"Invited by" information for users is no longer displayed
After we discussed this the other day, I've now changed it so that you can no longer see who a user was invited by. While some people did like it being public, I think the benefits of keeping it public were pretty minor, and there were legitimate concerns about privacy on the opposite side.
So now it's still stored internally and I'll be able to use it to see if someone is repeatedly inviting users that cause problems, but it won't be shown on the site any more. This means that invites are now effectively anonymous—neither the inviter or the invitee will know the other's username if they don't want to reveal it themselves, and other users won't be able to see any relationship between them either.
Hopefully this will help make some people feel less hesitant about inviting others, and as I mentioned earlier in the daily discussion post, you've all been topped back up to 5 invite codes again.
Thank you. I'll start inviting folks now!
Could this possibly be optional? Because I'd love to show who I invited, but other users wouldn't.
It's possible, but it might be a bit of a confusing/convoluted process to get both the inviter and invitee to approve it being public. I'm sure some people will say they only want some of their invites to be public, so it would need to be a separate approval for each individual invitee and not just a general "show all my invites".
There's also the possibility for some weird social dynamics to come out of it. If we get drama and someone suspects that UserB is an alt of UserA, someone will pressure them to "prove that UserA didn't invite you then!" and then "prove that you both weren't invited by the same user!" and so on.
I think it's probably a lot simpler to just keep it secret.
Out of curiosity, what value do you find in displaying that?
To me it was a mark of approval from the invitee, and put some pressure on the inviter to invite people that they believed would act positively for the community.
There still is that to a degree though, since @deimos can still see the invite tree. Public accountability and crowd-sourcing bad invite tree detection is gone now, but I don't know if the benefits of that are enough to justify the potential privacy and harassment issues. Time will tell, I guess.
Years from now, as the last of the reddit wretches are finally getting their tildes invites, they'll look into the profiles of the people who uplifted them and see the much coveted badge of honor of being invited by the founders.
/s
In all seriousness though, this is the value people see in it.
If people want some sort of anonymous trophy, we could display distance from Deimos for invites. E.g. I'd be distance of 1, my invitees would be a distance of 2. (Deimos would be 0.)
Knowing you were invited by Deimos is less of a privacy issue since he's invited many random people.
That lovely black α, on the space purple background, with just a little bit of a shiny veneer effect, inside a black border, a trophy to mark your legacy and your self worth to the world... You know you want that alpha tester badge :P
I definitely want to see badges and trophies. Reddit has them now but they are a mostly-ignored bolt-on. I think we could go a lot further with that idea. Probably not as far as Steam has gone, though. :P
I like transparency and even if some people don't want to display this information, I'd like if it were an option that I could