The recent report mentioned in the MakerDAO bullet is actually the final report on our initial 3 month trial (which was extended), and includes engagement metrics. tldr; engagement (the main thing SourceCredâs performance was measured by) went up significantly. E.g. hereâs a chart in the report.
SoruceCred itself has also grown considerably since it began dogfooding using Cred scores to pay contributors. Below is an observable notebook that visualized contributions, broken down by plugin. It appears to have broken due to an update, but if anyone wants to update it they can get fresh charts.
1Hive is obviously exploding, though hard to say how much SourceCred affected that. Most newcomers seem to have come for the faucet.
Cred is a proxy for value created. A larger community will generally create more value than a smaller one (e.g. more Discourse posts, GitHub PRs, discord memes, etc.). This is fairly tightly coupled currently, as Cred is minted primarily on reactions to contributions (e.g. likes on Discourse). More posts -> more likes -> more Cred minted (created).
One could configure SourceCred such that this coupling is looser. For instance, in the extreme case, you could set the weights such that no new contributions mint Cred. This would mean that the only way to get Cred is to interact with nodes that did have Cred. Any time you interact with a contribution (reply, react, etc.) an edge is formed between you and that contribution. Some amount of Cred then flows across that edge to you. This is generally undesirable however, as it tends to create zero-sum games. By having new contributions mint Cred, you have an increasing supply of Cred and (hopefully) a positive-sum game.