#buildresponsibly

At REVER HOMES, we believe safety isn’t just a rule — it’s a responsibility. From PPE checks to regular audits, every step we take ensures our people and projects stay protected. Because a safe site builds the strongest structures.

In the construction industry, the spotlight on sustainability has never been brighter. Nowhere is this more evident than in the United Kingdom, where environmental compliance has become a cornerstone of responsible construction practices. In this blog post, we will delve deeper into the intricacies of environmental compliance for UK construction projects, exploring key regulations, industry…

by Asha

Hey Hopscotchers!

Last week we removed the "Popular" tab from our community page, and since you are all builders too, we'd like to share our thinking with you.

A "Popular" tab is common on user-generated-content platforms like Hopscotch. Initially, it seemed like an effective and simple way to showcase high quality projects. Members would like projects and the most liked projects would rise to the top.

But by designing a system that prized high "like" counts, what naturally followed were projects aimed at purely gaining "likes".

Some examples:

"If you give me 500 likes, I will make Minecraft" (a false promise)

"If I don't get to the top of popular, my parents will take my iPad away"

"If you don't give me "likes", I'll report your project"

Yikes!

These projects had minimal content and programming, and our system design choices occasionally brought out meanness.

Most importantly, competition reduced collaboration, one of the most effective and fun ways to learn.

As builders of something that other people will use, it's important to think about the short and long-term impact of our work. What long-term lessons will our users take away from our tool? What behaviors are we encouraging? What behaviors are we discouraging?

Thinking through these questions, we decided to replace "Popular" with a tab called "Most Branched" ("branching" is when someone takes your code and adds to it).

We did this for two reasons:

Branching is a generative action for the community. With branching, the end of one person's project is the beginning for someone else, so this cycle of creation and play can continue to build on itself indefinitely. Liking, while a positive reinforcement for the author, doesn't have the same rich and productive benefit for the community. Further, taken to extremes, competition for "likes" can be degenerative and negative for the community.

Branching is actually a better indicator of quality than liking because it typically requires more effort on the part of the brancher. If you're branching a project, it's likely you want to look "under the hood" and learn from the code or you want to share your ideas and add to the project.

So what happened after we made the change?

For starters, "Most Branched" has surfaced an actual version of Minecraft :), but more generally, it has encouraged inventive, fun and more productive interactions among members.

Now we are seeing:

"Here's a webpage template. Free for anyone to use"

"How to make a wave. Yours to copy"

A template to create a platform game

We at Hopscotch have been amazed and thrilled with the creativity and collaboration that is happening.

And importantly, we've learned the importance of thinking through the potential consequences of our decisions. Before we introduce new things we ask ourselves:

What behaviors are we encouraging?

Taken to an extreme, how will these changes impact our community?

Most importantly, what lessons will our users take away?

So as you're Hopscotching or building anything that others will use, take time to think through the side-effects of your decisions, especially those decisions that seem small because they are easy to implement or seem like no-brainers because they have been done many times before.