Resolve social proofs support

[markmhendrickson]

We're aware that we provide social proof functionality that many new users attempt to use, yet it's quite buggy and we aren't confident of the value it provides or whether it's worth maintaining and extending.

This epic entails deciding what to do about social proofs in general as a strategy. We can choose to fix the known bugs or additionally chart out new functionality and use cases for them.

We may want to gauge interest in social proofs among the general team and community to see what people like or dislike about them, and whether we can develop consensus around their place on the platform.

[stackatron]

Seems like we have an answer on how to proceed: https://forum.blockstack.org/t/social-proofs-anyone-care/7239/9

[moxiegirl]

@jeffdomke Maybe you can sum up what you see as the solution on this ticket and we can close the forum discussion and point here.

[zone117x]

If this proposal withstands scrutiny https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-browser/issues/1857 then I'd say for a bit of upfront dev cost, we drastically reduce future maintenance burden in order to maintain the current social proofs feature.

[markmhendrickson]

It seems the consensus from the forum post above is that moving the social proofs UI from the IDs page to a secondary page (perhaps under "Settings") is a good move to reduce its prominence so new users don't feel it's necessary to utilize, yet maintain its existence so that it can evolve into something useful overtime.

I've added an issue for this change here: https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-browser/issues/1876.

[satojandro]

Hi guys,

I'm new to the party, recently opened a thread on the forum (see link).

I quite like social proofs and I'm interested in implementing the blockstack ID into my app because of them. My issue is with the social post to verify the ID (on social media accounts) having to be permanent.

I suggest allowing the user to delete the social media post once the account has been verified, potentially requiring the user to ratify (verify again with a new post) after a certain period.

(https://forum.blockstack.org/t/id-verification-with-social-media-feedback/9354)

[diwakergupta]

This has come up again in multiple contexts recently. Unless there's a compelling reason to keep social proofs around, I propose we eliminate this section. We can always revert the PR or bring back limited functionality if the need arises later.

[moxiegirl]

Recent change by Removing proofs mentioned in blockstack/blockstack-browser/pull/1988 removed linkedin, hackernews, and a couple of others.

[diwakergupta]

Github has also been removed. But as the flurry of forum posts about verification show, this whole section is causing a lot of friction without any clear value add, so we should just remove the whole thing.

[moxiegirl]

@diwakergupta My understanding is the purpose of social proofing is to support reputation (sample reference).

Not against removing these social proofs but we should acknowledge that they serve a purpose in a blockchain ecosystem. We should be explicit as to whether we want to address reputation in our ecosystem. If the answer is yes, it would be helpful to have a roadmap.

cc: @zone117x did we remove the proofs config from gaia?

[markmhendrickson]

We should be explicit as to whether we want to address reputation in our ecosystem

Theoretically this could be a clear "yes" in the future. But this seems very far future to me, given what we currently have laid out as priorities in our roadmap. As such, the cost of maintaining the current functionality seems greater than simply removing and re-adding once that day comes.

did we remove the proofs config from gaia?

I may be mistaken but I believe that Gaia-based proofs are an entirely different system?

[moxiegirl]

@markmhx still in the readme, the docs, and the code on master from what I can tell. Don't know the current plans which is why I asked Matt.

The gaia hub can also be configured to require a minimum number of social proofs in a user's profile to accept writes from that user. This can be used as a kind of spam-control mechanism. However, we recommend for the smoothest operation of your gaia hub, to set the proofsConfig.proofsRequired configuration key to 0.

[zone117x]

@moxiegirl is correct with the Gaia usage.

I'm not against removing them due to prioritization constraints. But I think they do add value:

• Gaia spam-control mechanism
• Blockchain reputation mechanism that @moxiegirl mentioned
• A high percentage of users simply want to use them

[markmhendrickson]

Are we aware of anyone using the Gaia spam-control mechanism at the moment? That appears to be the most immediate thing we could be breaking with removing social proofs from the browser.

[zone117x]

I'm unaware of anyone using the Gaia spam-control mechanism. Removing them right now shouldn't break anything.