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Profile badges

A collectible badge for each completed quiz, shown in the profile and never tied to a result.

Decision: ⚪ idea

Context

Raised by Oskar Barcz on Discord on 2026-10-06, with this short as the inspiration. There is no design and no product documentation for it yet.

The idea as proposed:

  • A badge per quiz - finishing a quiz gives the taker a badge that is visible in their profile.
  • A collection - badges add up, so a profile shows how many quizzes someone has been through.
  • No result inside - a badge does not represent the outcome. Only the date it was earned is stored, so that it cannot be linked back to the answers.

It sits between two existing docs. Gamification rewards the taker inside one quiz; a badge would reward them across quizzes. Accounts are deliberately a creator and administration feature that a taker may never need; a badge would be the first thing an account gives a taker.

Badges are also what early access rollout would count.

Opportunity

  • A reason to come back - today nothing connects one finished quiz to the next one, and a collection does.
  • A reason for a taker to have an account - it answers the "two half-features" risk in accounts, where a profile with nothing in it looks broken.
  • It fits the product we already have - the reward is attached to finishing, which is the behaviour the whole questionnaire is built to protect.
  • It gives us a returning-user signal - a count of badges is a way to recognise loyal takers without knowing anything about their views.
  • Cheap to show off - a badge is shareable in a way a political result often is not.

Risk

  • It is a record of who took what - the rule in privacy and legal is that an account never connects a person to their views, and a badge ties an identity to a specific quiz at a specific time.
  • A date can be enough to join the two - an anonymous answer set and a badge created at the same moment can be matched by timing alone, so "only the date is stored" has to mean a coarse date and an award that is not written in the same step as the answers.
  • Taking a quiz can itself be telling - a badge for a quiz on a sensitive topic says something about its holder even with no result attached.
  • It asks takers to register - the funnel has no sign-up wall today, and a reward that only exists with an account pulls in the other direction.
  • Public profiles are a new surface - a visible collection is the start of the social graph that accounts were written to avoid.
  • Collecting can beat answering - people who click through for the badge make every dataset downstream worse.