DFINITY is the single greatest individual profiteer of NNS spam

[justmythoughts]

@wpb your response came off as partly an attack against me mixed with a rebuttal to my initial argument, so I’ve broken this response into two parts.

1. A bit of background on the spam topic, and my personal contributions thus far on this specific topic, and to the developer forums regarding other areas of the IC
2. Addressing your concerns with my post

First off, a bit of background

@wpb

This forum post feels like you want to make noise more than you want to solve the problem because you don’t recognize these solutions and you didn’t follow up on your prior attempts on a solution

I, and many others such as yourself, @skilesare, @lastmjs, etc. have spent countless hours coming up with proposals to combat spam in the forums, as well as addressing long threads of concerns/feedback. In fact, I started the very first discussion in this forum related to spam prevention the first week spam started in early April. I later created two complementary proposals to combat the spam issue

1. Proposal to fix governance proposal rewards at 75% on a daily basis
2. [Proposal] Introduce an incubation period and minimum support threshold for governance proposals)

My work on these proposals was incorporated and referenced in several other notable proposals brought forth by the developer community, which were picked up and evaluated by @bjoernek from DFINITY

1. Proposal to restrict rewards qualification to a threshold by @skilesare
2. Proposal to covert from system based reward to voter based reward; to implement an accept quorum mechanism; and to return the reject cost to 1 ICP by @skilesare
3. Multi-stage Governance Proposals, Starting w/ Stage 0 and Stage 1 by @lastmjs

These proposals have stalled since early-mid May (the Supernova effect?)

@wpb

There has already been a proposal 55651 that passed that will completely solve this spam proposal issue.

As you mentioned, proposal 55651 was passed back in April. It was put on the “roadmap”, but is not at all difficult feature to design and implement from an engineering perspective. In fact, I would conservatively estimate that this would take something like 2 weeks of backend and 1 week of frontend engineering work tops to implement. It’s actually possible the reason this proposal hasn’t been implemented yet is because DFINITY is not in favor of it, or is waiting for another solution that they would prefer.

@wpb

All other spam prevention proposals that have surfaced in prior discussions are harder and more time consuming to implement. Plus nobody ever took those discussions to the actual proposal stage, which means there is nothing to further consider.

You know this is not accurate. @skilesare crowdfunded and put forth an easy-to-implement quick-fix Proposal to temporarily reduce governance proposal weight to 1, which was rejected. Had this proposal passed, it would have been much harder (20X harder) for whales to benefit financially from spam proposals through @ysyms.

@wpb

Another way you can contribute to the solution you are seeking is to use the original tool that is already built into the governance system…make a proposal to increase the proposal reject fee.

Increase Proposal Rejection Cost did not achieve it’s goal of reducing spam, as agreed by notable members of the community such as @LightningLad91

Source

@LightningLad91

I want to acknowledge the points you make here @coteclaude. It’s evident to me now that increasing the spam proposal cost to 10 ICP is not an effective spam deterrent. Furthermore, any additional increase would only serve to further harm the average stakeholder. I clearly made bad assumptions about what people would be willing to do to increase their rewards.

The 10 ICP proposal reject cost has not stopped spam, it’s acted as a blunt censor on new proposals that aren’t financially funded (by crowdfunding or whales) being brought forth by the community to the NNS.

To address your concerns

@wpb

The title you picked for this post doesn’t accurately reflect the content. It looks like you are trying to post a sensational news paper article in order to sell more papers. Why attack the very organization that is needed to help implement a solution?

I feel the title is actually very accurate. DFINITY is profiting from the NNS spam rewards more than any other staked entity. Although DFINITY has said they won’t work on the spam issue until after the SNS, the SNS release will most likely go through several stages of release and tuning (not just one and done) and I’d estimate it won’t be fully complete until 2023 at the earliest.

I therefore see no reason why proposals to eliminate spam won’t be kicked down the road(map) as long as possible, especially if the financial incentives to delay implementation are aligned with those that have the most voting power.

@Zane

Personally I see the current spam situation as a feature and not a bug as it gives active stakers a nice APY boost without increasing the yearly inflation and helps increasing Dfinity’s treasury.

I’m glad some of us can see the current situation for what it is, and just have different opinions on whether this is positive or negative for the community.

Why am I “sensationalizing” this?

I’m escalating my tone with respect to this specific issue of spam on the forums, because it now seems that the entire community has accepted spam as the new normal, and that no action or even discussion has taken place in the last month with respect to NNS spam (by the community or DFINITY), while the amount of spam has escalated in the meantime.

I don’t vote actively anymore - not because I don’t care about the IC and NNS, but because my NNS app is slow and my inbox is 95%+ spam. I’d estimate that I’m not the only one who’s voting habits have changed over the past few months.

In the following statement denoted by (->), I’m extrapolating a bit based on my personal experience here (I don’t have data to back this up)…

-> To think all of these changes going back to last year were to incentivize active participation, and now we could potentially be back at a more passive governance state with voters checked out and delegating to their follow neuron all because of a spam issue that either no one wants to or has the time to tackle. A passive NNS, with 4 voting named neurons and everyone default following them.

Prioritization comes from visibility and sometimes shining a light on a glaring issue is the best way to drive action and improve it. Management drives priorities, which can be easily changed - for example, DFINITY is currently prioritizing and investing a significant amount of financial resources into two lawsuits

1. https://cointelegraph.com/news/dfinity-foundation-files-lawsuit-against-meta-over-infinity-logo (this is PR)
2. Defamation lawsuit against NYT and Arkham Intel - (100% agree with this lawsuit)

The resources for the logo lawsuit could have easily instead been spent on an engineer or two (at least) to design and implement proposal 55651, or a different a solution for NNS spam.

Outside of NNS spam, I’ve dug into other issues and brought visibility to them such as

• What process does the DFINITY foundation use to vote on NNS proposals?
• decentralization of the boundary nodes
• A case study on the benefits of passive voting power through default followees

in order to get more information and drive action where necessary. We all benefit when the IC receives criticism, and as both a developer and investor, I care deeply about these issues as they will have long-term effects on the IC (even if I am benefiting handsomely from the current rewards structure).

@wpb

I know you don’t favor that proposal, but you could try challenging why that proposal hasn’t been implemented yet.

Outside of good faith, how the work for the NNS proposals that have passed will eventually be implemented and shipped to the IC is a great question for another forum topic thread (Is it DFINITY’s responsibility? Should the community given a pair of keys to the castle?).

Remember this proposal that passed the NNS? → Motion Request for Neuron Indexing