The Social Norms of Flowing Cred Questions (please answer!):sourcecred:

[decentralion]

@s_ben

@decentralion this was illuminating for me. Conceptually, I vaguely understood this was the case, but wasn’t sure. Now I’m not sure how much Cred is flowing to all the posts you and @Bex liked, but perhaps that’s out of scope here?

One of the features I’m planning for the new UI is to not just show cred inflows (where did this node get cred from?) but also cred outflows (where did this node send cred to?). Should make it easier to explore the answer to that question.

@s_ben

The way I was interpreting this (correct me if I’m wrong), is that if I a Discord post, my overall Cred score goes down, if only by a little bit. Which makes me more conservative with my reactions. Which isn’t bad (it could be good to introduce more skin-in-the-game), but if I don’t understand how much I’m giving away, as a user I might be too conservative.

Yeah, we should probably tweak the wording there. In general, it’s not the case that creating a new reaction (or new outbound edge in general) will reduce your Cred, since Cred isn’t a fixed quantity that you “spend” or “keep”. All your Cred is always flowing away from you all the time, you just get to choose where it flows to.

To consider an example, suppose that I have 100 Cred, and I have one outbound edge (I liked a post by @Bex, for example). Now I create one more outbound edge (say that I like a post by you, @s_ben). I still have 100 Cred, but now instead of flowing all of it away to @bex’s post, now I’m flowing 50 to @Bex’s post and 50 to your post. I haven’t lost any Cred, I’ve just changed how it’s flowing.

However, there is a situation where liking could reduce my Cred. Suppose that I have 100 Cred, and I have one like to a post by @Bex, and that post was a reply to my post. So of that 100 Cred, say 20 of it is actually flowing back to me via the chain of Me -> Bex's Post -> My Post That Bex Replied To -> Me. Now when I like your post, some of that cred that was flowing from me back to me is instead flowing to you. So in that case, my cred might go down, say to 90 cred.

For a particular case study, we can look at parafia capital in the MakerDAO Discourse. They wrote one topic that got a lot of but otherwise have little engagement, and have never 'd anything themselves. So the result is that their Cred “has no-where to go” and piles up on their node, giving them an abnormally high Cred score. If they were to anything at all, their Cred would drop a lot.

To use the water metaphor from @miyazono’s post, it’s like we have a basin with a small trickle of water in, but it’s really well dammed and the water can’t get out anywhere. So the result is a surprisingly big lake.

As part of CredRank we’re going to tweak the rules here a bit, to make it harder to create “cred traps” like this. In general, I don’t want it to be the case that reacting to stuff causes people to lose Cred. And like I said, right now that happens in edge cases… if you are someone who has been behaving “normally” and liking a fair amount of stuff that isn’t your own content, then adding more likes won’t cause you to lose Cred.