I have been following Synapse for a long time now on the NNS but I just realized (thank you @Dylan for pointing this out) that they have missed a few votes this past week, therefore not optimizing our returns. This is unfortunate, and likely an oversight on their part, but I wanted to know:
Is there a website that tracks all named neurons and their voting histories? I would like to follow a highly reliable neuron that aligns with my interests, where is the best way to find this?
The best place to find Named Neurons and their voting history is on the website you linked: the Internet Computer Dashboard. You can click on any proposal and see all named neurons @ the bottom. If you click on them it will go into further detail of who they are and what they are about. You can review their activity yourself. I am not a named neuron but I am thinking about doing it once I have 100 ICP staked, at least then I’ll feel my votes have some weight.
Thanks @ckMood , I’ve looked through the IC Dashboard but haven’t found a user-friendly way to see the major neurons and their voting percentages. Maybe I’m missing it though 
Here is a link to vpgeek.app, which give some very good tools for doing this research. If you click this link, it will take you to a table that is sorted by voting participation rate for all NNS named neurons for All proposal topics for the All-Time period. Unfortunately, they include Open proposals in this data, so it’s not a completely accurate ranking since there are currently 26 open technical proposals, but it gets you close to the answer you seek.
You are right that the synapse neuron voting members are ultimately responsible for making sure that our neuron votes, including proposal topics that we don’t currently emphasize as our specialty. When we first set up the Synapse neuron 2 years ago, we chose to follow DFINITY on All Topics Except Governance, SNS, and Neuron Fund. The proposals that we did not vote on recently fall into the Node Admin and the Participant Management proposal topics, which are topics that fall into the All Topics catch all. I’m not sure why DFINITY chose not to vote on a few of those proposals recently, but we will ask and decide if we need to make changes to our configuration if they have a new voting policy that is expected to result in unfavorable voting participation moving forward.
The governance canister has tracked the Synapse voting history since Feb 2022 and we have missed 18 total votes out of 6379 proposals that have been completed. All but one were technical topics that fall into the All Topics catch all. Regardless, our voting participation rate is 99.72%
I wasn’t aware of this website so I was wrong. thanks for this.
Incident Report: It appears that there were 10 proposals total that did not get a vote from the Synapse neuron in November. We have been following DFINITY on the Node Admin and Participant Management proposal topics and DFINITY has been voting on the majority of these proposal topics. However, all 10 of these proposals that were rejected due to insufficient voting had a voting period that ended on a Sunday. Hence, it appears that the reliability of voting fell off on the weekend.
These proposals are all part of a larger effort to improve node topology and diversification. These seems to be the most relevant forum posts on this effort node diversification part 1, node diversification part 2, new node provider proposals, node provider renumeration) and here is a motion proposal 125367. At this time there is a major uptick in the number of Node Admin and Participant Management proposals that are the result of this node diversification effort, so this is a somewhat heavy load of proposals at this time. I don’t know how much longer it will last, but seems like it could be months.
I have advised the Synapse voting members that we need to consider voting manually on these proposals if they are still open by the weekend. DFINITY typically waits until day 4 to vote on these proposals. Hence, it doesn’t leave much time for Synapse to respond if they don’t vote since we have 13 voting members. Instead of waiting until day 4, we will likely vote on day 2 if that falls on a Friday.
If there is anyone in the ICP ecosystem who is actively paying attention to the node diversification effort who can offer reliable and educated voting on these Node Admin and Participant Management proposal topics, then please let me or any of the Synapse voting members know. You can find us on our website at synapse.vote. I think we would be interested in setting our neuron to follow them. Not only would that enable us to contribute to further decentralization of ICP, it would also give us slightly more control to make sure we don’t miss votes moving forward. I am absolutely opposed to blindly voting yes or no on all proposals, so that will not be our long term solution. However, it is appropriate for us to seek qualified Followees for each type or proposal topic. Perhaps this event is a good opportunity to expand our voting members with a new skill set. Please advise if you know anyone who can specialize in this area.
Hi @wpb correct that the reliability fell off. Because of the large number of proposals, the voting expiring in the weekend, Dfinity waiting till day fourth before casting any votes, and a small voting quorum these proposals were rejected. There was no intentional abstaining from voting for these proposals and several of the submitters to resubmit (partly in the forum thread on New Node Provider Proposals where most communication takes place). We’re actually discussing how to improve reliability of voting over the weekend and will come back on it.