Should Discord be a "cred-free space"?

[decentralion]

Thanks everyone for sharing your perspectives! I appreciate the quality of discussion here.

As TBD, I’m going to make the following call:

• Let’s try a Discord plugin, with the semantics I initially proposed.
• Let’s consider it an experiment (dogfooding!) and keep our eyes wide open for potential problems that come from using it.
• At 1 and 3 months after the plugin was turned on, we’ll have discussions about it: how we’re feeling about it, how/whether it changed the vibe, how it changed our behavior, etc.
• Based on those discussions, we might change the plugin, write new social guidelines, or discontinue it.

---

Remainder of this post has my takes on specific points in the discussion.

@s_ben

there actually are a lot of people that contribute only in chat … answering questions from newcomers, pointing them to resources, doing low-level support … Their economic value in fact is often explicitly recognized by investors and traders.

This feels really important to me. Right now, the “population” of Discord and Discourse have a lot of overlap, but there are already contributors who are notably more present on the Discord than on the forum. This divergence will only grow with time. I don’t like the idea that some populations of contributors, who we all agree are doing valuable work, don’t have any first-class way to earn cred.

@wchargin

Could the mechanisms that we use [for in-person chats] also apply to communication that happened to occur on Discord?

[they] will necessarily be holistic, rather than turning each individual comment into (for lack of a better word) a microtransaction.

By the same logic, why not use these other mechanisms to reward forum posts, or GitHub issues, thus avoiding turning each individual post or issue into a microtransaction? The answer is that friction matters. It’s hard for me to see a principled reason why a valuable GitHub issue comment should get “intrinsic” cred, but a valuable Discord comment shouldn’t.

(I agree that, on average, GitHub issue comments have a longer “valuable lifespan” than Discord comments, and it might make sense to give them more cred. But this is a continuum, not a dichotomy.)

@anon60584824

Perhaps there could be an intermediate, where if someone posts something special, there is an anonymous way to report it, and give the other person cred, but without it being so publicly known. This likely goes against the transparency goal of sourcecred, but there must be some way to do it… maybe another idea is if there is a channel like didathing where others nominate

I’m pretty reluctant to sacrifice the transparency and fork-ability of Cred instances, and so getting anonymous signals without sacrificing those values requires a ton of zero-knowledge-cryptographic style engineering that we’re not prepared for.

I do like the idea of having a channel (let’s call it #props) where people can nominate each other for receiving cred flows, though.

@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.

Now that are so meaningful, we might want to have a discussion about “what a heart means”. See here: When to ❤ something?

@Beanow

Perhaps emoji based cred flow is just not the way to go and we should have a fixed amount of cred flowing to didathing, simply to promote the activity of sharing, and not attempt to value the contribution being referred to?

I think cred minting should always have an element of review. represent an informal review, minting to merged PRs makes sense because they were also reviewed. If we mint directly to any post in didathing, we’ll encourage a race-to-the-bottom where people are incentivized to post increasingly trivial things there.

@s_ben

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.

In the future, I think we’ll mostly do forward-looking weight changes rather than retroactive (needs technical work), so we shouldn’t have quite so much volatility. That said, I’ve been thinking for a while that we should implement a “grain vesting” type mechanism that damps the volatility. This will also make cred-and-compensation less tightly coupled, which will reduce the “I need 5 to get paid this week” type vibe.

---

Also, I’m happy to have some truly cred-free spaces on the Discord, I just don’t think the whole server should be a cred-free space. We could disable cred on the #random channel, for example.