>But now the quality of the questions and answers is worse
I see a lot of new users digging up 10 year old questions and cloning answers. They've really hit a spam problem that's difficult to solve.
I'm not sure that people giving good answers and help are well matched by a system designed for people who like "leveling up". I think that system pulls in a mismatched crowd over time, too focused on the game goal.
The solution creating a match is supposed to be what you get the points for leveling up for. However, that does not really remove the mismatch, it just covers it up a bit. You _will_ get, at least for a time, a lot of people who focus on quality to get ahead. Over time you will get more and more people focusing on just the points and the levels for their own sake though, who start cheating the system. I think gamification might, over time, slowly erode the target it wanted to achieve, even if/when it starts out doing well.
Of course, all of it happens in a context. Why are there so many people chasing after such fake "power" and "fame" in the first place? Are so many at least somewhat qualified people (on the Internet and with more than basic programming knowledge) that bored and dissatisfied with their local situation to chase purely virtual achievements?
They shouldn't have entered the job search space. The moment they offered to help their users find work, suddenly those fake Internet points (and activity behind them) started to carry a real (if probabilistic) monetary value.
You get to keep everything that you achieve in your own head, like "having fun" or whatever satisfaction you derive from what you do on those sites. You don't get to take out anything you manage to "create" their though, like your level and points. So except for what you manage to do in your own head it's much-input-no-output, a black hole box that swallows all your efforts and keeps them without giving back. Again, speaking about the "game", not about your own satisfaction e.g. for helping others.
The game is used to pretend to you the rewards are higher, but in order realize that promise you have to stay in the game world because the rewards you earn cannot be taken out.
So yes, within the context of those sites it is "real".
