Show HN: I built a gamified forum to help hackers fund each other

For gamification to actually provide benefits to game players, the game designers need to first be truly vested in improving aspects for the players of the game, not for meta goals outside the game. The second you see a process turned into some game/point system, ask yourself how that system could benefit the owner/designer of that system. Chances are, a meta goal exists and some sort of resource extraction from players exist (time, money, effort, knowledge, etc.).

If you understand a game very well and a weakness exists, it's possible for the players to extract winnings outside the game back to themselves but they need to understand the metagame and a weakness needs to exist that is realistically attainable. Game designers/owners are at an advantage because the game designers are often positioned to patch the rules of the game as weaknesses are discovered and exploited while the game players have no such power to adjust the rules.

When you've got good feedback loops in place and clear progress updates, being flashy without substance week after week just wouldn't work.

For example, our first winner plans to spend their funds as such:

"I'll be able to pay for the CI/CD pipeline for the next billing cycle, this lets me route the amount planned for that cost into the referral program which will, hopefully, help the platform acquire more users."

Essentially by choosing this project as their winner, the community has enabled the startup to cover some of their core operational costs so they can experiment with a new marketing/sales channels. This is exactly what we were hoping HackerStash could do :)

At face value 'points' can lead to distorted incentives, but we're working hard to ensure that altruistic behaviour is most rewarded. Second to altruism is evidencing clear progress in your own project, with some big features coming in the next few weeks to support that. In fact I'd say the later is our current weakness but not for lack of attention, just we've decided we'll learn and iterate faster with more eyeballs on the product, users in the contest etc.

Thanks so much for the feedback, also glad to hear you like the UI!

We have some basic weekly challenges right now that help boost your score to incentivise community feedback (these are only be visible to users). Adding competitions is not something I'd thought about, but it's a fantastic idea.