Grants for voting neurons

[wpb]

Hey @lara I would like to echo the primary concern that @Lorimer has raised here. I still believe that there are no real incentives for people to follow any entities other than DFINITY on the technical topics. This concern was first raised by @dfisher earlier in this thread and I followed up his comment expressing the same concerns. You also followed up with your own thoughts on the topic at the time and I provided an example of an easy step that could be considered to address the issue.

@dfisher

To clearly state the goal, we would like to decentralize voting power away from Dfinity and empower individual neurons from within the community.

In order to achieve this goal,

1. Named neurons to be incentivized to do valuable work and gain a following
2. The IC community needs a reason to vote for named neurons other than Dfinity

Your proposal addresses point 1) above, and is a step in the right direction. If named neurons are paid, then they will be incentivized to work. That said, today, there is absolutely no reason the IC community has an incentive to vote for named neurons, EVEN IF they are doing excellent work.

I cannot overstate how big of a weakness this point is to the current design

In my observation, CodeGov has seen a percent level increase in followers over the last 4 months, but it has not been as significant as you might hope given how engaged we are with technical proposal reviews on all 5 technical topics (IC-OS Version Election, Protocol Canister Management, Subnet Management, Node Admin, and Participant Management). I think this is another example to go along with the concern raised by @Lorimer about his own observations of voting power increase.

That said, I believe that DFINITY has plans to improve the workflow for known neuron registration that will enable us to claim a specialty in certain proposal topics. This change along with an update to the NNS dApp UI to reveal known neurons specific to each proposal topic could have an impact on decentralizing Followee selection. I hope that is still in the plans and look forward to seeing if it makes an impact, especially as neuron owners are asked to routinely confirm following.

Regardless, I still think it is likely that there will need to be some incentive put in place to encourage people to select Followees other than DFINITY. The natural tendency is for people to follow the dev team on any project. This has been true for every SNS and it has proven true for the NNS even after a concerted effort to remove default following on the Governance topic. Two years ago there were measurably only about 2% of total voting power in the NNS choosing to follow DFINITY on the Governance topic. Today, there is close to 20% following DFINITY. This is why DFINITY now triggers over half the total voting power that typically votes on Governance and SNS & Neuron’s Fund proposals when they vote. If decentralization is the goal, then people need a reason to choose someone other than DFINITY. As described by @dfisher, the risk/reward for following someone other than DFINITY is not currently worth it to most NNS participants.

To be clear, I believe it is important for there to be diverse options on who to follow on every NNS proposal topic. I have no interest in accumulating a high percentage of voting power for CodeGov. I would love to see a substantial amount of voting power being triggered by many of the known neurons who put themselves out there as Followee options. CodeGov should be one of many and I am all for changes that will have an impact on how many known neurons are reviewing technical topics and how much voting power they are able to trigger.

@Lorimer

It’s important to discount Synapse’ influence. It holds a lot of VP, and has clear preferences about who to follow (it’s not unlikely that the current configuration will change soon if certain members continue to push their agent and have their way - Proposal: 134722, Proposal: 134654).

To be clear, the certain member that @Lorimer is talking about here is me. I am an original founding member of the Synapse neuron and fully led the effort to organize the formation of that known neuron. I have also taken initiative throughout our 3 year voting history to ensure we have well known and credible voting members and that we stay on top of voting on every proposal topic, especially Governance and SNS & Neuron’s Fund proposals. In that 3 years history, of course we have unintentionally missed some votes. However, when that happens we take steps to reconcile and improve our performance. I expect that I will always be motivated to lead and manage the group the best I can. However, I don’t control the neuron and the decisions we make. I proposed (134722) that we remove @Lorimer as a Followee for the Subnet Management proposal topic because of his high frequency of reject votes on that proposal topic over the last 4 months. He has voted to reject 34.4% out of 163 Subnet Management proposals since the Grants for Voting Neurons program began. In contrast, CodeGov has voted to reject 4.9% and DFINITY has voted to reject 3.7%. Since Synapse follows both CodeGov and Lorimer, it means that Synapse has voted to reject 34.4% of these proposals as well. In my opinion, this performance does not reflect well on the reliability and credibility of the Synapse decision on who to follow on this topic. Hence, I proposed that we make a change. The other voting members for Synapse did not agree, which is why that proposal did not pass. There was a consensus of our Followees on the Neuron Management proposal topic who are ok with our high reject rate on this topic. It was a helpful exercise to better understand the opinions from our diverse and well respected voting members on how the Synapse neuron should be configured.