Pre-prop discussion: Reputation

Decentraland reputation system

Motivation: The DAO and dApps in the Decentraland ecosystem need to be able to understand user activity and history. Community members should be encouraged to engage with others in the community.

Furthermore, Dunbar’s number Dunbar's number - Wikipedia is much smaller than the number of MANA holders and greater community members, suggesting that we as a community will need some way to understand each other’s activity objectively if we want to coordinate and achieve common goals. Incentives from the value of MANA may solve this problem for MANA holders but not for the greater community.

Most Decentraland community members are active in a few specific ways. For example, some community members create content but are not active in the DAO, whereas some members hold MANA or LAND and are active in Discord but are not active in the forums or the world. A reputation system could begin generalizing a community member’s activity history for use by the community, ecosystem dapps, and the DAO. This Reputation system would reward and encourage participation in the community and create clear pathways for new community members to earn status in the community.

Specific ideas: Decentraland Reputation is not a single score but an aggregate composed of sets of component scores. These components are bucketed into an x, y, and z axis for social, economic, and creative. Participating in the DAO and Decentraland ecosystem contributes to these component scores. Some examples of participation:

  • collecting POAPs

  • minting approved wearables

  • publishing scenes

  • calling smart contracts

  • delivering on grant projects

  • voting in the DAO

  • gaining hearts on the forum in discussions

  • getting stars or thumbs up on messages in Discord

  • owning MANA and LAND

  • owning names and wearables

The output of the combined reputation score is thus a “vector” pointing in a direction that shows the magnitude of social, economic, and creative reputation for that identity.

Use cases: How the DAO voters benefit from a unified reputation system:

A new committee is formed to work with corporate partners who want to publish wearables. DAO voters who are not personally familiar with the candidates use the nominated candidates’ Decentraland Reputation scores to decide who to elect to the committee.

A new content developer joins the community with valuable skill. The content developer deploys a few scenes and creates some wearables. When the content developer applies for a grant, DAO voters can see their creative Decentraland Reputation score is appropriate for this grant.

The DAO must hold a moderated discussion on a controversial topic in which a lot of value is at stake. DAO voters select a moderator who has significant social and creative Decentraland Reputation.

A new passionate community member joins the Decentraland community. This community member spends a lot of time exploring the world and attending events and is rewarded with badges and Reputation for doing so, enshrining their participation and qualifying their contributions in the forum.

Challenges:

  • The monitoring costs of these calculations may be significant. Funding sources should be built in, whether that’s a fee system for dapps accessing reputation scores or something else.

  • As a rule of thumb, Decentraland Reputation should be used only to indicate assurance of reputation, not a lack of reputation. Social and financial credit score systems are poorly implemented in the real world and are used coercively instead of as a community resource. A good implementation opens opportunities for all community members and makes it easier for trustworthy new community members to gain trust quickly rather than raise barriers to entry.

  • Bots will be made to farm reputation. This is okay until the bot accounts are used for something other than farming reputation. To combat this, most applications should only be interested in single or specific combinations of reputation components. For example, bots could build reputation by collecting POAPs and voting with MANA but should not be able to leverage that economic and activity reputation to send community-wide messages or gain committee roles.

Past art: Yearn’s Governance 2.0 plans to use community ranks to help form committees and work groups. Gitcoin has badges as rewards for completing tutorials and participating in the community. The badges are designed by members of the community and are fun to collect.

what else?

2 Likes

This is quite intriguing food for thought. For a non-biased “outsider perspective”, I verbally shared this with my 67 year old mother to see what her take is as a retired civil servant (lifelong social worker). Very altruistic approach. This is an extension in a way of how the real world distinguishes individuals (i.e. credit score, education level, employment status, etc) but isn’t a true indication of what that individual is about at their core (i.e. someone has a horrible credit score because they have paid cash all their lives).

Do you envision this Rep System to be public facing knowledge that’s easily accessible or just shown in certain circumstances? Engagement and contribution is the only way that DCL can grow and evolve - just like life! I’d be happy to verbally discuss this with you and/or as a group if anyone is interested.

Yes, I agree that it doesn’t address who people are at their core. I think that’s not the job of a system though—people are different to everyone in their lives, so Decentraland ought to care about who that person is to the DCL community instead of trying to generate a holistic vision.

I think it must be public-facing! I’ll plan this for a town hall at the new DAO hub (once it’s built) and will ping you when that’s scheduled.

I like the deep nature of this idea as right now the only way to display “status” is wearable items and to a limited degree the ownership of a name in-world vs a no-name character. Of course, Twitter is another one.

What I would be interested in is whether the implementation difficulty is something we should be concerned about or not. Earlier proposals that included a bit more development work were often “shut down” with the reference to dev priorities on the existing roadmap. (Voting power for L1 wearables ownership for example)

Now if we exclude the above as a concern, then I would wonder if you would lose some of your accumulated scores over time or if once a status is reached it would be there to stay?

In summary, we probably should discuss additional status metrics but may also consider a simplified solution. We could in theory embrace Twitter as a status metric for ease of implementation but that, of course, creates a dependency on an external platform which is a no-go… curious to read other comments. Thanks for this interesting proposal

Can anyone tell me if this idea has been implemented? Is there currently a reputation system in Decentraland?