Positive Cred Velocity

[Beanow]

@burrrata

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there aren’t as many likes flowing around as before. If this is true, then this is a problem. Hoarding Cred will lead to low value Cred for all parties involved! The more we give Cred, the more people are likely to engage in order to earn Cred. The more people engage with the community and earn Cred, the more Cred they have to give away. This creates a virtuous feedback cycle.

I like that you’re drawing attention to this. A bit of “share the love and everyone wins” ethos is by design and good to be aware of

@burrrata

Currently, as far as I know, nodes that don’t flow Cred out kind of just accumulate Cred. It’s like a damn that builds up a big reservoir of Cred. This reduces the flow of Cred downstream, and as a result less will grow (building on the Cred/water metaphor).

I think you’re right that accumulation of Cred can happen in nodes that have few or no outbound edges. In practice having no outbound edges is uncommon though. As likes are not the only way to create these edges. Mentions, replies, references, quotes, these all create edges too. If in normal activity these “damns” still pop up and start accumulating Cred, I think we should distinguish between two classes of problems.

A technical problem - The algorithm could bias towards this pattern and inflates scores beyond what the community feels like it should be worth. There’s a couple of ways we could tweak the algorithm to disperse these pockets of Cred. Like changing weights, considering new edge types, manually curating, etc.

A coordination problem - If people are feeling incentivized to “hoard Cred” and deliberately withhold from likes and attributing dependencies and such, that’s a more complex issue. Perhaps the incentives are indeed wrong and we should boost sharing dynamics. Perhaps it’s because of a misconception, where people believe it’s a zero-sum game and they will lose Cred by “giving it away” to others. What does it mean for collaboration within the community? Does it translate to people trying to do things on their own vs cooperating? I think this is where the most interesting challenges for SourceCred lie.

However

@burrrata

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like there aren’t as many likes flowing around as before.

I didn’t get this feeling necessarily, but it would be very interesting to see some data. Another one for my wishlist of UI improvements

My feeling is that some of the velocity shifted away from the forums into different areas.

The spike here I think comes primarily from discourse activity. Which is also heavily incentivized at the moment. With an 8x weight for topics and 2x for posts. Compared to 1x for a PR and 1/16x for Github comments. Resetting these to 1x each, activity seems to be reasonably constant.

On top of that I think a lot of value of recent activity is in the blind spots of our current measurements.

• The podcast and community calls.
• Generally more Discord usage.
• Talks for funding and legal entities that aren’t on-record here.
• Chatting with @decentralion to help me onboard as a developer.

A really big deal for recognizing those is Supernodes: Moving past raw activity

TL;DR

I’m wondering if we actually have a hoarding problem at all. Or just blind spots. So having a few metrics to know what’s going on, and more coverage of the known blind spots, I think would help here