We can see this effect from Mitchell's own release of his terminal emulator (Ghostty). It was invite-only. The in-crowd on YouTube/Twitter lorded it over others as a status symbol. None of it was based on actual engineering prowess. It was more like, "hey, you speak at conferences and people follow you on social media... you must be amazing".

They're negative sum, but even negative sum systems usually have many winners (so it 'works' for some subset of individuals). That's why it perpetuates.

i think you can go earlier then that. reminds me kind of rep systems on message boards. which got abused.

Yeah, these solutions are always made to try and disract from the fact that you need real, admin-level moderation and enfoecement to build trustworthy users and communities. a rogue actor should be afraid of losing their account if they submit slop. But instead all this is outsourced on the community to try and circumnavigate.

Community level enforcement is unfortunately a game of cat and mouse. except the mouse commands an army and you can only catch one mouse per repo. The most effective solution is obviously to ban the commander, but you'll never reach it as a user.