Changing the CredSperiment weights

[decentralion]

I’m now going to reply to a lot of specific points that were brought up in the thread.

On reviewing artifacts

@burrrata

It would be nice if we integrated a creation and review process for Discourse Artifacts (similar to GitHub PRs and reviews). This would enhance the contributor experience/rewards while also improving contribution quality.

I agree; I want to extend review culture and workflows from code contributions to all major contributions to SourceCred, including artifacts and documentation. Moving the source of truth for artifacts into source control in GitHub would make a lot of sense. Watch this space.

On the weight for issues vs pull requests

@burrrata

• Writing code and then submitting a PR on GitHub often takes more effort than creating Issues. The current and new configurations give Issues and PRs the same weight. Why is this?

Y’all are right, it doesn’t make sense for the weights to be the same. I propose new weights at the bottom.

On contributors earning salaries

@burrrata

some contributors have been paid salaries … while also receiving Cred. … it’s important to consider these dynamics.

Yep, having sources of income and security external to the project make a big difference for contributors, especially in this immature stage of the project. The goal of SourceCred is to recognize and reward people fairly for the value of their contributions. In the case where people are earning salaries for working on SourceCred, I think it makes sense for the companies paying their salaries to receive a portion of their Cred; this makes sense because the entity paying the salary is helping to enable the work. This will also make SourceCred easier to adopt in open-source projects where corporate sponsorship is happening, make it easier for employees to contribute to SourceCred, and enable more SourceCred contributors to have diversified economic support. I’m planning a fuller post on this subject soon, please hold future discussion of this point for that post.

On time-scoped weights

@burrrata

The way the SouceCred system currently works there’s no sense of time. We can’t say that weights were like X, then Y, then Z. We just update the weights and recompute the entire system from scratch. This means that at any point Cred can change, sometimes drastically.

Our inability to have time-scoped weights is definitely a bug and not a feature. What I care about most in this change is the way it changes the future incentives (i.e. we need more reward for developers), not the way it changes the past history. We should develop the ability to change weights in a time-scoped way, it will be a valuable tool in our toolbox going forward. (To do this, we need more developers ).

On solving multiple problems at once

@burrrata

The core value prop of SourceCred is that it recognizes and rewards contributions. That involves creating a contribution graph that gives contributors reputation that can then be correlated to rewards and potentially governance. Traditionally problems like funding, governance, and reputation are separated and that’s part of the reason why they’re so hard to solve: they’re not actually completely separate things. They all connect to each other. SourceCred acknowledges the interdependence of things and connects them in a way that is incentive aligned for positive sum value creation.

I quite agree with this. I think that handling funding, governance, reputation, and rewards together, we are more likely to create a viable, functioning system than if we look at just one part in isolation.

Evaluating contributions, not contributors

@anon60584824

I’d like to please ask everyone to stop referencing me as “the example that doesn’t seem fair / was boosted.” It’s just not appropriate to keep unfairly targeting me like that.

Thanks for this ask, @anon60584824. I think one thing that’s really clear from this discussion (as a few others have mentioned, too) is that we need to develop clear guidelines around how to have these discussions. One of these guidelines will be: focus on the discussion on valuing contributions, not the contributors.

This will also mean making changes to the UI. Right now the UI strongly guides you to focus on the impact on contributors’ cred totals, because that is the salient information in the UI. I think we should change it to show things like:

• Which initiatives and artifacts generated the most cred (this week / all time)?
• Which contributions generated the most cred this week?
• Which types of contributions generated the most cred this week?

Having the UI show this information will guide us all away from focusing on the (zero-sum) game of who has the most relative cred, and towards the (positive sum) game of aligning on what kinds of contributions we want to reward and recognize.

On making development viable

@Beanow

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.

@Beanow, thanks for explaining these dynamics; this has been on my mind for several weeks, and is a big part of the motivation for these changes.

Right now, so much in SourceCred is blocked on development. For example, just things that came up in this discussion:

• the supernode system, so we can move away from activity cred minting
• time-scoped weights, so we can make less disruptive changes
• a new UI that enables discussions focused on valuing contributions and not contributors

We need to ensure that development activity is rewarded, because as a community we have a hard dependency on developing more tools.