People give kudos for lots of reasons. I give them out of agreement, encouragement, to recognize a great post, or to welcome a new member's first post. Kudos are a lightweight way to engage with your fellow Local Guides. They don't result in points or status. I don't think we need to tell people how they should be using them.
Philip's point about them being a signal for other spammy behavior is noted though. As our community policy says, Local Guides who add low-quality / spammy / fake information to the Map may lose their LG status or even be banned from contributing to Google Maps at all.
People give kudos for lots of reasons. I give them out of agreement, encouragement, to recognize a great post, or to welcome a new member's first post. Kudos are a lightweight way to engage with your fellow Local Guides. They don't result in points or status. I don't think we need to tell people how they should be using them.
Philip's point about them being a signal for other spammy behavior is noted though. As our community policy says, Local Guides who add low-quality / spammy / fake information to the Map may lose their LG status or even be banned from contributing to Google Maps at all.
There are lots of guides around, tips for reviews, for photos for edits - how about a Google Modgives some quick feedback on giving kudos?
The help section says: "Kudos is a content rating system that lets you vote for the messages you think are the most useful or important." It's great to give a post a thumbs up but is the system being abused and therefore rendered somewhat debased?
There are quite a few LGs who are simply giving kudos to gain a badge. They're easy to spot by looking at their Connect profile and you can see they have simply opened a thread and kudo'd every post, then opened another thread and done the same. One LG recently gave 500 kudo in four hours - probably in attempt to gain kudos back.
@TraciC or @Corrie are you aware this kind of kudos 'spamming' is very regular, do you have advice to LGs engaged in such activity?
You are entitled to your own opinions and should of course only do as you please, but I have to say that it seems "over the top" to assume you could get banned for the normal use of kudos.
Yes, spamming is something that is not permitted in this community and the LG program in general, and would have consequences, but why do you think that giving kudos would be perceived as such?
Breaking the community or program rules can in some cases be done unknowingly, although one could say that it is our responsibility to educate ourselves about them, as we accepted the terms and conditions when we signed up. I do not get the impression that members of the LG Team are trigger happy when it comes to banning people and trust that each case is evaluated carefully.
There have been examples of banned Local Guides that did not understand why they were banned and came back to ask for help and clarification. Of course, these cases are handled by Google privately, so there is nothing we can learn from these examples. So yes, warn people to take care and follow the rules, but also let's not get paranoid.
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