I went ahead and created an observable notebook, to look at the empirical distribution of “power” in our community today, assuming the following rules:
- Cred Power is proportional to lifetime cred
- Grain Power is proportional to grain balance
- Participation Power is proportional the square root of recently earned cred
Here’s the resultant power table:
I think it’s pretty interesting! A quick takeaway is that @wchargin and myself have just under 50% of the power. The next ~5 most engaged contributors have about 25% of the power, and the long tail of everyone else has the remaining 25% of power.
The “participation power” metric is indeed quite democratic, as just having a few recent forum posts is enough to get >1% of that power. (This is because we take the square root of the raw value, for power computation purposes–this tends to push power towards the long tail of small contributors.) Since it’s intended to be a counterbalance to the more concentrated cred and grain power, I think it’s working as intended.