Thursday Community Call Recap 9.29.22

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Hello everyone! Welcome to the weekly Thursday Community Call Thread. We really want to engage our community to think and learn about new topics in these calls. Unfortunately not everyone gets a chance to attend the call and those that do don’t always get a chance to speak due to time constraints.
There is value in continuing the types of conversation we start in these calls. We don’t want the call to be the last time people engage with the topics addressed. We want to enrich your days with inspiration and open eyes to new concepts. These topics might be applicable to some of your works or spark a personal interest. It is our goal to facilitate new ideas and creative thinking through this thread.

Community Call Link: SCRF Community Curation - SCRF Community Cal

9/29 Community Call Recap:

This community call was intended to discuss and plan commenting, engagement, discussion quality, and community input here on the forum. This is a discussion that should happen semi regularly to keep a clear idea of what expectations are from our community. Paul Zube gave a lovely presentation about What makes a good discussion which I have summarized below!

So what makes good discussion at SCRF?

Paul gave us 4 perspectives to think about this with

  1. What would be good discussion according to tools?
  2. What makes for good discussion/engagement based on the moderation team’s thoughts on the forum?
  3. What does research suggest a good discussion is?
  4. For us as an organization and community, what does good discussion look like?

Taking a look at these individually, Paul brought up miscellaneous points and questions about each.

Tools
The first tool we have at our disposal is the trust system of Discourse. When thinking about discussion at SCRF, we are mostly doing on the forum, so the trust system is the first level of understand who is engaging in good conversation. The three levels can be simply described as such:
Trust lv 1: Reading the forum and not doing anything bad
Trust lv 2: Interacting and posting good content
Trust lv 3: Consistently interacting, reading, reviewing and posting - these people are very aware of forum happenings

The second tool we have that determines quality content is the beloved SourceCred!

SourceCred allows us to make connections between rewards and quality content creators. The priority is production of content and replies, likes and consistent long tail value. Check out the hyperlink above to see how SourceCred determines who is creating good content.
The main issue with this is requiring people to opt in, which does not always happen
SourceCred can suggest what good content is, but we don’t want to be solely reliant on a robot to do this for us. This leads us to…

Moderation
The moderation can actively and manually choose content and deem it quality. They are trying to best utilize the aforementioned tools as well as find new ones.
Moderation however, does not end with the dedicated SCRF team. Our community can partake using the built in tools from Discourse such as flagging to indicate low quality posts.

Research
According to some research, there are certain roles that take place in the discussion space. There are task oriented roles: opinion seeker, info seeker, contrarian.
But with these roles there needs to be relationship maintenance: getting praise, harmony between sides, understand the consensus

SCRF
As an organization, we want to make sure that we working toward actionable things. With these ideas, we have created our own method of finding and rewarding good discussion. Take comment of the month for example, people can nominate that which they think is the highest of quality discussion. This is SCRF imposed and community ran.

There are benefits and issues with all of these perspectives, so I leave you with a few questions to consider from these topics**

  • Do you have any tool suggestions for us to use?
  • How do you feel about the existing tools?
  • Is there a way you see to more involve the community in moderation?
  • How do roles blend in an online space?
  • Remind ourselves “What is the overall SCRF mission?”
  • How do we avoid biases?
  • How do we avoid plagiarism? Is it even an issue at SCRF?

If any of these spark your interest or you have other questions / thoughts, please discuss below!
This is allowing for a discussion in its own, but please don’t hesitate to bring things from the community call in as well.

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Thanks, @Angle and the SCRF team, for the work you do, and especially for making these call recaps available for people like me who can’t meet up for one reason or the other.

On the abovementioned points, I’d like to chime in a few thoughts concerning the trust level and use of existing tools.

I believe the trust level in discourse is rightly implemented because of the criteria involved. However, what SCRF needs and wants is quality and thought-provoking engagement.

To reach a certain trust level, users must meet the criteria, and once they do, it opens them to more potential opportunities. (Not so sure about how it works, but I know trust levels affect Sourcecred ranking)

My question is, can a trust level be removed/lost? If yes, what would cause that?

Moving on, the current iteration/implementation of tools on SCRF is okay, although we’re still learning and improving.

I can only think of GitHub, Sourcecred, Discourse, and the Multi-Sig as the core tools. I would appreciate more information on other tools SCRF uses/plans to use.

I don’t have any tool suggestions at the moment; it all depends on the part of SCRF and its needs. I could suggest a tool once I have more info about that.

About moderation and community participation, I saw a flagged comment one time with the caption:

Baby steps, but moving forward, it could open the door for more of the community to moderate the platform. First, however, SCRF should set moderation parameters so the power isn’t abused.

About plagiarism, I don’t know how that would be an issue on SCRF, but I’m open to clarifying answers.

Overall SCRF Mission… I have heard it somewhere, maybe from @zube.paul, but IMO, it’s to have (conclusive) conversations on complex, brain-racking topics which move the crypto, Web3 ecosystem forward.

From what I’ve seen, everything done in the forum is to achieve this goal.

And that’s it!

Thanks for the avenue to provide my feedback.

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This is a great question and one that I am interested in across a variety of reputation systems. To your specific point, Discourse itself has the trust level system that for levels 1 and 2 can’t be lost. However, my reading is that level 3 could be lost. It’s discussed in their Understanding Discourse Trust Levels article. Our forum has that system operating.

I’m interested in this as an overall question because what is the long-standing impact of reputation? For example, there are many people who have made their careers and created a strong reputation within a field of science, etc., that then later in their career have not kept up with new advancements or have starting just “coasting,” As a result, does it make sense for all reputation systems to be able to degrade? And if they do degrade, how far should they degrade? Back to neutral or should a person who has had higher reputation have a reputational floor that they can’t fall below. For Discourse, that looks to be Trust Level 2.

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Thanks for the clarification Paul

I did read the Discourse article on trust levels but I didn’t notice the part on trust levels that can be lost.

Concerning your later questions, I think all reputation systems SHOULD be able to degrade, especially in the situation you illustrated.

Should one not keep up with the updates in the industry, or be active, they basically lose relevance. It wouldn’t make sense for them to maintain that particular reputation level.

That said, it still doesn’t make sense to lose all the reputation one has garnered in the past. There should be a reputation floor/threshold. But then, it all depends on the platform.

Glad to know I can’t lose my trust level, but I also intend to be active to unlock more, and gain more Street cred/reputation. :grinning:

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@Harvesto, I got you :smiling_face:

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Thanks, bro… Much appreciated.

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I was present at this community call but dropped off along the line. Good recap @Angle, the points were duly noted.

To add to what a good discussion mean for SCRF as a community, I’ll focus on Value Addition. I’ll propose how to measure it and how to implement it here.

As a Content Strategist and Marketer, I apply Value Addition to get leads to read my content and in turn buy my services. A valuable discussion should either answer some questions from other community members, provide extra resources for deeper insight, bring a new perspective or idea to the table amongst other things. In the end, someone or SCRF gets value out of it.

Measuring a good discussion can be automatic and organic. But, it can be gamed anyway. However, let’s be optimistic. If someone makes a post or comment, and I get value out of it, I’ll most likely either like or reply that comment. The more comments and replies the initial comment gets the higher the probability that people found value in it. Like I said earlier, this can be gamed, but it’s a good measure.

To implement this, the Moderator of the comment of the month can assist. There are some good comments which provide value that might be ommitted monthly. Maybe because no one remembers to nominate them or some other reasons. To reward this kind of comments/discussions, every month the comment of month Moderator can have 1 or 2 slots for such engaging comments, especially if they satisfy the comment of the month criteria.

So, the Moderator scans the monthly comment list to find comments with the highest replies and likes for possible selection. I feel this will encourage forum members to contribute more quality comments and reward good discussions too.

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Thanks for expanding on the community call discussion.

I generally agree with your notion of Value Addition. It’s hard to pin down what that looks like, but you did mention a few approaches already in effect.

This above approach is essentially what SourceCred values as well. There’s more to it, but this is essentially it.

I’m glad that you also mentioned how we can be supporting what we value through comment of the month nominations. There is certainly a roll for people involved with moderation to help curate those nominees, but we also want to make sure that the whole community gets to participate and nominate. I’m working on some ideas for user interfaces that will potentially make it easier to nominate great comments that help provide Value Addition, but for right now, we have the on-forum nomination threads and polls. The thread for October is now open for nominations, by the way. So as you’re reading, please make nominations!

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Thanks @zube.paul for the decisive response.

Looking forward to the user interface you talked about. It sounds exciting already!

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