Should Discord be a "cred-free space"?

[s_ben]

Appreciating all the pushback and discussion. Below I try and address some points and elaborate my thoughts.

@wchargin

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: SourceCred Discord Plugin - #15 by wchargin

There are some good quotes in this thread, so replying to a few in-line here.

@wchargin

While we may have different perspectives on the magnitude of (a) [the degree to which we think that magically having cred on Discord would be a good thing], I think that we’d agree that in the long term it is something that we want to have, and would be a strange gap if missing.

I’m glad to hear you agree it’s a gap, even if you’re pushing back on adding now.

@decentralion

only messages that receive :sourcecred: reactions become nodes in the graph. This means that Cred intersects with Discord only deliberately / intentionally rather than passively / implicitly.

This is nice to have, but, as you hint, this doesn’t really solve the problem. “Ugh; they liked my comment enough to :+1: it but didn’t :sourcecred: it” currently does not pass through my mind on Discord at all.

So if I had my way, we would use all the emojis I think filtering out only a single emoji () is smart, just because I think it addresses some concerns raised here about every reaction being weighty, and buys us some “cred-free” space while we experiment. But actually, so far, in my observations, the emoji has already taken on a useful meaning in the communituy: defining “what is SourceCred?”, in a light, playful way. It’s a means to collectively define our identity and culture. Or “scale our values”, to use a term we’ve used in the past. It can also be used to enforce those values in a light, positive way (there’s no negative symbol). If the only way we have to express what is (or is not) SourceCred explicitly is some heavy process such as reporting undesirable behavior anonymously (which is absolutely vital), I think we’ll just do less of it.

The problem of parsing the meaning of hundreds of emojis is out of scope for now, but fertile territory as SourceCred grows and is adopted by other communities.

@decentralion

is it appropriate for people who mostly participate on Discord to not have any first-class way to get cred?

As above, this doesn’t follow, because anyone can thank. It is true that if there were a clique of people who were only contributing on Discord and wanted to flow cred to each other, but nobody wanted to flow cred to them, then they would have a harder time doing that.

So in the DAO I work in (which flows ~$250k/mo to contributors), there actually are a lot of people that contribute only in chat (e.g. Discored or Telegram). They’re not on GitHub or forums. Often, they’re just hanging out discussing the project, or crypto in general. But they’re also answering questions from newcomers, pointing them to resources, doing low-level support; some things only the devs can help them with, but I’d say %80 are just common Qs. Additionally, they provide value just by being the community. Their economic value in fact is often explicitly recognized by investors and traders. Algorithms literally monitor chat and social media, tracking engagement, sentiment, etc. and using those as trading signals. And these people often get paid zero for the value they create. I’m not saying they should be paid a lot. Just that they should be recognized, and see themselves in the graph. Yes, you can have some sort of process where people controlling money decide to start paying mods. But typically that takes the form of just hiring one or more full-time mods. Which excludes most of the people in the chats creating the value being moderated, and concentrates power into the hands of those mods, often leading to power imbalances, censorship and drama. And even if we decide to reward these people another way, by what mechanism? I would argue having SourceCred valuing chat contributions would be superior to other methods.

To give an example of work that falls through the cracks in the graph, during our last community call, we were joking about the brick of life literally slamming into you. @LB actually drew a cartoon depicting that and posted it in the #random channel. Everyone appreciated it. @anon60584824 said “@LBS you need a ton of cred for your creations…”. There were two reactions. But no cred is flowing…we could have put it in the graph as a Discousre post, but we didn’t… Why? Because many contributions are simply too small… And we don’t want to create too much noise on Discourse. This is one reason the didathing channel is brilliant too IMO, and a rich source of cred.

Another thing to keep in mind is that chat is increasingly becoming a place where work is done. Slack is eating the world, for better or worse. Many VCs are investing heavily in enterprise chat programs. @burrrata was just posting in Discord a link to a Discord-based project, MetaGame, that wants to use SourceCred on their Discord.

WTF is MetaGame?

I think that, while it is a considerable amount of work, it could pay large dividends down the line.

@decentralion

to use a recent concrete example, you posted a helpful and informative message to the Discord earlier this week: […]

My two cents as the author of that message: I’m totally fine with not receiving cred for that post. I didn’t expect any while writing it. I posit that it is a feature to not create a culture of expecting remuneration for the simplest acts of helping each other.

I think it’s important to remember not everyone in the project has the same amount of privilege. Right now, everything that happens on GitHub have their contributions automatically minting cred, whereas contributors on Discord will see their contributions quickly evaporate sans cred. Yes, people can do extra work to get in the graph, but we don’t want to put extra burdens on the people with the least privilege.

I totally agree we don’t want a culture where everything feels transactional. My hope is that SourceCred does a good enough job automating value transfer in the background that people feel free to just contribute for the joy of it, without worrying if this particular transaction gets me X$. But that means that the stream of cred from contributions needs to be robust and capture as much value as possible. Essentially, if all contributions are valued, you don’t have to think as much about is this particular contribution rewarded. More thoughts on how to create this later in this post…If we can’t achieve that, I’ll happily retreat on this one.

@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.

So, the stress is mainly just due to expected volatility. When the big weight change happened (which I was totally in support of), I went from like $4-5k a month to like $400-500/mo for the last couple months. Which is fine. I signed up for volatility and am financially prepared for it. Also, this is partially just due to not having the Initiatives plugin working yet. I expect my cred scores to be volatile as we experiment, but to eventually catch up and roughly reflect the value I’m bringing. I also expect that, even when we get something great working, it’s going to take some personal experimentation and emotional labor to adjust to it. Change is stressful , even when good

The thing is though, I feel like, in addition to work going unpaid in chats (and that labor being more social and emotional in nature, which is already undervalued), there’s something inherently stressful about having only one level of signaling. Especially as we move to like-minted cred, and that signaling starts being more weighty. It means that communication around value is low frequency and scarce. In the gap, lacking other communication (this is virutal after all), there’s no way to just say ‘hey, that’s cool’, without it being this big shift in cred/power/money.

For instance, on Twitter (arguably a reputation system), there are multiple levels of interaction. Much of the interactions are just s on Tweets. Which is a much lower weight signal than Retweeting. If the only thing I could ever do was retweet, I would interact far less, and my interactions and my social graph would certainly be poorer for it. In fact, it was a on a Tweet about SourceCred that led me to discover the project. If there was nothing lower than a Retweet on Twitter, it’s likely the person that saw the SourceCred tweet wouldn’t have interacted with it at all, and I never would have found this project.

I want SourceCred to be like a vast, living organism, with branches reaching as far down as they can go. It is this property that I believe will make it antifragile, responsive and stable.

Phew! Ok sorry for the novel. Getting into some deeper issues here I suppose. Still open to debate. Just realizing though it would be so much more fun (and time efficient) to have this debate in person at CredCon, since we’re meeting in just a few days!