Thank you so much for clearly outlining both elements of this problem @dfisher . I agree point 2 is equally important to point 1. At the end of the day, there is no real reason to follow anyone other than DFINITY on technical topics even if there are known neurons that are capable and committed to offering a decentralized option. Your experience is a clear example of this point. Thank you for sharing it.
The only other example we have of trying to decentralize the NNS away from the original default following of DFINITY/ICA is the Governance proposal topic (SNS & Neuron’s Fund didn’t exist at the time and the default following when it was created followed the Governance topic, which was already decentralized). Even though the solution on that proposal topic didn’t incentivize the new known neurons via rewards, the solution to that problem did address point 2.
At the time, DFINITY was not voting reliably on the Governance topic. Hence, if you wanted to maximize rewards you had to follow either Synapse, cycledao, or ICDevs. Unfortunately, ICDevs was a little late specifically because the NNS was not decentralized and a very large genesis neuron other than DFINITY had enough voting power to block their first two attempts at becoming a known neuron…that is until Synapse and cycledao grew a following and other genesis neurons started to realize they were losing voting rewards.
The change that occurred was that the Governance topic was removed from the All Topics catch all and required explicit following on the Governance topic or you lost rewards. Since DFINITY wasn’t voting on the Governance topic, you had to choose one of the new known neurons or vote manually in order to get your rewards. The change to following patterns happened almost immediately due to the impact on voting rewards.
I’m not suggesting that this needs to be a solution to point number 2 on these technical topics. The point is just that decentralization probably requires that there is a reason to follow someone else besides DFINITY. This new grant program doesn’t address that issue like @dfisher indicated. Hopefully the long term solution that is rolled out in 6 months will include a solution to this problem. In the meantime, this grant program should offer an opportunity for known neuron to gain credibility as a Followee for these technical topics.