Changes to governance proposals and voting reward weights
Today, before the proposed change, all proposals are rewarded equally. This means that automatic voting through following on exchange rate proposals, which happens every 10 minutes (circa 144 times per day) and maintenance proposals (typically 1-6 per weekday) provide the same voting rewards as a deliberate manual vote on a motion proposal. This means that neuron holders deliberating and manually voting on motion proposals have a negligible impact on their voting rewards.
@johan and I propose to make two changes to incentivize more community participation in the governance process.
First, we want to disable default following for proposals on the governance topic (which currently includes motion and uninstall proposals). The main reason for this change is that most neurons follow the beacon neuron of the Internet Computer Association (neuron #28) as this has been the default value since Genesis. For most neuron holders, it makes sense to follow the ICA beacon neuron for maintenance proposals, like adding and removing nodes and upgrading the replica version. However, for governance proposals, the ICA or the DFINITY Foundation should not be the arbiters. While we encourage neuron holders to deliberate and manually vote governance proposals, neuron holders that donât want to manually vote on governance proposals can still configure their neurons to explicitly follow a neuron or set of neurons that they trust on the governance topic.
Second, we want to weigh the voting rewards based on the topic so that exchange rate proposals receive a much smaller weight (our proposal is 0.01) and governance proposals (motions in particular) gain a much higher weight (our proposal is 20). Proposals on other topics have a weight of one.
Motivation
In a typical week, the total weight of exchange rate proposals will be roughly 10 (144 * 7 * 0.01) and maintenance proposals will add up to a weight in the range of 5 to 30 (based on historical data).
As a significant portion of voting rewards will now come from voting on governance proposals, neuron holders have a strong incentive to either vote directly on all governance proposals or explicitly configure their neuronsâ following for such proposals.
Further guidance to neuron holders
For neuron holders with many neurons, we suggest picking one main neuron (probably the one with the longest dissolve delay) and having all other neurons follow this main neuron on the governance topic. The neuron holder can then either vote manually with the main neuron on governance proposals or have the main neuron follow a set of neurons that they trust.
Neuron holders have been able to change their default followees since Genesis, as well as specifying overrides for specific topics, but this feature is not yet widely known or widely used.
Click âEdit Followeesâ.
Click âAdd Followeeâ for the âGovernanceâ topic. Then use a known neuron ID or pick one of the named neurons. In this case, I picked the DFINITY Foundation.
As a final note, if this proposal is adopted, the NNS dapp user interface will be updated to say âAll Topics Except Governanceâ instead of âAll Topicsâ.
What we are asking the community
- Read and comment on this proposal
- We will submit an NNS motion this week on it, based on feedback