What makes you think people mindlessly press yes/no? That’s more work than following someone else. Perhaps there are some people who do this, but it seems unlikely to be a systemic problem.
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A rebuttal to @Manu @dfxjesse, @wpb, and those who disagree with this feature or who are worried that an increase in abstaining votes could result in the passage of proposals which otherwise would not have passed.
By staking, or locking up your ICP in a neuron in the NNS for a set amount of time (8 years), you are forfeiting the right to liquidity or computational utility of that ICP in exchange for voting power and staking rewards proportional to the amount of ICP and time that ICP has been locked up.
A significant portion of this staked ICP and voting power (I would estimate >20-25%) selects a followee neuron and does not log back in. While their vote is counting towards a YES or NO vote through the followee, they have “checked-out”, and are not actively voting. This is not any better for decentralization of the network or the decisions made through governance, as it simply pads the overall voting power of various named neurons and does not accurately represent the true active voting power of voters that think upon and manually vote or stay up to date with their followees’ positions on each and every proposal.
We already have an “always rejects” named neuron, and I assume we’ll end up with an “always approves” named neuron in the future, as well as scripts that one can use to auto-vote on every proposal. Passive participation in the NNS is a intentional feature not a flaw, so why would should the choice to actively abstain be any different?
I would therefore argue that passively following a neuron that votes YES or NO is no different than an individual neuron actively voting to ABSTAIN.
Additionally, allowing voters the ability to actively abstain removes the current financial incentives and ties that requires voters to have an opinion on every issue. Most voters, including myself don’t have a well formed opinion on every single issue (even though I’ve read though these forums every day for the past 10 months) nor do we have the time to do so, and we can’t expect voters to be experts on who the best experts/neurons are to follow in each governance topic.
Using financial rewards as a mechanism to force voters to pick a side or a followee neuron doesn’t help the NNS make decisions or make the NNS any safer, as the only people fully understanding most proposals are the ones who have had the time to fully read through and understand each and every proposal.
Voters shouldn’t be forced into either rushing their voting decision or blindly trusting a followee neuron to make the “right decision”. Instead, they should be given the opportunity to abstain if they don’t feel that their vote will add anything positive to the outcome. In this sense, the choice to abstain without financial losses is crucial.
For those arguing about rewards, the real “rewards” that a voter misses out on by actively abstaining is that their voting power will not produce any impact on governance. The passive, abstaining investor will receive their voting rewards, but has now placed their funds and 100% faith in the community to make the best decisions on their behalf. This is a much larger risk to the abstaining neuron, given that during this time their vote will not count.
Personally speaking…
I have nothing intelligent to add yet as my opinion has not really been baked.
I will say that I generally have liked the idea of an abstain, but I admit I have not really gone through the intellectual exercise of seeing how it can affect many parts of the system or even basic game theory.
What I will say which is more useful, is that I know folks in DFINITY are actively reading this thread.
I also think this is the IDEAL thing for the Governance Working Group to discuss… a mechanism about voting.
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This is why we need periodic confirmation of neuron followees.
I think these are very different actions. All proposals need a yes/no decision. Delegating your vote to a Followee is active participation in that decision making process. Over time, as we get more named neurons, and the quality and participation levels of those named neurons improves, decentralization will improve. This will lead to more options on who deserves to be the recipient of your delegated vote. Abstain is removing yourself from the yes/no decision making process. This should not be rewarded because you are not participating in that decision.
I added additional thoughts on this topic on Taggr earlier today. There are several interesting comments from other well known community members in that blog post as well.
I’m actually more inclined to favor changing Governance weight to 0 over adding an Abstain button. However, I hesitate to make that change too.
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I agree with most of what you are saying as it is my personal experience that at first I had no idea or understood voting but after a time I found following a useful tool for a selfish reason of rewards, now I have a growing knowledge of certain groups that I vote on as I have learnt that I can refresh Internet Computer Network Status to know when to login to vote as I have twice this morning.
Still I was not sure on Bless New SNS Deployment and voted no because of the unprofessional naming.
I would support a third option as there are times where I feel I have more to say than YES or NO.
As I understand it there should be a post about an vote on the NNS and the reasons with a better time frame than I have just posted this proposal on the NNS for voting.
I agree with @wpb here, this would be addressed by periodic confirmation.
As a voter i am very familiar with this challenge, but I still think this challenge is also solved if we all just get comfortable voting no whenever we’re not clearly in favor. The NNS has the power to change essentially anything in the IC, so we should be extremely careful here, and I think it should naturally lean towards “no”, and I feel like adding an explicit abstain might make it more easy for bad proposals to pass, which could cause huge problems.
I 100% agree and really hope we can improve this. I really hope that we as synapse.vote can start expanding the topics we vote on, eg with replica version management.
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It’s not the same result cause by not voting you lose out on rewards.
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Not everyone wants to follow a named neuron, especially until we can recast a vote before the voting period ends.
Even then since governance proposals are meant to analyze the community’s consensus on a certain topic/idea it’s better to distinguish between “I don’t like this” and “I don’t know/care”.
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I agree with @wpb here, this would be addressed by periodic confirmation.
Are you also going to make it transparent on the NNS that following rules have changed and a link to this forum for discussion about why.
I keep seeing that we as voters are mindless and our voting is questionable but even though I may not understand all things I believe most of us know the difference between team updates and spam.
I know when I see spam most of the time and want a third choice to punish them back because at the moment the extra rewards for those who spam cost us all.
How about taking their rights away from their rewards periodically like want you want to do to the good neurons.
The main benefit I can think of in having an abstain option, is that it would allow me to follow other neurons on all topics, but still choose not to vote on a topic I feel conflicted about, or may want to refrain from participating in (for example, due to conflict of interest). Today if I want to not vote, I have to unfollow neurons until after the vote is passed.
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Thats the whole point. If you not vote then you should not get any rewards.
Yes, absolutely. To incentives people not to vote and get all benefits is just a horrible idea and very selfish too.
Abstain is different from not voting at all.
If one doesn’t vote at all it probably means he is not actively involved in the NNS.
Abstain is a perfectly valid choice if a staker wants to receive rewards while not expressing
himself on a topic he has no strong opinion on. Forcing stakers to vote yes/no all the times if they want to receive maturity will just have them vote randomly or by hearsay, making the outcome of the vote less accurate of the community’s actual consensus.
People do not vote randomly. They vote with their own financial interests and what they believe is best for the IC. In aggregate across the entire voting power of the NNS, this results in the long term best interest of the IC. Not having an abstain button causes people to choose one or more Followee. When a Followee doesn’t represent their own best interest, then they become motivated to vote manually or to change their Followee selection. Either way, it’s not random. Every neuron owner is making their own choice how to manage their voting power in their own self interest.
Abstaining is a perfectly valid choice that neuron owners can make for themselves, but that choice does not perform the act of governance of the IC. Every proposal must be decided yes or no and only yes or no votes contribute to that decision. We cannot pay people to sit on the sidelines. We must pay people for governance decisions. If we pay people who do not contribute to the governance of the IC, then they are profiting solely from the efforts of others. This would turn ICP into a security and would introduce really big legal problems.
I have no problem with people abstaining from voting on a proposal, but I don’t think that decision should result in governance rewards. The utility in an abstain button would be for named neurons to announce that they don’t plan to vote so their followees know to vote manually. In fact, there could also be utility related to how the NNS interprets absolute democracy and on an individual neuron level. For example, if a neuron owner has 4 Followees configured and 1 chooses to abstain, then the yes/no vote criteria for that neuron to reach a decision could automatically degrade to 3 neurons instead of 4 neurons for that proposal. This could be an automated mechanism that enables fair liquid democracy when Followee neurons choose to abstain.
I don’t want to get too far off topic here, but people are profiting from the efforts of others - that’s sort of how investments work in general. Investors are receiving 10-20% APR for choosing a followee and checking out. I have no problem with this, but let’s not pretend that the NNS voters are the ones that will be responsible for the success of the IC (if it succeeds).
The real builders on the IC (DFINITY, dev community) are the ones who are providing the effort and value (potential, yet to be realized).
The entire staked maturity conversion/maturity modulation change was made to prevent tax events from occurring - for all intensive purposes ICP was a security before the change, and after the change it becomes more difficult to classify it as one.
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Governance proposals don’t need a yes or no outcome as they don’t result in any immediate actions and are merely polls to determine community consensus, “abstain” is a valid outcome in such scenarios and shouldn’t be penalized with maturity loss otherwise nobody would use it. Some governance proposals imo should have high abstain rate as they might be too technical or interest only a subset of the entire NNS community, e.g ICRC-1. In such cases the average voter is unlikely to have an informed opinion so with the current system they have to either vote randomly/based on hearsay or rely on a named neuron, but that shouldn’t be required, infact I think it’s an antipattern that only reduces the level of decentralization and accuracy of governance proposals.
Wouldn’t it be more transparent if the yes/no votes on those proposals came only from those willing to express their own informed opinion instead of those who happen to have many followers?
I’d argue abstaining from proposals is a governance decision and contributes more to the IC governance than an uninformed vote or following a named neuron just to get maturity on autopilot.
Choosing a Followee is active participation in governance because the vote is counted and it is cast by someone you trust to cast it for you. It’s an actual contribution to governance decisions even if it is low effort. I don’t think that decision should go on indefinitely, which is why I co-sponsored the periodic confirmation of neuron followees proposal with @Kyle_Langham over 6 months ago. It’s still an easy way to make active decisions, but at least it forces all neuron owners to stop and think about who they are following and confirm that is still who they want to follow.
I’m not sure how to respond to the rest. My commentary was not about who or what will make the IC successful. I agree developers are important. The profit I was talking about is the payments made by the NNS through tokenomics to perform the work of governance.
I think your two arguments would be the outcome of the idea presented by @skilesare to change the proposal weight of Governance topics to 0. That way there is no driver to select a Followee for the Governance topic and the only people who vote are the people who really care about that specific non-binding proposal. I recognize that the NNS could function this way and would be in keeping with the tokenomics design to incentivize governance participation. It would push all NNS decisions that are paid by tokenomics to apply to only proposals that affect the code and it would eliminate the need to vote on Governance proposals in order to maximize voting rewards. I’m not saying I’m in favor of this idea (I’m actually neutral about it at this time), but it would achieve your desired outcome of the Abstain button (not voting, yet maximizing rewards) without having to pay people for abstaining on NNS decisions.