# DONUTS: a case study in tokenized incentives
**URL:** https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/donuts-a-case-study-in-tokenized-incentives/810
**Category:** Uncategorized
**Created:** [August 6, 2020, 1:50am UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/donuts-a-case-study-in-tokenized-incentives/810 "2020-08-06T01:50:07Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 6
### Author:  [@s\_ben](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/u/s_ben)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2020, 8:49pm UTC](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/donuts-a-case-study-in-tokenized-incentives/810/6 "2020-08-06T20:49:40Z")
> [@cslarson](#):
>
> 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.
Yes was wary of posting that number, as it’s a bad proxy for activity, but gives a general sense of a sub’s size. Definitely think a larger community could have a higher mcap, especially if its sub’s eyeballs are as valuable as r/ethtrader’s (arguably on the high side).
I see the current banner ad is going for 100,000 DONUTS/day, which at current price is ~$256/day. If that was average, you’d be seeing ~$7,700/mo. Not bad. Have you seen demand for special memberships (badgers, GIFs in comments)? Just bought another month for 5,000 DONUTS (~$12 at current price) just to experiment and give back. But aside from enthusiasts, is there organic demand for the features (admittedly I’m not so excited about such features)?
Btw, looks like my membership purchase has been hanging for a couple mins… 
Presumably because of high gas fees and Reddit waiting to see a payment tx go through. Don’t mind personally, but a regular web 2.0 user might be worried about that.
> [@cslarson](#):
>
> 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.
We implemented something similar for Maker actually. They were seeing brigading on applications for new collateral types (i.e. handful of new accounts would be created that only liked content supporting their coin). Obviously didn’t want to pay shills for this. So we implemented a feature that changed the amount of Cred a like mints (creates) based on Trust levels in Discourse,
>
>
> This commit modifies the Discourse plugin so that it sets a weight on
> every Lik…e based on the trust level of the user in question. Right now
> the weights are hardcoded as follows (we will make them configurable in
> the future):
>
> | Trust Level | Weight |
> | --- | --- |
> | 0 | 0x |
> | 1 | 0.1x |
> | 2 | 1x |
> | 3 | 1.25x |
> | 4 | 1.5x |
>
> See the following blog post for details on the trust levels:
> https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
>
> I set the weights very low on levels 0 and 1 because they involve very
> little engagement (e.g. don't require making any posts). I set the
> weights on 3 and 4 to be only moderately higher than default so as to
> keep the democratic vibe.
>
> Test plan: See included unit tests. I'll post a before/after look on the
> pull request.
>
> This closes #1863. Thanks to @befitsandpiper for the work that enabled
> this PR, namely #2040, #2041, and #2042.
This likely isn’t needed as much for other SourceCred plugins, as the Cred score of the person liking, commenting, or otherwise interacting with the contribution will influence how much Cred is flowed, similar to how a high-ranking webpage on Google will confer a higher page rank on other sites it links to. However, we do mint an equal amount of Cred on every like in Discourse, as we found that [minting Cred on likes instead of activity](https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/minting-discourse-cred-on-likes-not-posts/603) (posts/comments) increased the quality of scores (review is good signal).
I’m personally generally wary of hard thresholds, as they can be hard to set properly, and are potentially exclusionary and amenable to collusion attacks (i.e. let’s just set the threshold high enough we can shoot down any competing voices before they have real power). That said, it still seems unclear how to balance this with the legitimate need to create and maintain healthy ingroup/outgroup boundaries. Perhaps it’s just human nature and binaries will win 🤷♂️
Have my eye on tools for detecting manipulation. Since SourceCred is a graph, there are general tools that address this (e.g. it’s relatively easy to do data viz to detect dramatic changes in the shape of a graph, then investigate). How to make the distinction between malicious gaming and healthy gaming (and it is a fun game), and deciding how bad actors are punished raises yet more interesting open issues around decentralized governance however:/
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