Should there be more people on the leaderboard?

My impression is that prolific posters show up on the Top Contributors list more often than low-post-count, high-karma posters. And, of course, worst of all they don't get ranked by positive karma percentage, or by karma per post. Somebody posting a good article in Main seems to be a less common cause of showing up on the list than high output.

For that reason, I don't see it as having a positive motivational effect either. I pay loads of attention to my positive karma percentage, none at all to karma in absolute terms. If I wanted to be on the list, my best bet would be to chime in on everything no matter how low-value my opinion actually is – which appears to be a poor and occasionally frustrating use of my time. Quality, not quantity.

Embarrassingly, I never realized the leaderboard existed and I've read LW from day one.

The first question would be: "Why do we have the board in the first place?"

Do we have it because we believe it provides a significant motivation effect?

I'm wondering what the optimal number of people on the leaderboard would be.

From a usability point of view, 15 sounds about right to me. There is already a lot of other stuff on the side bar.

I suspect that if there were 20 people on the leaderboard, that would increase the motivation effect, without significantly devaluing being on the leaderboard itself.

Maybe, if the point is to increase motivation there might be better ways. I don't know if these are any good, but here's some example ideas:

• Designated appreciators - people who try to highlight the good parts in posts and offer constructive advice on how to improve them.
• Month in review post - this would be a post that contains the authors favorite posts last month with short abstracts of the posts.
• A more flexible feedback system.
• Some designated (nice) users who offer to give advice if people message them.
• Some designated collaborators - if you have some ideas for a post, but don't know enough about the subject you can message some users who have volunteered and have knowledge in that particular area. If they have time, they can help you find what areas to look into further and offer advice on how to improve your post.
• Suggested articles post - a post which provides some ideas that look interesting and haven't really been explored thoroughly yet. This would be good for people who don't have any ideas on what to write for a post.
• Perhaps, integrate the karma awards for the users who volunteer to take on certain roles.

I think it might be nice to try putting 20 people on the leaderboard. I myself have never been on the leaderboard as far as I know, although I have been on LW for a long time. (I actually have no idea what my name recognition status is in the community, relative to the average. Do people think, "Oh, a post by moridinamael, I know that guy," or have I wasted energy trying to establish an identity here?) A slightly extended leadboard would allow more people to gauge their relative position as a contributor in the community at a given time.

I guess the motivational effect of the leaderboard is biggest for people near its cutoff. I guess that increasing the number of leaderboard slots means a small overall motivation increase (good, I guess), and a shift of motivation from higher up to lower down (not so good, I guess).

The other point of the leaderboard is to help readers get a sense of who's who. A longer leaderboard contains more information, but I suspect is less digestible.

None of this seems like an obvious win (nor a big loss).

I think the top contributor list could be even shorter (to save space) but a link to a more complete list (via the unused header link) would be nice in that case.

The answer is 42.

(But, seriously, I think 15 is fine. I'd even be fine reducing it to 10 (username is currently #12)).