Cred Discrepancy: Discord Announcements Channel

The CredSperiment
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I’m writing this topic based on some concerns brought to me by other participants in combination with things that I’ve personally noticed. My goal is simply to bring the topic up for community discussion. I recognize that there may not be an immediately obvious solution, but I figure our community would value having stuff like this documented and brought to light so we can all think about it together.

I’ve noticed that the Announcement Channel in our Discord has some interesting impacts on the Cred of specific participants. The Announcement channel is a space that is super loosely defined, especially when it comes to crediquette (how we as participants engage with the current Cred mechanisms) and I think that’s creating some unintentionally inaccurate or obscured Cred-flows.


There are two major Cred inconsistencies that I’ve noticed with the Announcements Channel:

Lead Announcments

In the Announcement Channel there has been one announcement related to a person being elevated to Lead status, and a ton of emojis were added which flows a huge amount of Cred to both the person who made the announcement and the lead who was spotlighted. However, we haven’t repeated this announcement process with any of the folks elevated to lead status since then.

I don’t think this is out of any kind of favoritism but simply a lack of Cred literacy, lack of defined crediquette, and lack of defined process around when and what to post in the Announcements Channel.

I think that the amount of Cred flowed to the one lead who was announced isn’t bad. In fact, I can see it acting as a Cred-correction because there is so much that all leads do behind the scenes which our technology can’t see yet. Having that Announcement Channel bump evens that out, even if in a better world we’d just be tracking all the contributions of value instead of making up for lost contributions. However, if we feel that’s true for one lead, then why would it not be true for all leads?

Should all new leads be given a spotlight in the Announcements Channel, or should we find a different way of correcting for those as-of-yet untracked lead contributions?

Cred for Posting Announcements

Another thought re: Cred and the Announcements Channel is that anyone who makes an announcement gets a lot of Cred emojis because of the announcement’s visibility and wide-spread relevance.

For example, I didn’t come up with the idea of taking December off. I deeply agreed with it, helped encourage it, helped advocate for income stability which inspired the Grain boost, and I took the time to write up the announcement in Discord and Discourse. However, the Cred I’ll get from having been the person to share the announcement on both platforms is inaccurate because I was not the sole or even most instrumental person in us taking the month off.

I deserve some of the Cred, but certainly not all of it.

When I got props-ed for that idea/announcement in the Discord Props Channel (which flowed me even more Cred for this idea that was not originally mine), I took that opportunity to spread the Cred to Dandelion; pointing out how they originally came up with the idea in a props of my own. This is a work-around that I was able to spontaneously create, but it’s by no means a commonly expected or defined crediquette move.


My overall point is that our crediquette, Cred-flow literacy, and guidelines for use of the Announcements channel are all under-developed and I see it creating strange Cred-flows.

Some actions we could take:

  • Accept that the Announcements Channel is flawed and make up for it with how we interact. Creating some crediquette-based Announcement Channel guidelines that are well communicated and commonly understood to mitigate the uneven way it’s flowing Cred right now.
  • Turn off Cred minting for the Announcements channel all together and ensure that important correction-Cred flows around via other methods.

Feel free to share other perspectives or solutions. My intention is simply to surface this discrepancy that I and others have noticed in an effort to live up to our values of Accuracy and Transparency.

3 Likes
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Thanks for writing this up, @LB! You raise great points.

Personally, I’d support turning reducing Cred minting for the announcements channel. Like you noted, project wide announcements are high visibility and will tend to get a lot of Cred, and there’s a big risk that Cred misdirects away from the people who do behind-the-scenes work to make big announcements happen, and instead to the person who had the social privilege of being the one to then make the announcement.

IMO, we should try to tune things so that the Cred flow is proportional to the actual labor of announcing something, but not the Cred for the underlying thing being announced. Taking the time to (e.g.) write up an announcement on Discourse is labor that should be rewarded, but not disproportionately.

I think part of the issue here is that Discord weights for general reactions are super high. In the coming weeks I hope to come up with a proposal for re-weighting the Discord, so as to keep very high Cred flow in the props channel, but reduce the Cred flows in other channels. This would help with this issue, and a lot of other things that have popped up (e.g. people getting disproportionate payouts for attending a single community call).

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I also really appreciate this point. I don’t know much about this issue so won’t comment on it, but I feel that there is an opportunity here to open discussion about how we talk about cred flows and solve undesirable ones. As someone who deeply values what we’re building here, I often want to comment on similar issues; however, I often feel uncomfortable advocating for changes that might disrupt someone else’s ability to earn cred. I certainly would not bring up changes that would increase my scores, even if I believed it to be the right thing. Of course, some of this is silly and I should bring it up anyways, but I’m sharing in the hopes that maybe I’ve hit on a feeling that others might share.

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Glad you shared eeli, I think that’s probably a pretty common and reasonable way to feel. We’re just starting to get our technology keyed in which means it’s about time to start tuning it up as we go. There just hasn’t been a lot of opportunity or precedent for it yet, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that as a community we value transparency, accuracy of Cred, and respectful/kind communication. I totally believe in our community’s ability to grow into these conversations in a way that promotes a healthy, caring discussion even about potentially fraught topics like earning Cred.

One good trick to remember as we all learn and tweak together is to talk about contributions rather than participants. :slight_smile:

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I think it’s a great idea to reduce the weighting of our Announcements channel as a default model for others to embrace.

I’ve looked at some other communities and their use of Announcements channels for a while now, and in one of them their software releases and related announcements get tons of reactions—like, to the tune of many hundreds per message, while the average “good idea” or “cool thing you shared” post gets between 3 and 21 reactions total. In such a community, the leads posting to announcements would get almost all of the Cred no matter what else goes on in the community Discord.

Similarly, I would also even advocate that channels that only admins/moderators can post in (like Announcements) might simply turn off Cred minting altogether. Often, an announcement in there covers the work of multiple people anyway, and especially in bigger communities those people wouldn’t be mentioned each individually in the announcement message.