Changes to governance proposals and voting reward weights (Proposal)

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 don’t 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 neurons’ 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 “Edit Followees”.

Click “Add Followee” for the “Governance” 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 “All Topics Except Governance” instead of “All Topics”.

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
18 Likes

If this passes, would existing neurons no longer be configured to follow the foundation on governance topics? Or would this change only apply to new neurons?

Will the ICA or foundation continue to vote on governance? So that neuron holders could configure their neuron to follow ICA or foundation on governance without incurring a penalty?

How would a neuron holder get notified when a governance proposals is available if they wanted to vote?

Is there any bonus for voting on a proposal yourself vs configuring the neuron to follow another neurons vote?

For example, a neuron could receive a small portion of the voting rewards of each neuron that follows it.

6 Likes

I think I’d be ok with this if the minimum time period for any vote that ‘required’ a manual vote was extended to one week. I run a charity that has a specific mission to vote and I am deathly afraid of missing a vote with the current 1-day threshold. We want people to participate, but it can’t become their job. Actually…It WON’T become their job so the form has to fit the people who will participate…and I would imagine we would want those people to include people who aren’t currently paying attention, and who have far less time and attention on this topic that those of us on this forum.

16 Likes

A community funded project or dapp to send email / push notifications when a new governance proposal comes out, and warning when one of their neurons haven’t voted yet with only 1hr left to vote would be a good solution.

7 Likes

Btw, there is this Bot that sends you a telegram message Telegram: Contact @NNSProposalsBot

6 Likes

Will the rewards be same if i vote manually as if i follow cycle dao for example or other neuron except dfinity & ica?

2 Likes

Ya would be nice if this bot could filter which topics to follow.

4 Likes

I understand that for those who want to continue delegating and automating the governance vote we would just have to assign a followee for governance proposals. Is this correct? so, will it still be possible to automate the governance proposal votes? If not, manual voting would be a HUGE staking deterrent for people looking for a passive investment

1 Like

You have neglected to mention a few facts that total reward by Internet Computer will not change with this proposal. You are simply proposing moving some rewards from other neuron holders! What is so wrong is that you can have two identical eight years locked neurons. If your proposal passes, two similar neurons can receive different rewards by stealing from the other neurons or whatever you call! Your justification is to be voting manually! To me, someone can make a bot vote manually for them! Not all of us are capable or willing to use a bot, which is a scam itself. Most people can not vote all the time manually. Most of us have full-time jobs, kids, and other responsibilities! Shame on you that you even propose something like this. How about doing something positive other than trying to steal a reward from an 8 (4) years locked Neuron holder! This rewarding will feed more and more unjust practices up to scams!

Hi there,

Just to be clear (from the initial summary, added emphasis myself):

“While we encourage neuron holders to deliberate and manually vote governance proposals, neuron holders that don’t 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.”

4 Likes

Good questions. I have pinged @johan to provide a detailed answer.

1 Like

As I read it, this is just about whether the default is following dfinity on governance votes. Users can still follow them if they want to.

3 Likes

From my understanding a lot of people like to follow the default neurons (ICA or DFINITY) just because they trust that they will make decisions best for future of Internet Computer.
Gaining such trust might be problem for other neurons - how can anyone get to know them, should people watch every other neurons every voting and social media responses, what if they change opinions…?
There are already neurons which are suggesting to be followed, but it could eventually lead to same result as with the default following - people will choose randomly one of acceptable (and most loud/visible) neurons to make sure they vote, just with more general stress (a lot will be unhappy that had to do that).

So what about not changing the ‘follow neuron’ options - not forcing people to change things - and just motivate people by extra bonus for manual voting (though I’m not sure if NNS can reliably distinguish that).

Who wants to follow other neurons can do so, who wants to stay passive can do so, who wants more rewards will be active and who will be active will be extra rewarded :slight_smile:
I understand that main goal is to more decentralise the voting power - extra rewards for manual voting would for sure lead to higher activity - thus better decentralisation.

4 Likes

@plsak, what you suggest would deter staking from passive investors which is not a good idea. In any case, @diegop make it clear that we will still be able to automate the voting of governance proposals.

1 Like

We’ll I suggested None change for passive investors - only option to get extra reward for active ones. Also it’s clear that following still would be possible, I expressed worry that people will be just unsure about other than default neurons.

I think this proposal would decentralize voting power and I support it. I agree with @skilesare that the voting period needs to be extended to at least 1 week and have more accessible messaging about when proposals are up for vote. 1 day is just too short and highly subject to gaming the timing.

I would add that a nice coupling to this proposal would be some sort of pseodo-official “election” period or roadmap thread where interested parties could campaign for followers. Otherwise, I see a lot of people just switching their governance votes to one or two other neurons well-known neurons, which would defeat the proposal’s intent.

5 Likes

We are and can vote manually whenever we want! There is no reason to change it! When we manually vote, Dfinity or whoever we follow cannot vote on the same vote again. If we choose not to vote manually, it is consent whoever we do follow to vote on behalf of us. If the reward is increased for a manual vote, it just opens a big can of worms! How can you distinguish between actual manual votes and bots! Most people have a full-time job, our lives busy as is! The reason some companies offer cash rebates by mail or registration. They know only up to 80% will mail or register! Keep the remaining portion! This is kind of like that. Without question, some will miss the manual vote, and their rewards will be taken from them and given to those who voted manually or come up with a bot to vote for them. It is unfair, it is wrong!

2 Likes

I like this proposal a lot. Routine maintenance proposals should not carry as much weight as motion proposals when it comes to voting rewards. ICP is a governance token and I think active participation should be incentivized more than passive participation. Especially on motion proposals where we should want people to spend time learning about the topic and voting individually. I would go as far to say that liquid democracy should not be allowed on motion proposals. However, if liquid democracy is allowed then I do think that manual voting should be rewarded more than liquid democracy to encourage individual participation. Either way, motion proposals really should start with a required deliberation on the forum to give everyone an opportunity to learn the topic and know when the vote will occur.

As a side note, it would be helpful if a proposal ID could be assigned to a forum topic when the forum topic first starts. It is much easier to refer to Proposal 12345 instead of having to write out Proposal for the Yada Yada Yada every time you refer to the proposal. Motion proposals should be more than title and summary…they should be linked to deliberation IMHO.

Perhaps the motion proposal is first made as an announcement through the NNS and a forum topic is automatically created with a proposal ID and title. Somehow the first forum post needs to be reserved for the originator. Then after a deliberation period the originator can submit the formal motion proposal summary. I think it is also important for the originator to set a reasonable schedule for deliberation and voting.

4 Likes

I think maybe @johan and my writing was perhaps vague, so I apologize. I will clarify:

  1. manual votes do NOT get increased rewards

  2. Current state of the world is that many people click “follow all topics” and walk away. A blunt way of describing this proposal is:

a. Give governance topics more rewards (they are much rarer after all)
b. Don’t make governance topics THAT easy to follow as they currently are. Just add a few more steps to follow neurons for governance. That added friction for liquid democracy is a small price to pay for a thoughtful community.
c. Our belief (which we could be wrong) is that this small friction for following (setting your neuron to follow a particular neuron for governance rewards) is something so small that folks interested in rewards would gladly do it.

In the case you mentioned, you could easily follow a neuron. No bots or manual checking needed if you so wish.

3 Likes

@skilesare @rubenhorne
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the issue with voting period isn’t so much that we need more than 24 hours, but rather we need the vote to be scheduled. In other words, if the vote on a motion proposal is scheduled 1 week in advance, then people have time to review the summary, detailed documentation, deliberation, etc. Does the actual vote really need more than 24 hrs plus wait for quiet?

2 Likes