Exciting to see some ideas take shape. A few thoughts:
The contributors can choose to get paid in dollars, or they can ‘re-contribute’ their earnings back to SourceCred, in which case they are acting as supporters as well as contributors, and they receive mana instead.
As a contributor, I think I’d only do this if there was a possibility to obtain returns.
Closing the loop, supporters will be able to use mana to “boost” contributions, creating new cred. This means that supporters can use their mana to guide attention within the project. Supporters can even earn cred if they are wise with their boosts.
The mechanism of using mana to guide attention/work by boosting seems like the best way for investors and contributors to communicate/transact. Part of me is wary of a single party (say a large corp) coming in and just taking over, turning contributors into de facto employees, where those not doing their bidding get their cred diluted to near zero. But I imagine competition in most bigger projects, driving diversity of ideas and spreading cred/dollars around.
Cred is not transferrable between identities, and never will be.
…However, unlike a currency or token, mana is not transferrable, and is not exchangeable for money.
I’m not sure this is enforceable. While the project is small and not much money is involved, I don’t think it’s a problem. But one only needs look at Twitter (which likewise has a ToS forbidding exchanging accounts for money), to see the enforcement problems. There’s already a burgeoning market for selling Twitter accounts, as well as sponsored tweets, many of which don’t have the required #spon tag disclosing sponsorship.
Note that you cannot convert mana back to dollars. Also, the amount of mana you earn per dollar donated might change in the future. (Also, we might make the dollar-mana ratio different than 1, e.g. 100 mana per dollar, to make the numbers feel larger.)
This is a big variable. As an “investor”, I want some assurances of the “purchasing power” of my mana in the future, no? I know there are discussions about diluting mana over time to address issues, but I imagine people putting dollars into the project will want more clarity before they invest.
Supporters can also use boosting to guide the project to focus on their priorities. For example, if I want to see a feature added, I can promise to boost every PR that makes progress towards the feature. (In the future, we’ll have a way to boost bugfixes or feature requests directly.) An early version of boosting might focus on discourse posts, essentially creating “reddit gold” for SourceCred. We could do things like pin boosted topics for the next week, and/or create a weekly curated newsletter containing all the boosted posts.
As a cautionary tale, the r/ethtrader subreddit that is experimenting with basically this (turning reddit gold/karma into a token called donuts that is currently being monetized (e.g. you can set the subreddit banner)). Fascinating ongoing experiment, but it did recently devolve into a moderator “purge”, causing a “fork” in the community, with a sizable chunk of the community moving to a new non-monetized subreddit,
Could be a good project to follow and learn from. They have product support from Reddit apparently, and are trying this for real. But also probably some good lessons to be had in governance and expectation management. People will get upset if they invest significantly in SourceCred and have it change too dramatically on them.
When multiple people boost content, the later boosters will get less cred from the content than the early boosters, creating an incentive to boost early. Bandwagoners get less cred for their mana.
Will this not inhibit the boosting of valuable contributions after the fact, once they’ve revealed themselves as valuable? I see this is an open issue in other posts, but it strikes me as a tricky problem to solve.
However, I’d prefer to only issue Mana-Dollars (and not raw Mana), as that makes the value of an Mana more clear: every Mana in circulation represented either one dollar contributed to the project, or one dollar of potential payment that was declined.
Agree. Sound mana!
Nonetheless, we still have flexibility in deciding how much Mana to issue. Suppose that we learn through experience that 1/k of the dollar-mana is converted to dollars, and the rest goes to mana. And we have a flow of d dollars coming in per week from donations. Then we could afford to pay up to k*d dollar-mana every week without experiencing negative cash flow. Or, SourceCred could pay less than that, and build up a treasury.
This is contingent on the earlier (tentative) decision to only allow contributors to convert their dollar-mana to dollars in a certain time window (e.g. 1 month following distribution), before it is converted to regular mana, which cannot be converted. Otherwise, the treasury could build up liabilities in the form of mana, possibly resulting in a “run on the bank” should contributors decide to cash out at once. It could also result in a situation where people let mana build up, leave the project, and are then offered money to boost contributions.
Rather than issuing a fixed amount of dollar-mana every period, I’d rather have it be based on the total cred created. That way, rather than contributors competing to split up a fixed reward every week, they are cooperating to grow it.
Agree with this. It’s also the general consensus I’ve picked up from earlier discussions around this.
Boosting converts mana into cred. And per discussion above, cred may generate more mana. Clearly, we are setting up a feedback cycle here. If we tune it poorly, there will be exponential runaway growth in the amount of cred and mana, and it ruin the value of the system.
I mean, if SourceCred mana mooned and I made a ton of money for my thot leadership on discourse, I’d be okay with that:) But it’s not sustainable, true, and I want that more.
So we can’t set cred-per-mana too high. However, if we set cred-per-mana very low, then there won’t be much of a reason to use boosting. So we’ll need to find a good balance here.
This strikes me as an important enough parameter that it might need to be decided eventually by governance or free market pricing.
Impressions
Seems like a smart design. It also introduces some new structures and unknowns though, which will need to be figured out. For instance how to set variables such as cred distributed per week, mana/cred ratio, etc., seems important. For now we can just play with different values, but eventually these seem important enough drivers of the system that either governance, free market pricing, or both may be needed.
Psyched to play:)