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Not sure this goes in the spirit of the guidelines:

"Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion."

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, the entire concept of badges is so bizarre to me, but I'm old. There was another post some time back that would scan a user's post history and tally up how many points posts made using various reward levels. It was an obvious gamification with achievement type badges. I really hope that the person that did that gain valuable skills on how to use a 3rd party API and used it as a learning project. Other than that, what's the point?
There was a Launch HN yesterday [0] that featured something similar on their landing page, which caught my attention as it was the first time I'd seen such a badge.

Are there other projects floating around I've somehow never seen before? The justwords.ai badge has a different look and feel to it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39591972

it seems like this is only for YC companies to launch
I don't like how this feels - kind of like Product Hunt, Digg, Reddit, etc, and the implications of the "power users" there too. I'm not sure this is something to encourage.
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I *really* don't want to see us encourage gamifying HN submissions. Something can be highly ranked for a myriad of reasons, including for technically controversial ones (e.g different philosophies in solving specific technical challenges).

A discussion here is a discussion, not a selling point. Makes me less willing to contribute to conversation about a product if the parent company promotes in this manner, though I might be in the minority there.