Tipjoy starts giving out gold stars

Ha, I was just working on designing one, though for a game.

You know how current-generation video- and computer-games have "achievements"? I was imagining at one point that there would be a website where people could set certain "achievements" up (just an objective list of criteria for a certain way to do anything in any context), others could earn them, and neutral third parties could determine if they were, in fact, earned, and hand out the actual (virtual) goods.

They would be nothing more than an icon and a short phrase, displayed on a centralized service for verifiability, perhaps linked to a description and the "evidence" presented to the third party. Still, it's just the sort of thing I could see people raving over.

It would make life itself into the world's biggest, distributed, MMO. Rather than manually specifying achievements on the service for doing things in actual games, though, then submitting evidence in the form of a video and signed by the anti-cheating service running on your computer at the time, the game could just integrate its own achievements into the service using an API, automatically assigning people the achievements it's sure about. (Of course, this doesn't mean that people couldn't still create their own manual ones.)

Oddly, this could then become a trust and verification scheme (<College Board> achievement "College Degree" unlocked!) that could be attached to, say, an OpenID identity. It would be a qualitative, rather than quantitative, measure, though, though you could get an "over 2500 HN karma" achievement. This service would then be a sort of "meta-wuffie" that correlates different, subjective trust ratings without trying to make any linear, objective assessment from them.

I wonder if incorporating TipJoy into HN as a karma alternative would increase the quality of comments.

we can build this pretty easily, but I don't know arc. If anyone wants to volunteer to help build it, you can get a rev share too.

pg seemed open to the idea the other day