Sneak peek: SourceCred Discourse Plugin

[burrrata]

@decentralion

eternal september

Learn something new every day lol

Also, that’s awesome that the PageRank/SourceCred alg is more robust than a naive up/down vote system (not sure exactly what system Reddit uses tho). It would be great to see more applications integrating this, esp in a social context. While cred is obviously awesome for tracking open source dev related contributions, it could really be used to track contributions to any community including social networks. Currently, and sadly, almost every social network in the world sucks right now because… well because of many things… but having a better mechanism for recognizing quality contributions (however the community defines “quality”) would be awesome (esp if that gave governance weight to contributors in a DAO type setting). We’re currently kind of working on this with Daonuts (see about page), but something like SourceCred would really really improve the model greatly

@decentralion

Then we can decide, as a community: how do we want to weight likes, @-mentions, and quotes? By finding values that make sense for our community’s norms and expectations, we’ll get good results.

Will you get “good” results tho, or will you get more people doing the things that get them more points?

Atm the only “points” (at least in my head) is that I have ideas and want to brainstorm on stuff to make the internets better. IF I was optimizing for other metrics tho… I might choose to express myself much differently. It’s like someone who posts on instagram because they want to vs someone posting for likes. Originally it was all people expressing themselves, now it’s almost all people trying to game the algorithm to promote their personal brand. While every human in the system is optimizing for their own personal rewards, the system itself shapes the community greatly. IF the community can shape itself tho (vs FB/Insta doing it), then… well afaik no one knows because we haven’t tried it yet! Excited to see how it turns out and participate, but there’s no guarantee of “good” results.

@decentralion

Someone can add sentiment analysis without changing the protocol, but by adding a heuristic which sets the weights on edges based on sentiment analysis.

This is VERY cool! So it’s not just an algorithm, but it’s a platform that people can build apps/plugins for?!

@decentralion

f we can’t make a perfectly unbiased algorithm, we can at least make the tools so that communities using SourceCred can make informed decisions about what biases may be present, and constantly work to improve it, so that it becomes fairer and less biased over time.

We’re monkeys that wear clothes so everything we think and do is biased to a degree and it’s all relative. The most important part is that the algorithms determining who gets cred and why are open so that we can analyze, understand, and shape them together as a community.

@decentralion

Well, I imagine a web app that allows the user to interactively create a SourceCred graph and play with the structure/weights, then run PageRank. Researchers could then use that webapp to create various interesting graphs and we can use them to validate whether the cred flows match our intuitive sense of what should happen.

Running auto-ml on this in order to optimize for various objectives would be crazy… I mean I bet that’s what every major platform does already with their content “discovery” algorithms, but to open source that would be amazing. Could even run a tournament like Numerai, but where people submit parameters that make the graph more like whatever the community is optimizing for (and thus earn rewards for doing so). This way, as a community evolves and/or learns to game the system there would always be new adjustments coming in to reshape the graph towards whatever the community is optimizing for. This explanation assumes an understanding of Numerai, so does that make sense or should try to explain it better?

@decentralion

If you want to take a stab at this, I can write up some notes on how to get started, and what parts of the code base are relevant.

I would LOVE to. I’m super busy rn tho building DAOs and whatnot so I dunno how much time I could devote to it, but it’s something that would be incredibly interesting to explore

@s_ben

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 .

I mean… you do you, but altruism is not a winning strategy (unless you’re in a repeated game with > 5% altruistic players, but even then you need to be playing tit4tat). I like the idea of stress testing and breaking the game to see where it needs improvement lol

@s_ben

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

This seems really really interesting and a solid avenue of research. “Price” is just an abstract number measuring “value”, and more often perceived value. What matters is that there’s something being measured and market participants take actions based on their perception of that. We’re spending time/energy writing posts and curating content. If you post a thing, it’s like a sell order and if I reply, it’s like a buy order. You spent time to make a thing and I agreed to spend time replying to and engaging with that thing. When you add cred to that, it measures what we already know.

Example: if Vitalik Buterin responds to or reposts something on Twitter, people pay attention because Vitalik’s thoughts are high value and there’s a high chance that whatever he’s doing is worth paying attention to. This is implied, but the only measure we have right now is followers, likes, retweets, and “impressions.” Being able to map Cred to that would create an open market where participants not only earn social points, but governance weight and financial points as well. This could change (improve) the way humans coordinate and cooperate at scale!

If the algorithms are public and we understand them, then the impact will be positive. If the algorithms are easy to manipulate and/or only serve the interests of a few (advertising dollars, etc…) then the effect will be largely negative as we currently see today. The important part here is making sure that everyone can participate and understand the system, because ultimately they’ll have to shape it as they go.

This creates a meta market of data scientists who can submit tweaked parameters to the model that then will distribute cred (governance/money) to people within a network (which is itself a market!)

Does all that make sense? It’s clear af in my head rn, but I also feel like I might be rambling so please lemme know if this needs clarification!

@s_ben

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.

This is huge. I dunno how to prevent this, but having an open market that rewards people for submitting improvements to the SourceCred alg/parameters could help.

also, initially bots will have low cred to begin with and thus be less influential, but… I’ve been following subredditNN for a while now and the bots are getting better and better at an alarming rate (it’s a Reddit community of 100% bot generated content. Pictures, memes, text posts, everything generated by various types of neural networks). Maybe if a bot is actually producing stuff people like then it should get points for that, but then a data scientist could create a bunch of bots then use their cred to vote on things. Feature or bug? I dunno…

@s_ben

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.

Not sure if I follow the first half of this example, but I definitely follow this part. That’s the beauty of Proof of Stake or bonding curve systems. They provide cryptoeconomic security simply based on the fact that it becomes exponentially more expensive to attack/buy a network the more you try!

EDIT: after sitting with all this for a bit and letting it stir around in the back of my mind, I think that the main point I’m trying to get at is:

• at the heart of any social network/platform is a graph that measures the value of users and content
• “value” is whatever reward function that network/platform is trying to optimize for
• the social network then ranks users and content based on what is perceived to be valuable for it’s objectives (not necessarily the objectives/values of users on that network)
• valuable users/content are then promoted, while less valuable ones are ignored, shadow banned, or banned outright
• this is happening right now on digital platforms like Facebook/Insta, but also in meat space with China’s social credit system (fun infographic!)
• in both cases the problem is not measuring value, but the fact that participants in the network are not able to influence their destiny within that network beyond optimizing for the metrics that a single opaque entity dictates
• the killer app of blockchains is permissionless innovation, which is another way of saying open markets and competition that puts users in control and allows them to be participants in a network vs a product of it
• it is essential that participants in SourceCred networks/communities can easily understand and contribute to the governance (optimization) of the SourceCred algorithm that determines their reputation and financial gain in that network/community