I’d like to offer up a fairly uncontroversial proposal for improving our Cred scores: let’s start properly accounting for the Props channel.
At present, when someone makes a post in #props, it’s treated like any other message, and flows its Cred evenly between the author and any mentioned users. This isn’t really appropriate for Props, since most of the Cred should flow to the person receiving the Props.
I’ve written a pull request which allows us to add special logic for props channels which will make them flow Cred mostly to the people mentioned in the message. As a default, I suggest giving the props edge a 19x weight compared to 1x weight for authorship. That means if a single person is getting props, the author will get 5% of the Cred. (If 2 people, author gets about 2.5%, and so forth.)
I propose that we turn on this rule for SourceCred’s own props channel. At the bottom of this post, I’ve included a table that shows how the Cred changes as a result.
I think this is an uncontroversial change, but I’d like us to get in the habit of discussing changes to Cred on the forums before making them official, so please consider this change and share your thoughts and objections.
Name
Before
After
Change %
decentralion
24756
24102
−3%
wchargin
11403
11416
0%
beanow
5692
5649
−1%
s-ben
5101
5015
−2%
lbstrobbe
4856
4841
0%
hammad
3642
3702
2%
topocount
1790
1799
1%
burrrata
1735
1737
0%
KuraFire
1649
1731
5%
bex
1586
1616
2%
sourcecred
1396
1396
0%
mzargham
1261
1280
2%
sandpiper
1113
1262
13%
dependabot
1255
1257
0%
panchomiguel
904
970
7%
vsoch
910
913
0%
brianlitwin
889
895
1%
evan
642
703
10%
greenkeeper
667
666
0%
joiecousins
552
630
14%
yalor
481
561
16%
Thena
426
466
9%
youngkidwarrior
463
437
−6%
benoxmo
443
432
−2%
flyingzumwalt
362
398
10%
amico
259
273
5%
rpp
239
251
5%
doctorrobinson
290
233
−19%
github-actions
223
223
0%
owocki
210
208
−1%
deltafreq
205
204
−1%
ian
129
199
54%
cortanav
105
148
41%
protocol
140
140
0%
Louisgrx
139
139
0%
samkuhlmann
132
132
0%
sriche
129
128
−1%
peth
166
125
−25%
coopahtroopa
125
123
−1%
JavierCanovas
109
121
11%
(Here is the hacky observable notebook with data analysis, mostly included b.c. someone else proposing a Cred change might find it useful to fork off from.)
I’m in favor of this, a 19x / 1x weight split for the Props channel feels very fair and sensible to me; having the person who does the observation of giving props get 5% of the Cred encourages giving props to others more (great!) without making it a possible gaming vector (without it being super obvious).
Just so I’m clear, this is not just a 19/1 split for Cred weighting in Props messages themselves, but the 19x weight is also 19x compared to, say, a regular message of that person in a different channel, right?
Scenario: person A gives props in #props to person B. That message gets 1 emoji reaction. Does that mint 19 Cred for person B and 1 Cred for person A?
Scenario (continued): Now person B posts a message in a different, non-special channel. That message gets the same 1 emoji reaction, and it mints 1 Cred for person B..
(the scenario above is not correct, see below)
Is that correct? Is it more subtle than that? Am I getting the whole thing wrong?
This proposal only changes how Cred flows from the message, but doesn’t at all change how much Cred is minted. So in both scenarios, 1 Cred is minted at the reaction, and then flows to the message. If the message is in a regular channel, 1/2 of the Cred will flow to the author, and 1/2 of the Cred will flow to the mentioned person, so they both get around 0.5 Cred. With my update, 1/20 of that Cred will flow to the author, and 19/20 of the Cred will flow to the mentioned user, so the author gets about 0.05 Cred and the mentioned person gets about 0.95 Cred.
Once we have this change in, I would support increasing the channel weight on the props channel to (say) 5x. If we did that, then the 1 emoji would mint 5 Cred on the message, of which 0.25 would flow to the props author, and 4.75 would flow to the person getting the props.
I’ve been supporting this improvement for a while. I think this change makes a lot of sense: giving most of the Cred flowed to props to the person receiving the props. I’m in agreement with the original post and Faruk that 5% to the original poster makes intuitive sense.
