The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-gatekeeping-or-why-medieval-guilds-had-it-figured-out/

by todsacerdoti • 5 months ago

31 16 5 months ago

I mean, yeah, that will be the way everything will move towards to because LLMs will be a pain in the ass for open communities. We will see a shift from open communities towards closed, trust-based communities that are invite-only and where users have to vouch for the people they invite.

RamblingCTO2• 5 months ago

What on earth? We could just let the processes play catch up instead of bringing medival (like literally) ideas back to life. Guilds are the worst fucking thing. We still have those in Germany and I despise it so much. Fucking IHK and others where I have to be a member, I can't even decide for myself. Parasites they are.

fullStackOasis• 5 months ago

Did you read the article? The term "guild" was used, but what's being suggested sounded more to me like some kind of reputation management system. Something like the karma system here at HN.

RamblingCTO2• 5 months ago

Yes.

Would a guild system be perfect? Obviously not. Would it create new forms of exclusion? Probably. Would medieval Florentine weavers recognize the problem we're dealing with? I suspect they'd find it eerily familiar.

Still not a fan. If the author would've expanded a bit more on verification and not only trust I'd be more open. But this is just gate keeping and the opposite of open.

nicbou• 5 months ago

As another compulsory member, I can understand the rage. Parasites indeed.

selridge2• 5 months ago

Everyone who writes one of these thinks they’d be in the guild.

It’s precious.

atomicnumber3• 5 months ago

No no, but you don't understand! Of course I would be in the guild, I'm me. Everyone else is just you, so naturally they probably won't be. If they don't allow me, who would they let in??

(Sarcasm of course.) Isn't it weird how much of a quirk this mentality is? Almost reminds me of how everything though they were part of a select few who got to be secret agents in Club Penguin. "I believe every word you just said, because it's exactly what I wanted to hear."

true_religion• 5 months ago

Why wouldn’t they be? The easiest way to start a guild is to grandfather all existing tradespeople as legacy, and begin enforcement on rising juniors who have no connection to seniors in the industry.

Your children get to inherit your position, other people children have to beg you to apprentice them, and serve at your bidding.

Trying to squeeze out existing makers is doable, but it’s more logical to freeze the status quo to prevent immediate infighting or the creation and lobbying of competing guilds.

selridge2• 5 months ago

People will probably do this, and then discover that they were never in the guild to begin with, and they are out in the cold as well

pavel_lishin2• 5 months ago

What they're describing isn't actually a guild, it's just a web of trust.

I guess you could argue that's what guilds were, but guilds enforced membership and the ability to do the associated work; webs of trust merely advise.

Anyway, despite their assurances, it still sounds somewhat bureaucratic. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it should be acknowledged, and not just by whatever the libertarian contingent is.

waffletower2• 5 months ago

"Web of trust" is an apt name, and I think such broad affiliation is more doomed to gaming than more local approaches. Repo localized guilds, where contribution privileges are earned project to project, might work more effectively. Simple additions to SCM hosting such as pull request filtering by group could facilitate this.

pavel_lishin2• 5 months ago

No matter what, if this "Guild" system took off, or webs-of-trust did, there would be multiple ones almost immediately, and several claiming to be the "real" one!

rossdavidh• 5 months ago

In time, every organic system has to develop an immune system. Immune systems do, sometimes, misfire (allergies, auto-immune disorders). But, eventually, it becomes impossible to do without them.

Jamesbeam• 5 months ago

If you ever played World of Warcraft and were a member of any "guild" ever, which most do gatekeep players from joining the guild in the exact same way proposed here, especially if they play competitively, you’d know that this system is flawed and doomed.

You would have known that people in the guild leadership fall in love with each other and decide to literally rob the guild bank and then sell months of collective digital work to some Chinese for cold hard USD, you would know that the people getting the good loot before everyone else are always the guild officers, who decide wisely that the most valuable pieces go to the most valuable guild members, which are always in the close circle of leadership, and that people literally go Game of Thrones Lannister mode, because the more people decide who makes it up the ranks into the inner circle with the highest trust level, the less control you have over your own fate as there are now more people who could vote you out of your trust level/position.

I don’t have a good solution for the problem. I think it’s a fundamental thing in human biology that surviving today means acquiring as many resources as possible for yourself while not allowing anyone else to be in a stronger position. This is no longer a world for peace loving sheep, it’s the century of wolves, we had a decent run tho with peaceful cooperation. Maybe after another world war the people who survive will be smarter this time.

But I find it kinda amusing that the same people who programmed the tools to allow this problem to now be an existential threat to a system their whole industry relies on finding talent and maintaining the building blocks of a lot of their Products will get the full blow of what they did when the snake is done eating its tail up to its head.

waffletower2• 5 months ago

Guild membership will be gamed and acquired by those you are trying filter. And I don't believe this will be an edge case; those going to the trouble of resume padding or exploit insertion etc., will definitely long for and ultimately succeed at membership.

thatguy27• 5 months ago

So… Vouch?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930961

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2020252149117313349

https://nitter.net/mitchellh/status/2020252149117313349

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/10559

The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

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