The reason is pretty much the same reason Instagram doesn’t remove the “like” feature and Delta Chat doesn’t remove the “react” feature. About badges: basically like “achievements” in games, plus the “share” badge lets you basically “track”, notify you of how popular certain links / topics are. Feels nice, gives some feedback. I don’t think I have anything special to say about this.
Well I guess that particular message wasn’t of great value, because I see it on every Discourse forum I join. It wasn’t a big deal. Takes 5 seconds to dismiss.
Actually I received that too, and also one about “You’re the new user of the month” I forgot about that.
I’m not following, sorry. The “engagement reward” notifications I was talking about are not likes and reactions, but the messages from the “system” user and the notifications about earning badges. Could you elaborate on what you mean here?
Earning a badge like “nice share” tells you that a certain link with ?u=wofwca was clicked by 25 different users, right? So the usefulness is about having a window into the metrics that Discourse collects, which I’m guessing are not otherwise accessible? This is actually interesting because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to use badges in this way. But once you earn a badge, you don’t keep getting notified when other links meet the conditions for the badge, do you?