DONUTS: a case study in tokenized incentives

[cslarson]

@s_ben

Was wondering about this. My general sense, from our experience using SourceCred for valuing contributions here, and in our trial distributing DAI on the MakerDAO forum, is that for forums generally, when not too much money is flowing, people generally don’t change their behavior too much. At least that’s my subjective impression. If that’s the case with community points, perhaps simple and available proxies like karma may work well, as long as those tokens aren’t too valuable.

You mention r/ethtrader having 238k subscribers but the actual activity fluctuates significantly and of course the split resulting in r/ethfinance affected this too. Another data point is that in the most recent distribution, covering a month, 211 unique reddit users earned $DONUTs. I think with a larger community there may be possibility of a significantly higher market cap than the ~150k for r/ethtrader and that opportunities for sybil attacks on the contribution metrics more likely.

One modification I like but was not implemented was to have votes only from a subset of users count towards the contribution score. This could be a manual or voted list or it could be based on earning some threshold level of CONTRIB. I think this offers a layer of protection from sybil attacks. If (content) voting were public then algorithms to detect manipulation might also be developed.