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Vouch

github.com

421–430 of 507 posts

Re: Vouch

#421
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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

That’s not true—it depends entirely on the country..

Re: Vouch

#422

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?

What could go wrong?!

Re: Vouch

#423
post #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 t…

"It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts".

Yep. How about $1 per PR. The submitter gets to choose from a list of charities. No refund if the PR is accepted.

The goal is to get rid of junk PR's. This would work. There could be a central payment system, which any open source project can integrate with. It could accept payment in say India, of the Indian PPP of $1, so you aren't shutting out poorer developers.

Re: Vouch

#424
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge shame that crypto has been so poorly-behaved as an industry that almost nobody is willing to touch it except for speculation. It could be useful but it's scared away most of the honest people.

The fact that people around the world are trading hundreds of billions of dollars of stable coins [1], with India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Brazil in the top five countries [2], not least of all for the purpose of "greater monetary stability" [3], I think points toward the revolutionary usefulness of its inherently non-speculative properties (as referenced in positive applications of crypto in above comments). I…

The greed has ruined it, and the greed and desperation to get rich at all costs keeps it alive.

Re: Vouch

#425
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…

"It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts". Yep. How about $1 per PR. The submitter gets to choose from a list of charities. No refund if the PR is accepted. The goal is to get rid of junk PR's. This would work. There could be a central payment system, which any open source project can integrate with. It could accept payment in say India, of the Indian PPP of $1, so you aren't shutting out poorer develope…

I would not pay any amount of money, even a trivial one, for the privilege of being able to do free work for a project - and I don't think I'm an outlier here.

Re: Vouch

#426
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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

I'm glad that you are lucky enough to never have had to choose between filling your gas tank or eating. It's sadly the state many people live in.

Re: Vouch

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that people around the world are trading hundreds of billions of dollars of stable coins [1], with India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Brazil in the top five countries [2], not least of all for the purpose of "greater monetary stability" [3], I think points toward the revolutionary usefulness of its inherently non-speculative properties (as referenced in positive applications of crypto in above comments). I…

The greed has ruined it, and the greed and desperation to get rich at all costs keeps it alive.

My point is that despite the incredible greed and desperation it not only doesn't die, its practical uses are growing. The numbers say that the actual value exceeds the grift.

Re: Vouch

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

Probably just making it non refundable works almost as well (since time really is expended reading it), without the hassle of spinning up an intermediary layer blockchain.

Re: Vouch

#429
post #380
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be by design. Almost anyone writing software professionally at a level beyond junior is getting paid enough that $1 isn't a significant expense, whether in India or elsewhere. Some projects will be willing to throw collaboration and inclusivity out the window if it means cutting their PR spam by 90% and only reducing their pool of available professional contributors by 5%.

Students don't have a lot of money to burn here. They're borrowing money to study. You'll miss out on them. However, you're unlikely to notice. I mean, there is no control group in such experiment.

I think the open source ecosystem would definitely notice long-term. Most people who become regular contributors start out in university or earlier - that's wen you have the most time to spend on hobbies like oss.

Re: Vouch

#430
post #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 t…

I think the core insight here is about incentives and friction, not crypto specifically.

I’m working on an open source CLI that experiments with this at a local, off-chain level. It lets maintainers introduce cost, review pressure, or reputation at submission time without tying anything to money or blockchains. The goal is to reduce low-quality contributions without financializing the workflow or creating new attack surfaces.

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