The current setup (with exactly three very large prizes for posts and many more small prizes for comments) does seem a bit odd to me in that I expect it means many of the best contributions to the forum not eligible for prizes. I can easily imagine that there are excellent posts that are better than many or all of the awarded comments but not quite good enough to make the top three, and these posts can’t currently win anything.
I feel it might be good to permit excellent runner-up posts to win comment prizes as well, or otherwise to allow these posts to win small prizes.
Yes, this is plausible. Any prize-awarding system has to make tradeoffs between the size of a prize, the number of prizes, the bar for recognition, and so on. It’s good to have this feedback that we may be overemphasizing the amount of the top prizes, compared to the value of recognizing more posts.
The current setup (with exactly three very large prizes for posts and many more small prizes for comments) does seem a bit odd to me in that I expect it means many of the best contributions to the forum not eligible for prizes. I can easily imagine that there are excellent posts that are better than many or all of the awarded comments but not quite good enough to make the top three, and these posts can’t currently win anything.
I feel it might be good to permit excellent runner-up posts to win comment prizes as well, or otherwise to allow these posts to win small prizes.
Yes, this is plausible. Any prize-awarding system has to make tradeoffs between the size of a prize, the number of prizes, the bar for recognition, and so on. It’s good to have this feedback that we may be overemphasizing the amount of the top prizes, compared to the value of recognizing more posts.
It might be good to have a small number of runner of up posts without cash prizes. That would certainly help motivate me to post more.