Should Discord be a "cred-free space"?

[wchargin]

@decentralion: Thanks for creating this follow-up thread. I’ve posted my earlier draft reply to the original thread; due to context, it applies more cleanly there, but parties interested in this thread may want to read it: https://discourse.sourcecred.io/t/sourcecred-discord-plugin/283/15

Broadly, I think that I agree most closely with @vsoch’s comment in this thread (especially the first paragraph; anonymous or hidden-information elements of the cred graph is a hard problem that clouds my perspective on the second paragraph).

@s_ben

Much of the consensus building happens in chats, public and private. Those responses and s and actually do carry real economic value. You can feel it. I can already feel that weight when I in most contexts.

I would be interested to learn more about this.

It’s a saying in politics that all the real work gets done not over the aisle but over the dinner table. Such in-person conversations are inherently harder to feed into SourceCred than public electronic communications, as are private messages (huge privacy/security considerations) and Discord audio calls (just technically difficult). But they’re still valuable! Could the mechanisms that we use for them also apply to communication that happened to occur on Discord?

This suggestion is not meant to just punt the problem to another layer. Mechanisms that work for a conversation over dinner will necessarily be holistic, rather than turning each individual comment into (for lack of a better word) a microtransaction.

@s_ben

Moderation of chats is another big unpaid type of contribution that happens mostly in chats.

Interesting distinction. I think that you’re right that posting in chats is generally different from moderating chats, and correspondingly I would expect these to be treated differently. If chat moderation is important to the project, then it should have an associated initiative, championed by or otherwise linked to the moderators, and the moderators should receive cred for these contributions via the normal mechanisms.

@s_ben

But that’s the necessary work required to reach consensus and build a graph that is rich enough to flow value across.

The following is more a technical point than a philosophical one, but: in terms of richness of information, Discord is about the least structure that you can get. Individual Discord messages are not really addressable; archives are not meant to be read; the whole thing is login-walled; there are no threads, and there is no first-class quoting or reply mechanism as in Discourse; there is not even any delineation of “posts”. This is relevant because it affects how intrinsically valuable the Discord data is, which in turn influences how we should weigh the trade-offs.

@s_ben

Many of my posts are getting 0 s now. That’s probably fine, but I think another less weighty, higher volume signal could even that out, and increase the nuance and expressiveness of the graph. Allow me not to trip so much when nobody (nobody!) likes my post.

I’m sorry that this is causing stress for you—that’s a totally reasonable response, and I get where you’re coming from. I hope that you don’t mind me saying: it’s exactly this kind of stress that I’m hoping that we can keep from propagating to Discord, too.