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Vouch

github.com

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Re: Vouch

#411

Post by theredbeard »

OSS was already brutal for new contributors before AI. You'd spend hours on a good-faith PR and get ignored for months, or get torn apart in review because you didn't know the unwritten conventions. The signal-to-noise ratio sucked but at least maintainers would eventually look at your stuff.

Now with AI-generated spam everywhere, maintainers have even more reason to be suspicious of unknown names. Vouch solves their problem, but think about what it means for someone trying to break in. You need someone to vouch for you before you can contribute, but how do you get someone to vouch for you if you can't contribute?

I get why maintainers need this. But we're formalizing a system that makes OSS even more of an insider's club. The cold start problem doesn't really get any warmer like this.

Re: Vouch

#412

Post by sethammons »

miki123211 wrote: post #381
nl wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The "money goes to the repo part" is the problem here, as it incentivizes maintainers to refuse legitimate pull requests. Crypto has a perfect way to burn money, just send it to a nonexistent address from where it can never be recovered. I guess the trad fi equivalent are charitable donations. The real problem here is the amount of work necessary to make this viable. I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny…

You can reduce the transactions with payment providers. Instead of money exchanging from contributor to maintainer, have a token exchange. Contributors fund tokens with real money, and pull requests cost and refund tokens. Like an escrow account. But the money never goes to the target system. There are no perverse incentives to steal tokens. If you get a reputation of not refunding tokens (which have no value to a maintainer), then contributors will dry up.

"TrustTokens" or "EscrowTokens"

Re: Vouch

#413

Post by chmod775 »

vasco wrote: post #367
crazygringo wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever paid you? The technical side of this seems easy enough. The human side, that seems more complicated. Like, if I were your doctor or contractor or kid's schoolteacher or whoever you hadn't happened to already whitelist, and had sent you something important for you, and got that back as a response... I'm sure as heck not paying when I'm trying to send you something for your benefit.

Yeah, meanwhile a scammer will actually pay to have a seal of approval. It's a great way to stop receiving anything that benefits yourself and only start receiving mail which could make the sender way more than $1

> Yeah, meanwhile a scammer will actually pay to have a seal of approval.

No they won't. Especially not automated spam. They'd just get farmed by people creating millions of fake e-mail addresses.

Re: Vouch

#414

Post by VadimPR »

I don't see how to apply this to my medium-sized project - this is essentially a whitelist of all contributors, which is the same as a collaborators feature in github. How would an entirely new contributor get a contribution in?

This is perhaps good for massive projects like curl which are tired of AI slop.

Re: Vouch

#415

Post by layer8 »

Loughla wrote: post #90
zozbot234 wrote: post #71

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?

There are people who bid but then don’t pay if they win the auction. Or take weeks to pay after winning. That’s just a pain for the seller, because they have to spend time trying to get the winner to pay, or else have to put up the auction again (which used to cost some fee each time for the seller, I don’t know how it is now). The only penalty for non-paying winners is the negative feedback they receive.

Re: Vouch

#416

Post by Hendrikto »

awestroke wrote: post #407
nl wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I see no advantage with this over real money transfers. At all. Just use some kind of escrow.

You don’t need a third party, or anybodies permission, nobody can censor you or block your transactions, you don’t need a bank account with everything that entails. The barrier of entry is the same as creating an SSH keypair. It works globally, fast, cheap. You do not need to trust anybody, all the code is open and the ledger is cryptographically verifiable by anyone. There are lots of advantages.

Re: Vouch

#417

Post by rcmuir »

At first, this concept looked so cool, to solve a real problem!

But then the actions implementation starts with "pull_request_target" :(

Re: Vouch

#418

Post by monegator »

theredbeard wrote: post #411

OSS was already brutal for new contributors before AI. You'd spend hours on a good-faith PR and get ignored for months, or get torn apart in review because you didn't know the unwritten conventions. The signal-to-noise ratio sucked but at least maintainers would eventually look at your stuff. Now with AI-generated spam everywhere, maintainers have even more reason to be suspicious of unknown names. Vouch solves their…

let's make it even better: why not set up a donation mechanism to get in the list?

Re: Vouch

#419

Post by poulpy123 »

weli wrote: post #403
andai wrote: 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.

$1 might not be a lot to you, but in some countries that's the daily wage. Even in rich countries one dollar for some might be the difference between eating or not eating that day. Paywalling without any regional pricing consideration it's just going to incentivize people from poor countries to not participate in your project. Maybe that's okay for you but it's something to consider.

I don't like this idea but the people unable to afford $1 don't have time to propose PR

Re: Vouch

#420

Post by Wowfunhappy »

miki123211 wrote: post #381
nl wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The "money goes to the repo part" is the problem here, as it incentivizes maintainers to refuse legitimate pull requests. Crypto has a perfect way to burn money, just send it to a nonexistent address from where it can never be recovered. I guess the trad fi equivalent are charitable donations. The real problem here is the amount of work necessary to make this viable. I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny…

> I bet Visa and Mastercard would look at you funny if your business had such a high rate of voluntary transaction reversals

…you might be right, but I do wonder if the situation would be different if “your business” was “Microsoft”. Obviously they would discuss this plan ahead of time.

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