Loving the questions @burrrata and well thought out answers @decentralion. It seems the general “philosophical” framework/attitude is good (continually striving for “a more perfect union”, while realizing the flaws, continually working towards progress).
Discourse results look pretty good. It does have some abberations (like @LB’s inflated scores), but intuitively it feels in the right neighborhood.
I will note that my attitude (so far) in this game, is to not pay attention to cred scores, and like/comment/etc. as if I’m already in a perfect system. This is how I generally act in the Decred DAO as well, where real money is at stake–though not directly as we’re experimenting with here. Is this a good approach? Am I bravely “being the change I want to see in the world”, thereby nudging the system in the right direction? Or am I being lazy and irresponsible, and my thinking more critically about what posts I like would be valuable “work” that improves the system?
As for the larger issues around value, as I mention in my reply on another post, I think we could see various “Proof-of-X” type heuristics that can be used to define and gauge various community values. For instance, Proof-of-Awareness-of-Social-Issue-Y, say. Though that approach could have unintended side effects. I’m also tripping out here on the idea that individual interactions will create said issues structures in the graph organically, and that these can also be amplified organically through normal interactions. For instance, if I like every post that expresses value Z, will not more value Z show up if we devise some metric to measure it? I’ve been thinking generally how, even though there will need to be a governance layer, and voting schemes, etc., in a way, every interaction you have in SC is an impromptu mini vote. A statement on numerous issues at once. Another way I’m thinking about this is that every interaction is a transaction, with every interaction having its own mini unique market. Or several. In this way, “price discovery” could be happening organically? So while we should definitely look at this on higher levels of abstraction (definable project/society-wide issues), we should also be cognizant of how higher-level structures are being created organically at the protocol layer, like by like, and not accidentally do harm (or replicate work).
This also makes me think of “dark metrics”, or someone using closed-source proprietary metrics to inform their likes/comments/etc. For instance, if I’m trying to promote a product or company, I have a bot that, in addition to my organic activity, likes any post mentioning that product or company. Or I’m an activist, and I have a plugin that likes things based on identity characteristics (gender, race, nationality, etc.). In a sense, this is perfectly “legal” and expected behavior.
Edit: added below:
Ooooohh…Or let’s imagine someone using some metric to gauge something desirable (e.g. profit, development of a certain feature, some social value, etc.), then mapping that metric to nodes that increased that metric. They could then send cred directly to those nodes to increase their influence. This could be akin to an “incentive compiler” (term credit @decentralion) whereby high-level instructions are broken down to a more granular set of instructions. Here I think a community having its own currency perhaps becomes important. If a project shares the same currency as all other projects (say Grain), then a deep pocketed attacker could come in and co-opt a community by compiling incentives according to their metric, not the community’s (perhaps this is even an “evil” metric, such as sowing division, or sabotaging a product). If contributors are rewarded in their own community’s currency, an attacker would have to buy up that currency on the open market, giving money (and therefor power) to the community it was trying to attack.