it. If it becomes a site currency, that would also affect me. If it changes the site atmosphere for the worse I'll hang up my hat and leave, disappointed.

And if such a system encourages you to keep roleplaying privately as you have been doing...that's a-okay. The site should support all styles of play.

That's not a-ok if I'm driven away from a side of the site I'd otherwise be genuinely interested with. I am interested in eventually publicly roleplaying.

The reason I'm resisting so much is I can see very well the impacts this could reasonably have and how they'd affect my engagement with the site, and that as above - this is all because of a feature we don't need! It is not worth it!

If you want people to come to public roleplays, we need to go back to the drawing board and have a discussion about that elsewhere.

As for people feeling unappreciated, that's the system we have right now. People can publicly post a roleplay, and the only way for a reader to give feedback is to send a personal message to them, something that's really intimidating and a lot of mental effort for people. Making it easier for a reader to immediately show appreciation is a good thing.

I can already get appreciation. I tell my partner after a roleplay about the fun I had and they open up with the same. Don't know what you're doing if you're feeling unappreciated.

Votes from the public are not the same thing as your partner saying thanks. Neither is them paying you with points and votes.

And there's that thing about not paying friends for favours because it could insult them - I don't want monetary exchange for my efforts, I want a thank you or a "that was great".

Discussion here is dying down.

The reason I'm resisting so much is I can see very well the impacts this could reasonably have and how they'd affect my engagement with the site, and that as above - this is all because of a feature we don't need! It is not worth it!

To be clear, we do have a problem in that very very few people are roleplaying publicly, making it very difficult for the site to seem active, making it very difficult to grow, making it very difficult for people to get new roleplay, making it very difficult for people to stay. This is a HUGE problem which should not and cannot be understated. This is the single biggest problem the site has right now.

So long as people get some kind of thing for making a roleplay public, we can at least add a small amount of incentive to sway someone who otherwise wouldn't make their play public because why would they? Some kind of --- private --- point reserve could help with this, particularly if there was some kind of bar to fill (like a level).

What we should avoid though is contributions which could be easily gamed or are encouraging the wrong things. We should not encourage people (constantly) to endorse things, as you can move your points around at any time! We should not reward post length because a perfect roleplay isn't determined by length. A theoretical roleplay endorse would have the same issues.

The end system might be something similar to achievements. But we need some kind of thing to encourage people to make something public, and then we need some kind of thing that gives users feedback that this is something that other people on the site like. I am not sure what those things are at this point, but I'm not certain a point system is that thing.

Obviously, this thread is rich enough to take quiet some time to read, but from the things I scanned and read, so far, my vote at this point is that I support a lot of what Velus suggested, especially with regards to how to develop a points system that encourages positive actions and minimizes what I would call “mindless collecting of points”; I support a lot of that except the part about not allowing upvotes for public roleplays.

If you're only rolelpaying for your partner and only care about their opinion, then you turn your roleplay private, and the issue is solved. On the other hand, if you make your roleplay public, then it's downright weird to not want people to express their own opinion about what they're reading, especially when you have already deprived them from negative expressions and only allowing positive encouragement! Facebook, for example, only allows “Likes”; and we're not even discussing downvotes here as far I can see, but upvotes. Who the heck hates upvotes and simultaneously wants their work available for the public?! Weirdest stance I can ever hear about ift I understood this accurately.

Imara: there's a difference between wanting and getting feedback on your roleplay, and wanting and getting upvotes that turn into a public point score and give you treadeble site currency. I object to the latter.

There's another suggestion to add a feature to public roleplays to let readers comment, if the participants choose to enable it. I can't find it at the moment. That one sounds healthy and good.

@Velus: request community feedback for roleplays (litphoria.com)

Something like this Velus? I tend to agree with you that a points system would be a bad thing. Getting comments of kudos on a role play would be fine by me, though.

Wrecked beat me to the link, lol.

Without ability to grant points to public roleplays, people who are not part of that roleplay have no way to show their appreciation. Though I doubt the frequency of public roleplays can be increased hugely IMO, even if rewarded, but I do support any ways to improve that situation. Maybe incentivise people making their roleplays public after they're finished with them? If finishing and being entirely done with them even occurs very often (storyline finding its conclusion or such), though in such case I would think marking how (story done, trailing off, swapped to next chapter/dilemma) it concluded being important for searching.

May, what if people could leave positive comments, rather than giving points?

We've actually already seen a pretty significant uptick in roleplays going public since they were put onto the front page. So far, all of the data I can possibly gather points to the idea that any kind of recognition will cause more people to make their roleplays public, which makes sense logically to me.

Yasu, comments are another suggestion, unrelated to this one.

Wrecked I know I was referencing another suggestion but May said:

Without ability to grant points to public roleplays, people who are not part of that roleplay have no way to show their appreciation

And I was mentioning that there are alternatives.

The comments instead of points is also issue of do you want to publicly give them? Like, points are easier to be just anonymous unlike comments. Comments can be more useful/interesting to those who actually are roleplaying tho, I can agree with that. But points are also more useful to people who don't have or don't want to say anything more insightful besides +1 (which I guess is odd considering the context, but still).

Right so, I have a public role play that seems to sit at the top. As we can see, there are actually very few that seem to sit among the top five, because these are the active users. The idea behind the points is to encourage more players to be active and post public role plays, right? It's the gamificatin of the site.

I can't do too much predicting myself. I can't really know, as no one can. I see short terms gains almost certainly. People will see the new shiny points, or buttons, or levels, and want them right away. And that is awesome.

Based on experience on other sites, though (A certain furry themed role playing site, and a certain large doll maker / social site) this creates resentment in the long term. When there are levels that cannot be achieved, those who canot get them will feel agry and cheated. If you had things like levels, people who were around for longer would get so many of them that others could not catch up. Even with badges and pretty little lolipops, if people can't get what others have they feel jipped. I was on the end of having items in both cases, and enjoying them... but I did not get as much pleasure from my shiny little signs of hard work, as others users got hurt and anger toward those things.

So short term gains (Yay!) but when people can't ever match the highest levels, or can't even get the 'been here forever' badge, do you take them away from those who earned them, or tell the newer user base to suck it up? I agree that something to encourage users would be awesome. I am just not sure that levels or even achievemts are the best course.

I'd love comments or little kudos on my rp, just to know that readers are enjoying what I write... but I don't want to make others feel bad if they do not get the same kudos when they make the effort to support public play.

Don't apply the points to the character/account in public manner and it should be fine. Roleplays accumulating such overtime would be fine up to a point, or just show/rank them based on how many they've gained them in the last week or month or whatever, just not all time. All time highest points is bound to give skewed results on long term (I've seen this happen on other sites where clearly popular thing Now can't ever compete with a thing that was added there long ago). And if you Must have publicly seen point/+1 system, make it drain itself over time, so if the account/roleplay/whatever becomes inactive, the publicly seen points vanish, but you can maybe yourself (the author/participant) see the all time score. I dunno. Pixiv isn't quite good example to compare to, but they allow you voting on the same thing every day probably for this kind of purpose, where the votes are only in effect for a short time before they are no longer considered for scoring what's popular or good Now.

I've had cause recently to think on this again. At the beginning of this I responded based on charged emotion and didn't calm down and give myself time to think away from it — I'm not happy about that, and I've only since developed habits to deal with that better. Griz, thanks for handling me OK in that state.

There were several points brought up in here about how they could be used. I've scrolled through to try to regather them, point out if I missed something critical. I've deliberately left redundancy in here for different ways they were brought up:

• Reward doing good stuff. (Examples given: endorse or post feedback, make a large roleplay, cast or receive upvotes on roleplays. Implies roleplay voting in that last bit.)
• There to be shown off.
• Given to other players because you like them.
• Show how active you are in the community.
• Trade points: show appreciation, commission roleplays, use as fake money.
• Motivate people to have public roleplays.

There were a bunch of concerns brought up about the effects of these together. I don't intend to bring those up again.

Here's the thing: I think having something achieving each of the above points is fine in isolation. Problems arise because litpoints as proposed are/were trying to do all of that at once. It shouldn't. Even aside from concerns brought up above, some of these are counterproductive to do together — it no longer corresponds to how active you are if it's also a traded currency.

So, let's separate this stuff out:

• Reward mechanic to reward people for public roleplaying and other public activity, which contributes to site liveliness and health: Awesome, yes.
• Reward mechanic for doing constructive things around the site like interacting with feedback. Also great, yes, let's do this.
• A feedback/evaluation system for roleplays. Also a good idea. We have at least one suggestion for handling that.
• A silly roleplay currency that has no inherent value at all. Sounds great. If we have wallets of some kind, the amount of currency we have should be kept secret though.
• A method of showing appreciation to your partners. Some kind of feedback, sure, including verbal. Shouldn't be money though. (Do you pay your friend-with-benefits or significant other when the sex is great? Could you imagine doing that? If we handle it with exchange of currency, mutual appreciation is zero-sum anyway.)
• Something to act as bragging rights. OK, depending on what it is.
• Something that somehow quantifies your site activity. OK, if it's reasonably reflective.

Let's consider this stuff, where litpoints are one option for each of these.

• A reward mechanic for positive site activity and constructive behaviour: points (non-currency) and badges are common solutions available to us. (The bragging rights & site activity thing sounded secondary and as not the main point, but whatever reward mechanic we could provide could serve for both.) This sounds like it's what the the original main drive of Litpoints was. We should focus on that and get away from the other stuff.
• Feedback/appreciation, to partners and from the public, can be done in positive-sum methods: free upvoting and feedback comments are options.
• Lastly, a silly roleplay currency mechanic.

There are some fundamental disconnections that should be maintained between these things. Here's why:

Currency disconnected from roleplay feedback: This means you're not paying people for their roleplay or getting paid as the primary mode of feedback.

Currency disconnected from bragging rights: How rich or poor you are shouldn't automatically be a bragging right. It also shouldn't be a judgement criteria, which is why I suggest keeping it private. It's a good thing our real life bank accounts and net worth are secret. (Also, y'know, begging's a thing, so let's not put our wealth out there. So is theft, let's not make the people with lots of silly currency people want into security targets.)

Currency disconnected from the reward mechanic: Our reward mechanic can and should be more meaningful than getting paid. (Ok, maybe people can get silly currency for certain site contributions, but it shouldn't be the main drive. But, alternately, roleplay currency could be handled separately within each room, with each room deciding whether it has a currency, what it's called, and how it's earned - if it's not just generated by room staff. We can explore that separately.)

Roleplay feedback disconnected from reward mechanism: We should be encouraging people to roleplay without a care in the world, and just have fun in their own way. Whether we opt into public feedback and what we do with it should be immaterial, as some people aren't comfortable with that. The reward mechanism, however, must have two qualities to do its job: it must be desired by users, and it must pressure people into certain behaviours (the doing of which gives them the reward). As an example, profile completion is a reward mechanism of this nature.
Applying our reward mechanism to feedback will mean users feel pressure to opt into feedback (lest they miss out on the desired thing), and pressure to do whatever gives them the thing (such as, preoccupying themselves with the crowd's fun, engineering things that will give them good feedback, etc). All of this means we can't roleplay without a care in the world, with our own fun being of the utmost importance — we also face pressure which we either cave to or shrug off. Our repeated feedback on profile completion (including some not on the search such as un and dos) suggests people have a lot of trouble ignoring that mechanism and are heavily influenced by it, and I don't see why it would be any different in the case of another reward/pressure mechanism. For me personally, this would kill my ability to enjoy roleplays fully and relax and be intimate with my roleplaying partner.
People can want feedback and do things to get good feedback, but we shouldn't apply our purpose-built pressure mechanism to it.

(I don't have a clear reason to separate appreciation from bragging rights. I'll let that get brought up separately..)

So, yeah, feedback, currency, and reward mechanisms - three good ideas, let's keep them separate. Points could make a good reward mechanism, badges too. The currency could be called litpoints, so could the reward points, but both should not be one and the same.

I should clarify... When I say "So, let's separate this stuff out" I also mean without any presupposition the means to achieving those things will be litpoints. That list is just exploring those things in isolation.

The topic of how the profile completion was handled by some users of the site is an interesting one. I did not really anticipate people would care that much to get to the higher levels of the profile completion since it was, well, tedious and not easy, and since very few profiles did before. But lo, we had a lot of people who were suddenly quite interested in getting the thing just because the site presented it as a goal to be done.

So that should be kept in mind whenever we talk about system gamification. We already have a history of people taking the gamification very seriously, so it should not be done lightly.

I'd rather not have points. The badges thing has merits, but I'm still a little leery.

Whether points have that effect or not depends on what they mean and how they're handled. Same goes for badges. Like achievements in games, those don't create elitism or have-vs-have-not either.

Badges on consoles kinda do that exactly. There is a good deal put into comparing them and what one person has or does not have.

So under what circumstances does that have a negative effect?

New users feeling they can never compete with people who have a ton of points, trophies, etc.

We've reviewed this and decided to decline this in its current form. There's a lot of useful ideas here, in the feedback and in discussion, which we may use in future development.

Currency itself, if we have anything like that, will be limited to roleplays and/or series.