IMO: trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce". This is similar to real life: if you vouch for someone (in business for example), and they scam them, your own reputation suffers. So vouching carries risk. Similarly, if you going around someone is unreliable, but people find out they actually aren't, your reputation also suffers. If vo…
> Then again, if this is the case, why would you risk your own reputation to vouch for anyone anyway.
The same as when you vouch for your company to hire someone - because you will benefit from their help.
IMO: trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce". This is similar to real life: if you vouch for someone (in business for example), and they scam them, your own reputation suffers. So vouching carries risk. Similarly, if you going around someone is unreliable, but people find out they actually aren't, your reputation also suffers. If vo…
> Then again, if this is the case, why would you risk your own reputation to vouch for anyone anyway. Good reason to be careful. Maybe there's a bit of an upside to: if you vouch for someone who does good work, then you get a little boost too. It's how personal relationships work anyway. ---------- I'm pretty skeptical of all things cryptocurrency, but I've wondered if something like this would be an actually good us…
I don't think that trust is easily transferable between projects, and tracking "karma" or "reputation" as a simple number in this file would be technically easy. But how much should the "karma" value change form different actions? It's really hard to formalize efficiently. The web of trust, with all intricacies, in small communities fits well into participants' heads. This tool is definitely for reasonably small "core" communities handling a larger stream of drive-by / infrequent contributors.
"Open source has always worked on a system of trust and verify" Not sure about the trust part. Ideally, you can evaluate the change on its own. In my experience, I immediately know whether I want to close or merge a PR within a few seconds, and the hard part is writing the response to close it such that they don't come back again with the same stuff. (I review a lot of PRs for openpilot - https://github.com/commaai/o…
When there's time, you review, when there isn't you trust...
Indeed, it's relatively impossible without ties to real world identity.
> Indeed, it's relatively impossible without ties to real world identity. I don't think that's true? The goal of vouch isn't to say "@linus_torvalds is Linus Torvalds" it's to say "@linus_torvalds is a legitimate contributor an not an AI slopper/spammer". It's not vouching for their real world identity, or that they're a good person, or that they'll never add malware to their repositories. It's just vouching for the…
That’s not the point.
Point is: when @lt100, @lt101, … , @lt999 all vouch for something, it’s worthless.
You're giving way too much credit to the people spamming these slop PRs. These are not good faith contributions by people trying to help. They are people trying to get pull requests merged for selfish reasons, whether that's a free shirt or something to put on their resume. Even on the first page of closed ghostty PRs I was able to find some prime slop[0]. It is a huge waste of time for a maintainer to nicely tell pe…
If you can immediately tell "this is just AI slop" that's all the review and "attention" you need; you can close the PR and append a boilerplate message that tells the contributor what to do if they want to turn this into a productive contribution. Whether they're "good faith contributors trying to help" or not is immaterial if this is their first interaction. If they don't get the point and spam the repo again then…
The thing is, the person will use their AI to respond to your boilerplate.
That means you, like John Henry, are competing against a machine at the thing that machine was designed to do.
Not sure about this one. I understand the need and the idea behind it is well-intentioned, but I can easily see denouncelists turn into a weapon against wrongthinkers. Said something double-plus-ungood on Twitter? Denounced. Accepted contribution from someone on a prominent denouncelist? Denouced. Not that it was not possible to create such lists before, but it was all informal. The real problem are reputation-farmer…
GitHub needs to implement eBay-like feedback for contributors. With not only reputation scores, but explanatory comments like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAA++++++++++++ VERY GOOD CONTRIBUTIONS AND EASY TO WORK WITH. WOULD DEFINITELY MERGE THEIR WORK AGAIN!"
I know this is a joke, but pretending for a moment that it isn’t: this would immediately result in the rep system being gamed the same way it is on eBay: scam sellers can purchase feedback on cheap or self-shipping auctions and then pivot into defrauding people on high-dollar sales before being banned, rinse, and repeat.
I think denouncing is an incredibly bad idea especially as the foundation of VOUCH seems to be web of trust. If you get denounced on a popular repo and everyone "inherits" that repo as a source of trust (e.g. think email providers - Google decides you are bad, good luck). Couple with the fact that usually new contributors take some time to find their feet. I've only been at this game (SWE) for ~10 years so not a long…
Off topic but why was contributing to Npgsql a bad experience for you? I've contributed, admittedly minor stuff, to that ecosystem and it was pretty smooth.
I don't know if this is the right solution, but I appreciate the direction. It's clear that AI slop is trading on people's good names and network reputation. Poisoning the well. The dead internet is here. In multiple domains people are looking for a solution to "are you someone/something worthy of my emotional investment." I don't think code can be held to be fully AI-free, but we need a way to check that they are empathy-full.