When sourcecred was originally implemented, it was âjust an experiment weâll review & be able to drop whenever.â By now it seems to have made its way into the core mechanics & roadmap. It seems so deeply ingrained we can no longer detach from it, and we never actually reviewed it or consider dropping it.
Now, Iâm not saying we should drop it, but I do still have some concerns.
I hope most of them are due to my lack of knowledge, and Iâm sure some of them are.
- Just because something created a lot of emotional reaction, doesnât mean it created a lot of value.
People will react more to short things that create emotional reaction vs long articles that explain things in-depth. You might be pissed when someoneâs memes start creating more XP than your well thought out content or code.
Hereâs an example:
- Just because nobody is building on what you committed to github, doesnât mean itâs not valuable. Maybe you wrote it so well it never has to be revised.
On the other hand, people building & changing what you committed might mean exactly that you wrote something of low quality or incomplete, so it needed to be improved upon a lot.
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As far as I understand, Sourcecred will award the latter more?
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Same goes for referencing things on Discord. Just because youâre replying to someone doesnât mean they said or did something useful. It could be quite the opposite as it was fairly recently.
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You say it is not a black box system, but as far as I know there is no way for me to see how the people that have Seeds got those Seeds. I can check the weights but that is not a proof of anything else, because the weights can be correct and cred still wrongly attributed.
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One issue that I havenât heard properly addressed is that as the price of Seeds grows through the bonding curve, XP should be redeemable for less & less Seed.
- Otherwise thereâs no incentive for workers to get in early.
- Another thing that makes this even worse is reactions creating cred.
As we get more and more people engaging on Discord and Discourse, there will be more reactions to things, creating, for the latest content, even more XP than the early contributors earned.
Theoretically we could just reduce the weights from reactions as we scale, but as sourcecred recalculates everything retrospectively, it would make no difference.
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Looks like a blanket solution. Pull requests on the wiki should probably be awarded less than the ones on Interspace, especially as the wiki content will mainly be built on forums. But you can assign different values to different repos?
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Same question about channels on the Discord and categories on Discourse, posts in different ones can be made to weigh differently, right?
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Looks like it might turn out more restrictive than we thought & incentivize inefficiency.
- We built a wiki based on github so sourcecred can read contributions, but⌠is this really the interface we can expect meme-creators and writers to contribute through?
- Where embedding memes looks like this?
To be fair, it can be edited in an external markdown editor and the code imported here. So itâs somewhat easily mitigated. Adds to complexity but fine.
- I bulk uploaded 10 memes I made. If I was uploading them & creating pull requests 1 by 1, Iâd be getting 10x cred Iâm getting now⌠Incentivizing me to act inefficiently.
- If we want cred to easily flow to other contributors, we should be collaborating on writing docs on the forums. Thereâs much more friction to doing that than using Google Docs.
- On to attributions. On the call following InterCon, we spent 45 minutes discussing and putting down weights on each contribution.
- It required all of us to be on the call, and imagine doing this with more people on a bigger project. Not scalable
- Moreover, these contributions are still not calculated into cred.
- If we did it the old way, it would have required 2-5 minutes of each participantâs time and could have been done async. Weâd be done with it all the way back then.
- Dependencies are easy to write now, but might get out of hand as we move forward because everything requires almost everything before it.