Context. GitHub has introduced a new gamification element through personal achievements, whereby badges are unlocked and displayed on developers' personal profile pages in recognition of their development activities. Objective. In this paper, we present an exploratory analysis using mixed methods to study the diffusion of personal badges in GitHub, in addition to the effects and reactions to their introduction. Method. First, we conduct an observational study by mining longitudinal data from more than 6,000 developers and performed correlation and regression analysis. Then, we conduct a survey and analyze over 300 GitHub community discussions on the topic of personal badges to gauge how the community responded to the introduction of the new feature. Results. We find that most of the developers sampled own at least a badge, but we also observe an increasing number of users who choose to keep their profile private and opt out of displaying badges. Besides, badges are generally poorly correlated with developers' qualities and dispositions such as timeliness and desire to collaborate. We also find that, except for the Starstruck badge (reflecting the number of followers), their introduction does not have an effect. Finally, the reaction of the community has been in general mixed, as developers find them appealing in principle but without a clear purpose and hardly reflecting their abilities in the current form. Conclusions. We provide recommendations to GitHub platform designers on how to improve the current implementation of personal badges as both a gamification mechanism and as sources of reliable cues of ability for developers' assessment

翻译：背景。GitHub 通过个人成就引入了一种新的游戏化元素，即徽章会被解锁并显示在开发者的个人资料页面上，以表彰他们的开发活动。目标。在本文中，我们采用混合方法进行探索性分析，研究个人徽章在 GitHub 中的传播情况，以及其引入带来的影响和反应。方法。首先，我们通过挖掘超过6000名开发者的纵向数据进行观察性研究，并进行了相关性和回归分析。然后，我们开展了一项调查，并分析了超过300个关于个人徽章主题的 GitHub 社区讨论，以评估社区对这一新功能引入的反应。结果。我们发现，大多数被抽样的开发者至少拥有一个徽章，但我们也观察到越来越多的用户选择将其资料设为私密并选择不显示徽章。此外，徽章通常与开发者的素质（如及时性和协作意愿）相关性较弱。我们还发现，除了 Starstruck 徽章（反映关注者数量）外，其他徽章的引入并未产生影响。最后，社区的反应总体上是喜忧参半的，开发者认为它们原则上具有吸引力，但缺乏明确目的，且在当前形式下难以反映其能力。结论。我们向 GitHub 平台设计者提供建议，说明如何改进当前个人徽章的实施，使其既作为一种游戏化机制，又能成为开发者评估中可靠的能力信号来源。