Skip to content

Greg Lastowka

Play & Reputation Economies

Amazon.com has had, for about a year, a beta feature/forum called Askville.com. According to the web site:

What is Askville?

Askville is a place where you can share and discuss knowledge
with other people by asking and answering questions on any topic. It’s a
fun place to meet others with similar interests to you and a place where you
can share what you know.

The idea of an online Q&A community is hardly new, of course. There’s the defunct Google Answers, the non-defunct Yahoo Answers, and there’s even things like USENET, that virtual community where netizens still share and discuss knowledge, ask and answer questions, etc.

What’s intrigues me about Askville is not the substance of the exchange, but the incentive structure they have wrapped around it. There are experience points and Quest gold that can be earned by answering questions. For instance, if you look at the charts on that FAQ page, you’ll see that in order to be a level 4 user on Askville, and get a 20 gold payout bonus, you’ll need to have 1,500-2,999 experience points.

More on what I find interesting about this after the fold…

Read More »Play & Reputation Economies

Yale & Reputation Economies

The Green with the Old Campus in the background

Like several other folks who blog, I went up to Yale’s Reputation Economies conference last weekend. Plenty of others have offered thoughts about the conference (including Frank here). Eric Goldman has his own thoughts and a good list of links to other blogs and Rebecca Tushnet very helpfully posted panel-by-panel summaries.

It was an interesting conference, but before offering brief reactions, I should say that the most interesting thing for me was seeing Yale again. It was the first time I had been back to New Haven in over a decade, which was too long. I went up with my father (who is Y ’63) and we walked around the campus quite a bit. Unfortunately, I missed the two big things I was looking forward to. My old residential college, Jonathan Edwards (sux et veritas) is being renovated and the incomparable Doodle was closed. But I got to see the rest of the campus, and though it was slightly more plush, it was somehow pleasant to see how much was the same, at least in the vicinity of JE and the law school.

Yale Law School

Though I rarely stepped foot in the law school back in the late 80’s, it is, like most of the rest of Yale, a truly gorgeous building. It was so striking that it made me wonder what influence that type of architecture might have on the legal education that takes place there. Personally, I often associate knowledge with places. Some of the plays of Shakespeare are hard to think of apart from some of the buildings where I read them and listed to lectures about them. So I imagine that some of the Yale Law students must associate their initial forays into Holmes and Cardozo with the Gothic grandeur of the building.

Come to think of it, a disproportionate number of Yale law students become professors. I suppose we shouldn’t ascribe that to architecture alone, but the school does seem a bit like a cathedral of learning. Might that not influence the way students perceive the object of study? (A point of comparison suggested by a friend: what would Harry Potter’s education have been divorced from the imagined architecture of Hogwarts?)

More after the fold…

Read More »Yale & Reputation Economies