A Radicle Cred Instance

Hi there! I created a demo SourceCred instance for the Radicle community, which you can see here: https://decentralion.github.io/radicle-cred/

Currently this just assigns Cred based on posts on this forum. The rules are pretty simple–basically, every time someone :heart:s a post, that post earns some Cred, which flows to its author, the post it replied to, posts or topics it references, et cetera. Right now most of the Cred flows to people directly involved with the Radicle Foundation, but I imagine as the community grows and decentralizes it will start to flow more widely.

This instance will automatically update every day to reflect new activity on the forums. If the community wants, it’s possible to distribute RAD tokens through the forum. MakerDAO has been using a a SourceCred instance pointed at their own governance forums as a way of rewarding the valuable labor that goes into decentralized governance. For now though, I figured it’d just be cool to post this as an experiment and see what folks think.

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Sick! Curious if you’ve encountered a change in behaviour after MakerDAO has used this to reward users?

This is a good reward system to attracted and encourage users join our community. But pls consider connect with Bright ID app to qualified real users in order to prevent cheater.

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There’s been a lot of discussion about this at MakerDAO; overall the feedback has been quite positive, with people saying that getting rewarded for participating on the forums helped pull them into the project. You can see this announcement on extending the pilot Cred instance and this proposal for funding SC from the MKR protocol to get a sense of how the community has seen the integration. Also there’s this testimonial from a community member who specifically got engaged because of the rewards.

Right now SourceCred uses Discourse trust levels to mitigate spam/sibyl issues. So far that’s been sufficient to address forum-based gaming, although as communities get larger, I think using BrightID would make a lot of sense!

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SO COOL @decentralion ! I love it. Thanks for the contribution.

We’re thinking of starting a separate governance forum (gov.community.radworks.org) to host Radicle’s governance discussions and off-chain processes. How easy would it be to bootstrap another cred instance on that forum? I think we’d potentially be able to use the same one, if I can just host a set of categories at a subdomain, but use the same user base associated with community.radworks.org. We’ll see.

It’d be super easy to set up a separate Cred instance for a separate forum. Also, if you wanted to make governance a category on this forum, we can also configure SourceCred to only mint Cred on items in the governance category (or to mint much more Cred for governance activity).

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I’d issue a word of caution about these types of incentivization mechanisms. While they can serve to be good to incentivize activity at (very) small scales, we don’t want folks going around liking forum posts as a bedrock for governance (or token distribution). In my experience it’s best to have a human curator identify and suggest rewards for high quality posts / discussions.

That being said, there are (less subjective) actions that do make sense for automated rewards issuance:

— voting subsidy (but again, caution here, as folks may just vote to earn the reward)
— successfully passing a proposal