There’s a couple of things that concern me about this proposal.
I’m concerned the proposal:
- … improves non-technical contributor Cred by coincidence rather than design.
- … might substantially promote centralization of Cred.
- … introduces additional gate-keeping to the community.
- … will cause stronger bias towards recent contributions over time.
- … causes a double-whammy focus on recent contributions, as the grain distribution also shifted towards it.
Now to be frank, reaching out and raising objections at all from a -40% position kinda sucks. And I’m feeling forced to include disclaimers for my position here even though I intend to be mostly objective.
So here goes: I do agree developers such as myself in particular had a historical unfair advantage because of better platform support. As far as I’m concerned, fixing that bias is important, fair and welcome. By extension I’m expecting such a re-balance to mean I will lose some Cred, I’ve got no issues there.
However my theory is these new parameters benefit recent like-minted Cred, and this appears to correct Cred earned for non-technical contributions by coincidence, since they have recent likes.
This has to do with Cred inflation. With activity-minted Cred (like on GitHub), if the size of the community is constant you would expect a constant Cred inflation rate, because new contributions come in over time. This is fine, because in relative terms things should line up with the relative work you’ve put in.
You’d expect if the community grows in size linearly, the Cred inflation rate for activity-minted Cred would also increase linearly. The relative shares of past contributors could shrink from this, and this is fine because it roughly lines up with the larger community possibly getting more work done than in the past.
However for a linearly growing community, I’d expect like/reaction-minted Cred to increase Cred inflation exponentially. For +10 contributors, that’s +10 people’s worth more did-a-thing messages coming in, but +10x10! more Cred minted from reactions on did-a-thing compared to before.
If I’m right, this problem would exist regardless of this weight change, and ideas like sourcing Cred for likes from a pool instead have been around for some time to counter this. But this is why I think increasing the weights for like-minted Cred simply exacerbates a disproportional focus on recent contributions. And it’s by sheer coincidence that recent Discord users also has better contributor diversity.
Anecdotal evidence for this I think is comparing my change to @mzargham’s change in Cred. If my undeserved GitHub Cred benefit represents ~42% of my all-time Cred. Then it makes no sense that mzargham’s would be ~39%. If anything I feel like he should be gaining Cred for historically undervalued work that isn’t on GitHub. What we do have in common though is a low amount of recent contributions. And the “center of gravity” of when we earned Cred is roughly the same time period (last year-ish). Suggesting it’s tied to recentness more than the platform.
Note that this would give any old-guard contributor a perverse incentive to stifle the growth of the community as well.
My other great concern is with centralization and gate-keeping.
Fundamentally, a big reason you’d want to use SourceCred at all is to eliminate a lot of gate-keeping, such as in traditional employment/freelance situations. So in my mind reintroducing any form of gate-keeping requires a strong argument or lead to valuable experiments.
I think filtering no-role reactions could be a valuable experiment to learn about whether this improves Cred quality and offers any Sybil attack resistance.
But I fail to see why having increasing weights for different tiers in the social hierarchy:
- Is even necessary at all.
- Is not equivalent to manually approved reward-tiers (like employment is).
Back in my days (lol), the core/contributor/community roles weren’t formalized. But even having an informal status of core contributor and being 3rd on the “leaderboard” in my experience gave me a snowballing potential over others. It comes with more visibility, authority, easier access to other influential people (at CredCon for example) and easier access to off-the-record information. Those benefits compounded my ability to earn even more Cred.
Certainly I didn’t feel like core contributors need additional help to secure a fair amount of Cred for their work. At the same time, my case showed a new contributor was able to work their way up to core without knowing anyone on the team before. So (at least for a developer) the previous situation delivered on the promise of reduced gate-keeping and being meritocratic.
So as a counter-proposal why not have a role “crediquette-diploma” with 1x, and grant it to anyone we’re confident is not a Sybil account and has a basic understanding that their reactions meaningfully change Cred calculations. With 0x by default. In order to experiment and find out if it warrants the heavy measure of gate-keeping for this.
Finally I have a vague intuition that an escalating recent Cred bias (my theory above), may cause more centralization of Cred as well. If older contributions’ relative Cred decays faster-than-natural, it implies old Cred that was flowing to unpopular nodes lose traction faster-than-natural as well. I worry this could penalize people whenever they’re not strongly connected to the recent high Cred people.