February 14, 2026
Clout coins for coders?
Show HN: A reputation index from mitchellh's Vouch trust files
New GitHub reputation scoreboard sparks clout wars
TLDR: A new “Vouch Book” turns GitHub trust notes into a reputation score weighted by stars. The community is split: some love the cross‑repo transparency, while critics warn it’s easy to game with repo and star farms, demanding safeguards before this becomes the next clout-driven scoreboard.
HN just got a new scoreboard: Vouch Book, a community-made reputation index that pulls Mitchell Hashimoto’s Vouch trust files from GitHub and turns them into one big number. Each “vouch” (a trust note in a repo’s VOUCHED.td file) is like a thumbs‑up, with bigger, more popular projects counting more—thanks to a star-based weight that grows with popularity. Negative vouches subtract points at about 60% strength. Simple idea, spicy reactions.
Builder rosslazer drops the repo link and the crowd piles in. The loudest voice? chabad360, who calls it “exploitable,” warning that anyone could spin up a bunch of repos—or farm stars—to juice their score. The thread breaks into camps: one wants guardrails (caps, cooldowns, audits), another cheers the transparency (“finally, a cross‑repo trust view!”), and a third side-eyes the math—if denouncements hurt less than endorsements, does “bad behavior” get off easy?
Jokes flew fast: “social credit score for commits,” “clout coins,” and “GitHub leaderboards” became the meme of the moment. Supporters say it’s a helpful map of who’s trusted across projects. Skeptics say popularity isn’t trust and stars can be gamed. It’s part excitement, part panic—and 100% classic HN drama, where every formula becomes a battleground.
Key Points
- •Vouch Book compiles a cross-repository reputation index from VOUCHED.td trust files.
- •Vouch weights are calculated as ln(stars + 1) + 1, linking influence to repo star counts.
- •Example weights: ~1.0 for 0 stars, ~7.9 for 1,000 stars, ~11.8 for ~50,000 stars (e.g., Ghostty).
- •Denouncements (prefixed with '-') subtract at 60% of the corresponding vouch weight.
- •User scores sum all vouch weights minus denouncement weights across all repos; users can be inspected by vouch sources.