Vouch

IMO: trust-based systems only work if they carry risk. Your own score should be linked to the people you "vouch for" or "denounce".

This is similar to real life: if you vouch for someone (in business for example), and they scam them, your own reputation suffers. So vouching carries risk. Similarly, if you going around someone is unreliable, but people find out they actually aren't, your reputation also suffers. If vouching or denouncing become free, it will become too easy to weaponize.

Then again, if this is the case, why would you risk your own reputation to vouch for anyone anyway.

Fediverse link: https://fosstodon.org/@[email protected]/11603152931120...

I have a hard time trying to poke holes in this. Seems objectively good and like it, or some very similar version of it, will work long term.

I think LLMs are accelerating us toward a Dune-like universe, where humans come before AI.

Hope github can natively integrate something in the platform, a relevant discussion I saw on official forums: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387

Reminds me of the reputation system that the ITA in Anathem by Neal Stephenson seem to have. One character (Sammann) needs access to essentially a private BBS and has to get validated.

“After we left Samble I began trying to obtain access to certain reticules,” Sammann explained. “Normally these would have been closed to me, but I thought I might be able to get in if I explained what I was doing. It took a little while for my request to be considered. The people who control these were probably searching the Reticulum to obtain corroboration for my story.”

“How would that work?” I asked.

Sammann was not happy that I’d inquired. Maybe he was tired of explaining such things to me; or maybe he still wished to preserve a little bit of respect for the Discipline that we had so flagrantly been violating. “Let’s suppose there’s a speelycaptor at the mess hall in that hellhole town where we bought snow tires.”

“Norslof,” I said.

“Whatever. This speelycaptor is there as a security measure. It sees us walking to the till to pay for our terrible food. That information goes on some reticule or other. Someone who studies the images can see that I was there on such-and-such a date with three other people. Then they can use other such techniques to figure out who those people are. One turns out to be Fraa Erasmas from Saunt Edhar. Thus the story I’m telling is corroborated.”

“Okay, but how—”

“Never mind.” Then, as if he’d grown weary of using that phrase, he caught himself short, closed his eyes for a moment, and tried again. “If you must know, they probably ran an asamocra on me.”

“Asamocra?”

“Asynchronous, symmetrically anonymized, moderated open-cry repute auction. Don’t even bother trying to parse that. The acronym is pre-Reconstitution. There hasn’t been a true asamocra for 3600 years. Instead we do other things that serve the same purpose and we call them by the old name. In most cases, it takes a few days for a provably irreversible phase transition to occur in the reputon glass—never mind—and another day after that to make sure you aren’t just being spoofed by ephemeral stochastic nucleation. The point being, I was not granted the access I wanted until recently.” He smiled and a hunk of ice fell off his whiskers and landed on the control panel of his jeejah. “I was going to say ‘until today’ but this damned day never ends.”

“Fine. I don’t really understand anything you said but maybe we can save that for later.”

“That would be good. The point is that I was trying to get information about that rocket launch you glimpsed on the speely.”*

The Web of Trust failed for PGP 30 years ago. Why will it work here?

For a single organisation, a list of vouched users sounds great. GitHub permissions already support this.

My concern is with the "web" part. Once you have orgs trusting the vouch lists of other orgs, you end up with the classic problems of decentralised trust:

1. The level of trust is only as high as the lax-est person in your network 2. Nobody is particularly interested in vetting new users 3. Updating trust rarely happens

There _is_ a problem with AI Slop overrunning public repositories. But WoT has failed once, we don't need to try it again.

An interesting approach to the worsening signal-to-noise ratio OSS projects are experiencing.

However, it's not hard to envision a future where the exact opposite will be occur: a few key AI tools/models will become specialized and better at coding/testing in various platforms than humans and they will ignore or de-prioritize our input.

I think this project is motivated by the same concern I have that open source (particularly on GitHub) is going to devolve into a slop fest as the barrier of entry lowers due to LLMs. For every principled developer who takes personal responsibility for what they ship, regardless of whether it was LLM-generated, there are people 10 others that don't care and will pollute the public domain with broken, low quality projects. In other words, I foresee open source devolving from a high trust society to a low one.

Is this the return of Advogato?

We got social credit on GitHub before GTA 6.

Easy for the koreans to game this.

Makes sense, it feels like this just codifies a lot of implicit standards wrt OSS contribution which is great to see. I do wonder if we'll ever see a tangible "reputation" metric used for contribs, or if it'd even be useful at all. Seems like the core tension now is just the ease of pumping out slop vs the responsibility of ownership of code/consideration for project maintainers.

Another way to solve this is how Linux organizes. Tree structure where lower branches vet patches and forward them up when ready

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