I think that there could be a middle way between this. Like, authors get titles (I'd assume this is what the OP meant with 'badges', I don't think we need a separate badge system. Just use the titles for that since they're already in place.) for the number of their readers. With reviews, I could see how giving titles for reaching specific numbers might encourage abuse of the system. But giving some incentive for writing reviews might not be bad either.
Like, if I look at the first page of stories ranked by popularity, some stories don't even get ten reviews, others barely have one or two (despite having 100k-200k words so not being some kind of new-ish hit). Heck, we have a full 43 pages (!) of
finished stories without a single review. You can check that through the series finder:
https://www.scribblehub.com/series-finder/?sf=1&cp=completed&sort=reviews&order=asc&pg=44 (This is sorted by series status completed, reviews ascending, and links to the page where we finally get stories with at least one review.)
So IMHO, reviews should be a bit more encouraged. I'm not sure if titles/badges would be the way but I think it could be
one possibility to give a try. Personally, I could imagine two ways that this might work:
- Giving readers a title for having written at least one review. Most readers would likely do this anyway and if somebody hasn't, I'd think they would simply go and review something recently read or something they like a lot if they really want the badge/title. This would not lead to a lot of engagement but if it encourages at least a few people, I think it would be helpful as a start.
- Make it qualitative instead by giving titles for certain numbers of well-liked, existing reviews (ETA: meaning, whenever a review or a specified number of reviews receives a certain amount of likes) since those should be higher in quality and have likely helped other readers decide on what they want to read. Of course, we'd need to decide at which point a review could be considered worthy of that. (ETA: This might be complicated by the fact that we can't dislike reviews as likes would simply accumulate over time.)
Now, I'd personally also love to see something that encourages readers to write first reviews on a story (because, again, we have over forty pages of non-reviewed finished stories ...) but I'd say that this once again encourages abuse of the system, unfortunately. At the very least, I can't think of a good way to implement that.
