But it has everything to do with gamification. They went for the standard stuff in my opinion: leaderboards. Self-determination theory helps you to go beyond that, for example. I stated that in my initial comment.

Moreover, I'm a fit at solving this problem and never have been able to. I'm literally using 10 to 20% of my skills and here I see a blog post that highlights 80% of my background. I think that is relevant, albeit tangentially since I'm probably not the only one.

Some specific thoughts on leaderboards and points that come to mind (just free flowing here):

We've had countless of lectures on how to do more than just leaderboards and I'm disappointed that Duolingo mostly went the leaderboard route. I've thought countless of times "what's the value of a point?" And came to the conclusion it's about social comparison. This is why competition works so well. For example, HN karma points are a vague proxy for how much the HN community values your comments (more precisely, but not precisely enough ;-) It values your combination of: comment_frequency * inherent_comment_upvote, where an inherent_comment_upvote is a proxy for inherent_comment_value_according_to_site_guidelines_and_human_biases). People care about that, which is why some HN'ers like to score for points or why feedback on downvotes is asked. In this particular case, I ask that as well precisely because of the fundamental mechanism behind it: I feel devalued while I think I'm pointing out something interesting. So there's a natural inclination to ask why. It's not about the points, it's about the message behind it: "your comment is irrelevant and distracting". Anyway, that's a small view on why I think why karma points on HN have a particular motivating effect, which is also relevant since it's a gamification mechanic (which is, in part, what the post is about).