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Vouch

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Re: Vouch

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this seems like a privileged solution. Let's say you're a one-of-a-kind kid that already is making useful contributions, but $1 is a lot of money for you, then suddenly your work becomes useless? It feels weird to pay for providing work anyway. Even if its LLM gunk, you're paying to work (let alone pay for your LLM).

You get it refunded

The default could should be to refund.

That would make not-refunding culturally crass unless it was warranted.

With manual options for:

0. (Default, refund)

1. (Default refund) + Auto-send discouragement response. (But allow it.)

2. (Default refund) + Block.

3. Do not refund

4. Do not refund + Auto-send discouragement response.

5. Do not refund + Block.

6. Do not refund + Block + Report SPAM (Boom!)

And typically use $1 fee, to discourage spam.

And $10 fee, for important, open, but high frequency addresses, as that covers the cost of reviewing high throughput email, so useful email did get identified and reviewed. (With the low quality communication subsidizing the high quality communication.)

The latter would be very useful in enabling in-demand contact doors to remain completely open, without being overwhelmed. Think of a CEO or other well known person, who does want an open channel of feedback from anyone, ideally, but is going to have to have someone vet feedback for the most impactful comments, and summarize any important trend in the rest. $10 strongly disincentives low quality communication, and covers the cost of getting value out of communication (for everyone).

Re: Vouch

#223
post #139

It should just be $1 to submit PR. If PR is good, maintainer refunds you ;) I noticed the same thing in communication. Communication is now so frictionless, that almost all the communication I receive is low quality. If it cost more to communicate, the quality would increase. But the value of low quality communication is not zero: it is actively harmful, because it eats your time.

This thought pattern leads to crypto.

In that world there's a process called "staking" where you lock some tokens with a default lock expiry action and a method to unlock based on the signature from both participants.

It would work like this: Repo has a public key. Submitted uses a smart contract to sign the commit with along with the submission of a crypto. If the repo merges it then the smart contract returns the token to the submitter. Otherwise it goes to the repo.

It's technically quite elegant, and the infrastructure is all there (with some UX issues).

But don't do this!!!!

I did some work in crypto. It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts, and because crypto brings money so close to engineering it corrupts good product design.

Re: Vouch

#225
Problem 1 - assuming this Vouch tool gains wide adoption without major fuckups, I predict that a lot of people would "outsource" their own vetting to it, and it would become a circular system where newcomer would not be able to get vouched because everyone will expect others to do it.

Problem 2 - getting banned by any single random project for any reason, like CoC disagreement, a heated Rust discussion, any world politics views etc. would lead to a system-wide ban in all involved project. Kinda like getting a ban for a bad YT comment and then your email and files are blocked forever too.

The idea is nice, like many other social improvement ideas. The reality will 99% depend on the actual implementation and actual usage.

Re: Vouch

#226

What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects? Say what you want about wanting to avoid politically disagreeable people, but Bluesky has been shrinking gradually since the 2024 election, as people interested in political effectiveness or even avoiding a hugbox have drifted away. Or think about how new projects are generally not started as GPL anymore (except if they want to charge…

>What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects?

Perhaps that is the plan?

Re: Vouch

#228

What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects? Say what you want about wanting to avoid politically disagreeable people, but Bluesky has been shrinking gradually since the 2024 election, as people interested in political effectiveness or even avoiding a hugbox have drifted away. Or think about how new projects are generally not started as GPL anymore (except if they want to charge…

The project author has the choice of which set of projects vouches to use or to have a project-specific vouching system. People could still object to the vouch system via Issue/Pull-request Tool and off platform. Enough votes would highlight it.

Re: Vouch

#229
post #170

Ah, we have converted a technical problem into a social problem. Historically those are vastly easier to solve, right? Spam filters exist. Why do we need to bring politics into it? Reminds me of the whole CoC mess a few years back. Every time somebody talks about a new AI thing the lament here goes: > BUT THINK OF THE JUNIORS! How do you expect this system to treat juniors? How do your juniors ever gain experience co…

> Ah, we have converted a technical problem into a social problem.

Surely you mean this the other way around?

Mitchell is trying to address a social problem with a technical solution.

Re: Vouch

#230
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

The ones I've never understood are: Prompt payment. Great buyer. I can't check out unless I pay. How is that feedback?

I don't know how it is where where you live, but here there are two possibilities I can think of:

- When I buy an item I still have to click a "check out" link to enter my address and actually pay for the item. I could take days after buying the item to click that link. - Some sellers might not accept PayPal, instead after I check out I get the sellers bank information and have to manually wire the money. I could take days after checking out to actually perform the money transfer.

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