Hey @prose11, welcome to the Discourse! Super interesting post with a lot of content here. As I understand it, your post has five major points:
- SourceCred encourages “double-dipping” by getting rewards for doing the work, promoting the work, etc
- SourceCred has positive feedback (“rich get richer”) effects where more prominent contributors are likely to get more Cred for the same amount of work
- There’s a “chicken-and-egg” issue where people get paid only after proving themselves through contributions, but they may not be able to commit to make contributions until they’re already getting paid.
- MakerDAO in particular has issues around people getting paid from two independent streams (MakerDAO foundation and SC instance) which creates ambiguity and fairness issues
- Within MakerDAO, Cred scores are not well aligned with real-world value
I’ll share my thoughts point-by-point. Please point out if I missed any important points!
SourceCred encourages “double-dipping” by getting rewards for doing the work, promoting the work, etc
Right now it’s definitely the case that you can earn more Cred for the same amount of work if you just promote it more effectively. E.g. if I make a feature, I’ll get Cred for the pull requests that implement it. If I then go and write a post promoting it on the forums, I’ll get additional likes there; likewise if I promote it on the Discord.
The underlying issue here is that we are using social reactions on these various platforms as a proxy for the value of the work. We don’t have any “source of truth” for the feature existing, or for how valuable it was or what depended on it, so we fall back on Discourse likes or Discord reactions as a proxy.
We’re working on this from an engineering standpoint–our plan is to build the Creditor, a tool which allows collectively curating nodes in the Cred graph which represent meaningful achievements, e.g. the existence of a feature or partnership. Then, we would not be using Discourse likes as a proxy for the value of the feature, we’d be using Discourse likes only as a proxy for the value of the post. And writing a Discourse post explaining the feature is a valuable contribution! But it should be valued as a post.
To make this a bit more concrete, imagine a duo, Sam and Terry, where Sam is a great implementor and Terry is a great communicator. Sam writes a brilliant new feature, and then Terry writes the Discourse post explaining the feature. Under the current set of incentives, Terry gets most of the Cred, because the Discourse post gets the attention associated with the feature. Once we have the Creditor, we’d be able to flow Cred for the feature to Sam, but Terry would still get Cred for the work of communicating the feature.
SourceCred has positive feedback (“rich get richer”) effects where more prominent contributors are likely to get more Cred for the same amount of work
As with the point above, this is definitely true right now–Cred is mostly based on social feedback, and the social feedback varies depending on who it’s directed towards. To an extent, this will be mitigated by switching more of the reward signal out of the social domain and into the Creditor. However, at a deeper level, I think these kinds of positive feedback loops are simply inherent to human organizations. For example, someone who is well-known will tend to become better known over time, simply because people are talking about them. Attention, celebrity, and social power are self-reinforcing. (This is why the term “social capital” is apt; it’s a form of power that tends to reproduce itself.)
I think to say “SC will have positive feedback cycles, therefore it is broken” is unfair; it holds SC to a utopian standard while not carefully considering the alternatives. In my mind, the competitor to SC here is the system of compensation used by startups and corporations. Those systems tend to be opaque, unaccountable, and (based on the few cases where I’ve gotten to “peek in” and see the cap tables), massively, massively unfair. I suspect that if you had access to look at Maker’s internal compensation systems (including salary and tokens), and compare them to SC’s public figures, you’d find that SC has a much “fairer” distribution than Maker. For example, there are probably early contributors to Maker who got 10x more tokens than any current contributor could attain, even if that current contributor were adding 10x more value. (I could be totally wrong, I don’t know anything about Maker’s internal politics, this is just based on having seen inside of other organizations built on the same template.)
There’s a “chicken-and-egg” issue where people get paid only after proving themselves through contributions, but they may not be able to commit to make contributions until they’re already getting paid.
This is totally an issue–we need a way to give upfront, derisked compensation to contributors so that they can invest and eventually start earning plenty of Grain based on their contributions. Also, this mechanism needs to be decentralized. One idea I have (sort of a v2 of sponsorship) is to make it easy to make “Grain loans” to people. Suppose that I think Valerie will make really awesome contributions once she’s spent two months onboarding. I can give her an advance of 5,000 Grain a month. Once she starts earning Grain of her own, half of her Grain earnings will automatically go to pay down her debt, until she has fully repaid the advance. The debt would only apply within SC, i.e. there’d be no recourse to sue her if she leaves the project, so the sponsor would be taking a fair amount of economic risk. We could support reasonable interest rates to make it economically rational for the sponsor. A nice thing about this approach is that it allows anyone in the community to sponsor anyone they believe in, rather than needing a centrally coordinated hiring process.
MakerDAO in particular has issues around people getting paid from two independent streams (MakerDAO foundation and SC instance) which creates ambiguity and fairness issues
My read is that Maker is basically treating SC as a “bolt-on” piece of extra compensation to reward “external” contributors, while setting up a separate (more privileged) system for rewarding “insider” contributions. This makes sense b.c. Maker is an established organization with insiders that need clear compensation, and SC is still quite immature and struggles to perceive a lot of real and vital value. However, this use case of “external/bolt-on compensation” isn’t the use case SC is designed for and I expect this will create friction in the long run.
If I had my druthers, Maker would enable SC for everyone, and any salaries would act as compensation floors that are guaranteed on top of Grain payouts. So, e.g. if a governance facilitator is guaranteed $5000/month in income, and they earn $3500 from SC, then the Foundation would pay them the remaining $1500.
An advantage to treating the SC payments as the “base layer” is that it means there’s a consistent basic playing field for everyone in the org, and then getting into the privileged insider set gives you more benefits on top of the base layer, but it’s a little easier to navigate into/out of the insider set without having your entire compensation disappear or get re-orged.
In the long run, I expect we’ll keep building better mechanisms to manage these kinds of arrangements, e.g. we could treat Maker foundation payments as a “Grain advance” in the sponsorship model described above.
Within MakerDAO, Cred scores are not well aligned with real-world value
This doesn’t surprise me, since SC is really immature, and is only operating on the forums for Maker. My hope is that the Creditor will give us much better tools for perceiving the real flows of value in an organization, although this is still untested since we haven’t actually prototyped it yet. I’d be interested ot hear more about what you think is getting missed in the MakerDAO case (could be a really valuable topic of its own right).