Google News adds Achievement Badges

Achievement Badge: Add achievement badges to everything.

That was my second reaction. My first reaction was "Die in a fire."

Soon everything will have a badge! I'll get a badge for emptying the trash. A badge for adding a bookmark. A badge for gaining a badge. It'll be like the boy scouts, except completely devoid of value.

Seriously though, a badge for reading news? That I can share with people? And why would anyone care? Giving someone a badge for something that requires little to no skill to achieve isn't rewarding. Especially if everyone has them! It isn't something to flaunt. It doesn't even boost my ego.

Not that it won't work if done in a way that causes neurosis in users. Effectively that's how modern "social" games work.

The Problem with badges, Farmville-dollars (or whatever they are called) and similar things is that they are unreal things in an unreal world. Unless there's anything useful that can be done with it (say, like with StackOverflow-Karma that may help to connect people to open source projects or get a new job), I wouldn't bother.

There was some discussion on this a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2765834

I could see it being interesting if you got achievements for scoring highly on comprehension tests on the news stories you read. But not if they're just awarding the badges for generating page hits.