Took me a while to pitch in on this thread, but have been reading and want to briefly add some of my thoughts.
The human aspect
I’m agreeing on both major points here. We need to be careful in our language, and acknowledge that settling on a set of values is a subjective human process.
My feeling is the last part is making it’s way into the system design for a while now. Perhaps it’s an idea to start building recommendations / guidelines on how to have these discussions in a constructive way.
As an example: I would recommend entirely avoiding using people’s total cred scores in a value discussion. Instead try to answer the question “what do we care about as a community?” and when bringing in examples, use concrete examples. Such as “This PR” or “This Initiative”. While still being mindful that concrete work has people working on it too.
I’ve got a couple more thoughts on this, but feel like this deserves it’s own thread
About the suggested weight change
As @decentralion explained well. The activity based minting of cred is flawed. So we won’t solve every problem raised here, without moving away from this system.
Overall I think the suggested change is OK, with one main comment. And from my experience perhaps even conservative.
My value system
My largest concern for the weights is inclusion.
Of “insiders” vs “outsiders”:
With the new weights, an “I’m new and have a question” topic would be valued as much as a PR from someone who’s familiar with the project. seems inclusive to me.
Of “techies” vs “non-techies”:
The previous weights were very poor for developers. And I’ll expand on that. With the new weights, it’s good enough, though maybe conservative. And I’m happy with that. It will prevent gaming PRs and we should use supernodes to make up the difference.
Some back of the envelope scribbles
When I think about writing detailed topics, like About Champions and Heroes. This would take me about 2 days. That includes watching the reference video, fleshing the idea out on a notebook, sleeping on it, discussing the term on discord, drafting the topic, getting images, finalizing the post, etc. (Although granted, I’m a developer so doing this every day would drive me nuts )
On the other hand it’s taken me roughly from October 20th, till December 9th to implement Discourse mirror revision. With some back of the envelope math, that’s 50 days for 18 PRs. Making about 2-3 days per PR on average. And I’m certain the Initiative system will have a slower rate than that.
For deeper context of what this is worth: Champions is still a concept that isn’t fully defined and explained, but has been a useful metaphor. While just 1 of the 18 PRs includes #1431 which has made it possible for anyone to use SC on any public Discourse instance, no longer needing API keys to do so.
So my hunch would be, a good PR is more expensive to create than a good forum topic. Even though my skills specialize on the PRs.
In the before snapshot cred, I have 859 Cred. Which is approximately 70% Discourse, 30% GitHub.
In the after snapshot cred, I have 1068 Cred. Which is approximately 21% Discourse, 79% GitHub.
Viability of developing
Obviously the above approximation is really flawed. But it’s close enough to support what I’m getting at next.
In my experience current weights do not make development viable. When a topic receives 8x more cred than a PR and takes me about a day less to work on, there’s no incentive for me to write PRs.
Or to invert that, I would need to put in an extra day of work, and would be rewarded with 12.5% of what I would have gotten for a topic.
The suggested weight change doesn’t fully close the gap from my heuristics / intuition. But I think it greatly improves inclusion of developers.
Issues should perhaps be 1x
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In the time I’ve been with SourceCred, I’ve rarely put as much effort into an Issue as I have put into Topics. But Issues are most definitely worth less than a PR.
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Using Discourse for many situations is preferred over issues in our community, for visibility and inclusion.
Conversely pull request reviews are really valuable. So 2x for them makes sense to me.
The counter argument I could make for a 2x issue weight is: to incentivize new people to give feedback and bug reports.
(Assuming our existing developers won’t game this by creating an issue for every PR they submit and fixing it immediately after to pad their scores)
Concluding
- overall in favor of the change.
- Consider a 1x weight for issues.
- Let’s further discuss the human aspect and create guidelines.