SourceCred: an MMO for life

Note: Was going to add this to the Spotlights category because I thought that was where we shine a light on ideas worth considering (like a spotlight), but now it says “Category for thanking people for non-code contributions.”

Noticing a trend: when thinking about SourceCred or comparing it to other applications, the “killer feature” that stands out is the social aspect. SourceCred allows people to measure, engage with, and reward each other like never before. It works because of the way humans work. SourceCred is nothing without the community, but the community + SourceCred is (hopefully) better than just the community.

Zooming out there’s lots of frameworks to manage businesses, organizations, and communities. There’s also lots of social networks and forums for discourse. There’s also lots of financial markets for just about everything you can think of. SourceCred combines these all into a new unique experience.

This experience has value on it’s own for small teams, but it (seems like it) would become increasingly interesting as more people engage. After all, contributions are measured based on their relationship to other contributions. The more people engage with contributions the more engaging and rewarding it will be to create and engage with more content.

Ideally the price of rewards for contributions would scale with the amount of engagement, but this requires a sustainable economic model that doesn’t rely on @decentralion and @protocol. While sustainable and organically driven economic models that incentivize and reward contributions towards a common goal are important, this thread is not about that.

This thread is about discussing the social aspect of SourceCred. This will help us focus on the unique value prop of SourceCred, how to leverage that to create more value for our community, and… maybe… even make boring things fun and rewarding.