At the risk of becoming a link blog, anyone thinking about social software should go and read Dare Obasanjo’s latest post: Participation as Social Capital: The Fundamental Flaw of Social News Sites. I think the most telling part for me was:

Although turning participation in your online community into a game complete with points and a high score table is a good tactic to gain an initial set of active users, it does not lead to a healthy or diverse community in the long run. Digg and Slashdot both eventually learned this and have attempted to fix it in their own ways. The trouble with starting a new social site is always in bootstrapping. How do you get enough people using the site to start making the social aspects actually pay off? Ranking users is basically the default answer because it works so well with even a few users – it’s easy to get to the top and you feel just as special about getting there so you hang around and try and stay there so it helps to build the initial users of the site.

It seems to me that you need to either find a better way to build up early users or pick precisely the right time to get rid of your user score board. The ideal situation is the find related benefits for users that contribute. For example, uploading your photos to Flickr rewards photographers by having other users comment and provide feedback to help them improve (doesn’t help with getting bootstrapped of course since there’s noone around to comment). If users can improve at whatever the site is about by contributing to the site you have an in-built reward system that keeps the community focussed instead of distracting them.

The only example I can think of is LiveMocha and that’s because it’s a social network with a point rather than just a social network. You go there specifically to learn a new language and the social network and community just helps you with that goal. Social News sites I suppose have the aim of collating relevant news but that’s not really much of a point and there’s certainly no incentive to contribute – most people are there to consume the news, not filter it or create it.