I contribute to SourceCred and was here for the first ‘memepocalypse’. I support this idea.
When the meme channel was originally being abused, HNY was mooning, and the rewards were accidentally absurdly high. There was also an influx of thousands of new users, including many degens. My memory was that despite that, the meme channel was great for a week or two. Then some started abusing it, with upvote rings and low-quality spammy memes. Even then, I thought the channel was pretty great. There were still a lot of high-quality memes, and many of the memes called out as low-quality I thought were pretty entertaining. The main issue seemed to be that the people making high-quality memes were getting less HNY and attention than the gamers; high-quality memes would get buried under tons of low-quality memes. Which understandably pissed meme-makers off and kinda runined the vibe of the whole channel.
With the 1Hive community more settled now, and without accidentally high rewards, I think Cred minting could successfully be turned on without too much risk of gaming. And making memes is a good way to build and rally community.
The main risk I imagine is that any existing Cred farming issues will be present, and memes may be generally attractive to farmer types. As a point of comparison, the r/ethtrader and r/CryptoCurrency subreddits, which mint tokens based on Reddit karma (similar to Cred), regularly deal with complaints that memes are rewarded too much. And when governance proposals are put forth to reduce meme rewards, the powerful meme lobbies often shoot them down (can’t believe I just wrote that lol). That said, I think if you kept the weight low enough, it wouldn’t be worth it to the gamers. And it could unleash a lot of cool creativity and generate content to share. This even has echoes of the Cannon NFT proposal for me. Sure, most memes aren’t worth minting NFTs for. But it is art that is often commenting on events in the DAO, which I gather is the basic idea.
Cred weights can always be set back to zero if problems arise. I would just suggest starting low just to be cautious. Increase if you’re not seeing a meaningful increase in engagement. Decrease if you see gaming.