I drafted the following reply earlier, but opted not to post it because I wasn’t sure how much energy you wanted to spend on the topic and wanted to be respectful of your time. But clearly you judge it valuable enough to merit a follow-up thread, so here it is. (Posting here rather than there because it addresses both the “cred-free” part and matters related more closely to the initiative itself.)
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Some responses and thoughts inline, but let me first say that I’d like to separate two things: (a) the degree to which we think that magically having cred on Discord would be a good thing, and (b) the degree to which we want to spend effort implementing it in the near future, as signaled by this initiative being marked “up for adoption” and help “much appreciated”. These are correlated but different. While we may have different perspectives on the magnitude of (a), I think that we’d agree that in the long term it is something that we want to have, and would be a strange gap if missing.
This is nice to have, but, as you hint, this doesn’t really solve the
problem. “Ugh; they liked my comment enough to :+1: it but didn’t
:sourcecred: it” currently does not pass through my mind on Discord at
all.
Hmm… my intuition/strawman here—what do you think about it?—is that helpful and informative Discord posts usually create value by influencing the trajectory of other things that are more documented. If my comment about floating point numbers was useful to someone because they’re porting some JavaScript code to Python, the relevant PR description could include a “thanks” edge. If a comment shapes the development of an initiative, the “References” section of that initiative could include a “thanks” edge. We encourage these kinds of attribution, anyway.
It doesn’t require self-promotion—anyone can add the “thanks” edge, and I was actually imagining that most thanks would be added by the thanker rather than the thankee.
It is true that it raises the activation energy (and thus increases the signal-to-noise ratio, as it’ll be used less for “reflex” reactions). But contrariwise it also decreases the activation energy for actually posting on Discord.
As above, this doesn’t follow, because anyone can thank. It is true that if there were a clique of people who were only contributing on Discord and wanted to flow cred to each other, but nobody wanted to flow cred to them, then they would have a harder time doing that.
My two cents as the author of that message: I’m totally fine with not receiving cred for that post. I didn’t expect any while writing it. I posit that it is a feature to not create a culture of expecting remuneration for the simplest acts of helping each other.
This doesn’t sit quite right with me, and though I can’t pin it down exactly, let me try to share my point of view.
First, the nature of a plugin system is that we are inviting others to follow where we don’t lead. That’s explicitly the purpose. If it weren’t, then we wouldn’t need plugins; we would just bake in all the functionality to core ourselves.
Second, if we think that something is likely to create problems, that surely doesn’t mean that we must do it specifically to face those problems ourselves and break them down scientifically. It does mean that we should be transparent about known limitations of anything that we provide to others. But we’re well within our rights to say that we think that something is a bad idea and are not going to do it.
A critical part of “the paradigm” is recognizing where and how the paradigm should be applied. We need to lean into that, too.
Maybe I didn’t articulate them clearly enough, but other concerns that have not been addressed are that Discord is not an open platform (more closed than GitHub, as the entire content space is login-walled), and that implementing this would require a significant amount of work.