Our intent: The Foundation was not ready to commit to temporarily changing voting weights now without considering other options. It may still do that after more careful consideration. It may vote on other solutions as well.
Background
The DFINITY Foundation (via its named neuron 27) has started to vote on governance proposals. Since the DFINITY Foundation is a critical player in the ecosystem, our long-term intent is to make a habit of explaining our rationale for how we vote in motion proposals.
The main reason we voted NO is a combination of two things:
The Foundation originally made the proposal to change the weights to increase participation in governance. For the most part, it seems the original change of the weights has succeeded in its goal. As they say, "We did not want to throw baby out with the bathwater."
The Foundation wants to address the spam issue in a much more holistic manner (taking into consideration the pros/cons of many ideas posted by community) and not piecemeal. We would like a bit more time and discussion to discuss more thoughtfully different approaches that would address spam and still foster governance participation. This does NOT mean DFINITY may not like the general idea, but we voted NO because we found the implementation in the proposal to be premature for us, as we would like to consider openly (in these forums and with all of you) more options and more thoughtfully. We read everything here and we have seen no lack of ideas from the community, so we are still digesting all of them to see how we think about the holistic issues:
We want to be clear in what this means and does not mean:
Foundation may still support changing the weights at some other time. The Foundation was not ready to commit to temporarily changing them now without considering other options more holistically.
Foundation may vote YES in a new proposal from neuron 2648354259123105775. This is only a judgment on this proposal.
DFINITY almost went ahead with letting the community vote on the proposal that reset all the following topics - you say reverting tokenomics is not a good solution, I don’t understand what to make of this.
DFINITY did not announce that it has started voting and is voting actively on its Twitter. If I remember correctly, DFINITY had announced that it will abstain from voting on governance proposals on its Twitter.
Thank you for providing this clarification @diegop
I understand why the foundation would need more time to consider all options before making a decision.
I think this is a really good example of why an “abstain” option in the NNS would be useful. Purposefully abstaining from a proposal can send a message that the voter is not convinced one way or the other. This could let the proposer know that they need to do more work.
If a voter votes no, it’s much harder to see it as anything other than a rejection if not provided any additional context
Thank you for revealing my vague writing @CatPirate . Let me try again using your questions as prompts.
I did not mean to say that reverting tokenomics is not a good solution in all cases. I meant more that “we were not confident we have wrapped our heads around all the design considerations in this case.”
DFINITY did not announce that it has started voting and is voting actively on its Twitter. If I remember correctly, DFINITY had announced that it will abstain from voting on governance proposals on its Twitter.
DFINITY did actually announce that it had started voting on governance proposals.
I agree. Harsh truth: I think we (DFINITY) need to rework the human process for reviewing, communicating, voting on proposals… specially as more and more proposals enter the system. This latest trend of explaining our rationale on votes is good step, but it was always intended to be just one iterative step. A lot of the human process which you do not like is on me, so I do not mean to criticize my hardworking colleagues, but rather admit that I think you are seeing the same things I am seeing @CatPirate
I don’t mean to blame anyone from the DFINITY Foundation, including you @diegop. Seeing the latest swarm of spam proposals, it feels like NNS is losing its credibility. IC already is suffering from tons of misinformation and FUD, therefore appropriate communication is required.
IMO the reward distribution seems rather unfair to those that are not familiar with governance. I do support active participation in governance, but not at the cost of other users/neurons.
See the 2 reasons in the OP: “changing the weights to increase participation […] has succeeded in its goal”; and “we would like a bit more time and discussion to discuss more thoughtfully different approaches that would address spam and still foster governance participation” plus “we found the implementation in the proposal to be premature for us”.
not yet succeed until its over, what i mean is that we need to incentivize atleast 70 to 80 percent of every new comer to become active for hundreds hundreds of years and i think REWARD WEIGHT is very essential and important if we think about making the system forever decentralize and forever be call as utility/ governance.
Hi all,
Adding my understanding why the community & Dfinity voted no putting the weights back to 1 at this stage
The adjustments of the weights resulted in a big increase in voting participation from mid February onwards from to 10% to 40% as you can see in the new graph on the governance dashboard.
Only partially adjusting the weights (e.g. leave exchange rate votes on a lower level and everything else to 1) does not remove the spam incentive.
Adjusting the weights could still make sense but would need to embedded in a more holistic solution.
I’d suggest to rename spam proposals to keepalive proposals and discuss with the author (@ysyms) how to use it better for the community (if he/she is willing to) - it’s sponsored anyways so why not to use it as general and legit governance proposals channel (I recall there was some ‘successful’ DAO with similar plan which turned into rugpull).