SourceCred and Colony are similar in that they both are (or contain) reputation systems. Colony is very opinionated about how reputation works, though: there are Tasks, which are advance-scoped, individual pieces of work. Someone signs up to do the task, someone else manages the task, and then both parties’ reputation is modified based on the outcome. This is a really high-friction approach to building reputation–contrast it to the regular world, where your reputation is continually and implicitly changing based on all your interactions with others, not just formalized tasks in a particular framework.
You’re right that Colony’s reputation is task-driven, but I do think there are benefits to gating reputation behind a needs-driven, semi-adversarial peer-review process. Since reputation is driven by tasks, and tasks are driven by the needs of the org, reputation becomes a (hopefully) tight proxy for the value someone contributes to the organization. As an analogy, prices capture information because of the adversarial (“PvP”) nature of their setting. So here I would hope that reputation captures information in a somewhat similar way. We frequently discuss ways to reduce the friction of the task flow, and are on the lookout for ways to incorporate automated or implicit “tasks” – but to play the devils advocate I would say that some friction in the measurement may help keep the signal strong. After all, Elo ratings are highly trusted because they are the outcome of high-friction, adversarial processes.
I think the risk of “PvE” approaches to reputation (i.e. deriving rep from activity on discourse) is that that are more vulnerable to Goodhart-style failures, where people’s behavior will re-orient around the metrics that drive reputation, “putting pressure” on the phenomena and adding noise to the signal. Undoubtedly PageRank-style graphical algorithms are more robust to these types of manipulation, and incorporating adversarial inputs like pull requests (which must be approved) will make them even more robust. But I think that inevitably the broader the base of inputs the wider the attack surface, especially when the inputs are non-adversarial or non-resource-constrained. Is it really progress if more people are posting on forums simply to increase their post count?