[Discussion] SourceCred on Twitter

Governance
#1

Hello,

SourceCred in the MakerDAO forum has been a success! It has definitely had a good impact around here, in the forum, and it is still actively running!

What I am proposing to discuss here goes kind of against the “traditional MakerDAO culture” of avoiding memes/pumps/shills/etc, but let me try anyway (mostly for the sake of discussion) :slight_smile:

PROPOSAL: Start a SourceCred initiative on Twitter: reward (registered) users based on their number of likes/retweets on tweets containing the hashtags MKR/makerdao/DAI.

What do you think? We might just start and try it out for a 2-3 months and see what are the results, and if we like them :slight_smile:

@s_ben would SourceCred be able to support the Twitter platform?

1 Like
#2

Let’s just no do that… pls.

For the diversity sake, ha!

1 Like
#3

please don’t
might be good for the price of MKR, but I really enjoy the high quality discussions we have here. Moonboi-army not welcome. we grow based on fundamentals, not based on memes

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#4

Can’t say this is a terrible idea. Not sure how feasible it is.

Twitter

The Maker meme over the weekend had a lot of engagement and views. I take it as a positive. “Buzz” does help get people excited about a project, and if anything, will bring more people into the community. I don’t particularly think Maker needs hype, but it might be nice for morale :smiley:

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#5

Totally agree on preserving the culture here, in the forum and in the chat.

But one of the fundamentals of MakerDAO is for the MKR token to be:

  1. widely distributed (to avoid centralisation in decisions) and,
  2. valuable (to sustain bad events in case of unbacked DAIs).

So I would like to challenge this apparent dichcotomy:

Nice people/chat/forum ← vs → MKR well known and bought by crypto armies.

Are the two really incompatible?

#6

In theory they’re not, … :wink:

Imho we are far better off with not trying to incentivize promotion to the outside world. It is not adding to the fundamentals. As soon as we do that on twitter we will see a shillfest in the forum as well. Let’s try to delay that as much as possible

2 Likes
#7

@iammeeoh @ultraschuppi in some ways you are both right. Twitter is really important for spreading knowledge about Dai the in the high volume/propaganda sense, but the problem is that even otherwise smart people are unable to say anything useful on Twitter due to the way the platform is constructed. Would be good if Twitter activity could be prevented from ever reaching the forum.
Maybe wait a bit and then use Twitter for meme warfare only?

1 Like
#8

I don’t think other large projects have to pay for grass roots marketing. That should come intrinsically from a passionate community of MKR token holders that have an incentive to bring added value to their investment. Ideally this should be free. I doubt Chainlink and Aave pay their users for their services. The community just loves their projects. Hopefully one day that fervent passion will come to Maker, but hopefully later. September will come.

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#9

Yeah perhaps I should have made the:

Disclaimer: I don’t even have a twitter account.

:rofl: But I think it’s full of people out there who like communicating/learning from tweets, and I even witnessed some good tweets (see several examples here: SebVentures twitter account).

Again, I am not an expert of social media dynamics, but I suspect your belief is possibly a bit naive. I am certain that several projects directly pay top influencers to shill their crypto products/coins: youtube and twitter .

And if they don’t pay directly, they ‘stimulate’ grass roots marketing through other systems: airdropping tokens left and right, crazy farming opportunities, etc.

So yeah, I don’t think it is ‘free’ for anybody, really.

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#10

I’d love to be proven wrong! Sounds terrible!

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#11

I agree, I’m fairly certain community ambassadors like ChainLinkGod, BlueKirby, and other anons are either early token holders, or like in BlueKirby’s case, on the payroll (at least until the eminence rug)

Do we have any anons in the community that are early MKR holders?

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#12

Theoretically, SoruceCred could support Twitter. We discuss this internally from time to time actually, and may do it one day.

tldr; it could be really powerful, but there are reservations around what behavior it could incentivize, and it’s not currently a priority. Part of this is just dev bandwidth. You’d need to create a Twitter plugin for SourceCred, which would involve knowledge of the algorithm and devs to build and maintain it. Also, SourceCred is currently focused on building a new plugin called the Creditor, which could serve similar needs. It allows you to input arbitrary contributions into the graph. This would allow someone to, for instance, submit a list of high-impact Tweets they’d made as a contribution. If the contribution is accepted, Cred would flow to those Tweets and its author.

As for incentives, if the payouts are high enough, you will likely be spammed/gamed. Point in case, 1Hive was running SourceCred on its Discord, including its #memes channel (link). Which is kind of a meme-focused social media feed. When their token ($HNY) mooned, the fixed amount of HNY they were distributing per week via SourceCred went from being worth ~$2k to ~$60k. People were making thousands just making memes. Pretty quickly, their meme channel exploded. Lots of brilliant memes at first. Then more spammy, low-effort memes…Eventually, people started gaming it with upvoting rings, which ruined the experience for many honest actors, and 1Hive had to set the #memes channel to mint 0 Cred. Gaming stopped almost immediately.

Another “cautionary tale” is the r/CryptoCurrency and r/ethtrader subreddits, which are distributing tokens based on karma (also a reputation system). Don’t get me wrong, I love these experiments, and I think they’re generally going well. But both subs also appear to have a “meme problem”. Many (if not most) in these communities think memes are over rewarded, but appear to have a problem reining them in. See r/ethtrader’s most recent governance poll related to memes and Twitter posts :point_down:

So, if Maker wanted to go this route, it will likely need additional technical and governance bandwidth, both of which are scarce due to other priorities.

On a personal note, I have enjoyed memes and comedy surfaced recently by @Uncle. Even though it’s a bit edgy at times, the community seems to have generally embraced it, and it’s the first contributor I’m aware of in a community using SourceCred that is making money just from art. This seems like an interesting experiment for the forum :eyes:.

3 Likes