Yeah this is a real problem. I don’t know all the internal details of the situation, but this seemed sub-optimal from a governance perspective. At the same time, it resulted in one of the coolest experiments on Reddit and Web3 moving forward (which had been blocked for 6 months due to internal debates in the community). It’s complicated…
Yes. Freedom to fork is powerful. Building things with the end in mind is also powerful. As soon as you create something you should also think about how that thing will be sunset or transitioned. Whether it’s consumer goods or political powers, if there’s no endgame it becomes a mess.
It does until it doesn’t. That’s kind of the thing with any voting since voting can create or destroy lots of things. The most concrete example is token balances. We like to think, esp on Ethereum, that tokens are “ours.” That they’re immutable. The history is immutable, but the future may not be. It really depends on the way a contract is written. Most devs build contracts where they have the keys. Some contracts give governance powers to token holders. DAOs explicitly give token holders powers. This can result in tokens being minted or burned, even “your tokens.”
100% ! It’s so much cheaper to think through and discuss decisions before they’re made rather than after lol
Oh I’m having tons of fun! That’s exactly the problem. I only have a limited amount of time to contribute and all these discussions (as important as they are) are taking away from time I could be organizing and curating all the beautiful ideas buried in these threads. The fun/bureaucracy threshold can’t cross 80/20.
That being said, it’s interesting to analyze this from a meta perspective. At first I was approaching this as a blocker to doing work that I really wanted to do. Now, however, looking at it from the perspective of how humans get motivated (rewards, responsibility, community) is really interesting… I think we’re touching on something that is at the heart of every community, esp SourceCred: recognition and rewards.
The main value prop of SourceCred (as I see it) is that you can focus on doing the work you love and you’ll be rewarded and recognized. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission. You don’t have to log your hours. You don’t have to do anything that’s not directly related to the work. Obviously, as we can see, this only works within a certain context. You can create organized sandboxes that people can play in.
For example creating SourceCred plugins, organizing threads/ideas, creating artwork. Those things are permission-less because they are additive. You’re not changing anything that is, you’re creating something new. There’s only upside, but no downside.
Some things, however, have downsides. These things are often decisions. Some decisions are one way doors that you can’t go back on. Some decisions are reversible. Often it’s not the day to day that dictates how our lives turn out, but the irreversible decisions we make. This is one of the reasons why (ideally) executives are paid so much. They make decisions that affect the success or failure of ventures. Often, the more decision making is involved in a role the more it gets a fancy title. Titles do not infer decision making abilities, but those with decision making abilities are often given titles. Ironically, however, the outcome of decisions are hard to measure. As a result, people who give the impression of competence are often promoted rather than those who can actually think clearly. This is due to many factors, but a key contributor is that decision making is a complex non-linear process. In addition, outcomes do not reveal themselves until much later (if ever). Would be great if this was better.
One of the future looking examples of SourceCred is when a teacher inspires a student and then receives Cred from that pupil years into the future. Could this be used to also evaluate and reward the outcome of decisions as well? I don’t know, but I’d be curious to explore this more. Would there be a way to directly measure the outcome of say, voting to make ABC person a director of XYZ thing? Would there be a way to measure the decisions they make, and if so which ones? In the context of Discourse it’s relatively easy because you can measure engagement, but… what if that engagement is actually due to the work of someone doing amazing marketing on Twitter or via the Podcast or something? How do you measure and reward those correlations? I honestly have no idea… @decentralion any ideas here? lol
I think it helps because optimizing a system is a little different than being an actor in that system. Now… I don’t care how much Cred flows to the Discourse Director at the meta level. That was never established. I just think it makes sense that a director of an initiative should have incentives tied to that initiative as a whole vs just their own person. This incentivizes high-leverage work that benefits the whole system over just an actor within that system.
Also, just want to emphasize that it’s not just about the Cred. Titles such as “Director” might seem arbitrary and pretentious, but they also recognize responsibility. Responsibility creates a sense of purpose. This sense of purpose and ownership drives engagement and action.
Now… I’ll still do most of the work without the title, but… this is interesting to explore. Giving people responsibility and ownership is really important because people with purpose do great work. While we should strive to make systems as transparent and inclusive as possible, we should also recognize that DRIs are a thing for a reason. At some point someone has to make decisions. Committees create bureaucracy. The more people you have to run ideas by to move forward the more time you spend lobbying and the less time you spend doing.
Not sure where the optimal balance lies between a flat organization and a hierarchical one, but if we can figure that out we’ll unlock some serious awesomeness.
Yeah I really don’t like filling out forms, but that’s just because I’m lazy lol
Yeah totally. Still haven’t setup Discord yet, but it would be awesome to chat and say hi to everyone 
I totally feel that too!
Yeah definitely. Happy to chat anytime via Jitsi. Will also setup Discord sometime relatively soonish probably maybe
Yes! And also every task and the whole SourceCred game. I think this is really one of the most magical aspects of this whole thing: making work fun, engaging, and rewarding
Both! lol
Thanks for asking
It’s not just the small game of this topic, but more that in the larger game of my life I’ve had a really intense week. Dealing with a lot of the same questions, concerns, and situations in community after community gets exhausting. I love you guys, but decentralized async communication and coordination is hard. A foundation is trust is already hard to build IRL, but It’s even harder to build async. Aligning incentives and interests is hard IRL, but even harder in an async decentralized space. We’re changing the world. No one said it would be easy.
SourceCred (and DAOs) has a lot of potential to help here, which is really really exciting! What I love the most (well at least a lot) about SourceCred is that it makes it easy to just show up and do stuff that you love. Just do it, SourceCred takes care of the rest.
The thing is, SourceCred doesn’t take care of everything. Some things require decision making, esp across a wide initiative. Not everything can be solved with likes. We’ll find a way to optimize this in an amazing way, but I don’t know what that looks like yet. Directors seemed like one way to move forward, but there’s probably others too. I’m happy to explore any option that “just works” and also keeps the tyrannies of structurelessness at bay. Things rarely “self organize” in a harmonious manner.
Life tends towards entropy. Organization takes work. Literally. From an information theory and physics perspective, it takes work to organize stuff. That’s why Bitcoin works. That’s why it’s easy to destroy things, but hard to create them. That’s why there’s mostly space in the universe, and relatively few planets and things, esp ones with life we can recognize. Left unattended, things tend towards chaos. Life and success is a constant struggle against the nature of reality.
With SourceCred we can put in the work ahead of time to create a system that incentivizes work and guides actions towards organization in an organic way. Then we can let the computers do most of the work in the background. Yay. This stuff is hard so I’m glad we’re figuring it out together
Yeah totally. Happy to chat anytime, but a little wary of the recorded group calls. I’ll probably change my sentiments on that soon, but time will tell…
One of the Grin core developers did that. It was kind of cool, but (in my opinion) didn’t build much rapport. Happy to just talk lol