An important part of building a habit-forming product is finding the right reward mechanic. In May 2007 a Q&A website named Mahalo utilized a special incentive to get users to ask and answer questions: Money. People who submitted a question offered a bounty in the form of a virtual currency, the best response received the bounty, and could be exchanged for real money. At its high point, 14.1 million users visited the site monthly. But over time, users began to lose interest. As Mahalo struggled to retain users, another Q&A site began to boom: Quora . Unlike Mahalo, Quora didn’t offer money as a reward. So why have users remained highly engaged with Quora? Because people did not want to use a Q&A site to make money. Quora instituted an upvoting system that reports user satisfaction with answers and provides a steady stream of social feedback. Quora’s social rewards have proven more attractive than Mahalo’s monetary rewards. Only by understanding what truly matters to users can a company correctly match the right reward to their intended behavior. #Hooked …see more