Calling out a user positively
I know that you're not supposed to call out a user with negative intentions, but if you call out a user with positive intentions (i.e. praising said user or complimenting them for their hard work), is that still against the rules?
5 Comments
It's a tough question now that Activity Stream is gone. I'd love to hear what a moderator has to say.
In the past, this kind of thing lead to a lot of clutter on the boards and way, way too much cliquey popularity angling, which morphed into monstrous threads upon threads of collective back-patting by small groups. However, now that there is in fact no way to do this outside of the forum, I wonder...
Dcarl1 has laid out the problem in congratulating someone. Is it prohibited in an of itself? No. It is prohibited once it becomes spam. Which, we know is a highly nuanced concept on Duolingo. Are you able to read my comment in This discussion? I go a bit into the nuance of defining spam here. When congratulations become too numerous and low quality, they will be spam. What is too numerous? As is I see maybe only two or three a month, usually people are congratulating Duolingo. When a new course is released, we see an uptick in congrats post thanking the volunteer teams for their hard work. I like seeing these sprinkled here and there because staff and volunteers work really hard. But, more than just a couple total a month would likely sour the community to kudos posts, inviting down votes. In fact, it is likely that more than that are already posted but that the community down votes them out of sight, deeming them clutter.
