Sharing control of infrastructure, transparency are certainly important. I’m glad we’re exploring these issues for Discourse in the Discourse Admin trust model - #3 by Beanow post. I think we can mitigate these risks but not eliminate them entirely (humans gonna human). Just having the permissions public, as we’ve decided here, I think is a step in the right direction. Lowering technical barriers to forking is another.
I’m reminded of Reddit. Specifically the r/ethtrader community DAONUTS are based on, which you probably know a lot more about than I. There the admin of a large group (221k members) used their admin powers to fire all the mods opposed to their plan to issue tokens with governance rights, resulting in the community “forking” into a new subreddit, r/ethfinance. https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/cs84ar/6_of_10_moderators_are_leaving_ethtrader_a/
Scanning both subreddits just now, it appears r/ethfinance only took ~13k subscribers with it, but the engagement levels of both seem about the same…I wonder if it’s a roughly equal split of active community members? Are there lessons to learn from this?
This is really tricky, because centralized platforms (which are convenient and powerful and almost all communities using SourceCred will use), do have hierarchical permissions. Does it matter if you have a title if someone with permissions above you can delete your account if drama goes down?
Super glad you’re here! I am perhaps intentionally causing a disturbance in the force just to play devil’s advocate. Because it’s still early and we trust each other, it’s easier to be open about these issues now. I would maybe just challenge you with, “Are you not having fun already without a title? Will being Discourse Director address an issue you’re having now, or one you’re anticipating in the future?”. As for rewards, it seems like you are getting a good amount of cred for your efforts already. In the last cred distribution, I see you have more lifetime cred than me. When I saw that I though, “Huh, well, that’s maybe not entirely accurate as I’ve been contributing longer, but good I guess because I want @burrrata to come back to the project and contribute more. It feels like a wise boost”. And I’m glad to see you become more active lately. I think you’re filling a missing role right now, and having fun with that role. I suppose though this was largely a subjective judgement by our TBD @decentralion. Which we want to move away from over time. Do you think something like a Director position is necessary to get fairly credited as we decentralize? Is it just that creating initiatives is too tedious (a fair concern)?
I’m still open to this. Just wanted to voice my concerns early to be part of the discussion. I also think a voice chat could be useful here, if people are open to it. I know that raises other issues (e.g. I understand if you don’t want to compromise your pseudonumity @burrrata (this is an option that is generally critical to protect IMO)) . It’s just that while these forum discussions are really good (and document our decision-making), it’s really time-consuming. Especially as I’m a writer and it physically pains me not to wordsmith my posts. Sometimes live conversations can move much quicker, and also help build trust, even if you disagree with each other.