Merge Neuron(s) function

Maybe give me 1-2 days to think about the possibilities and what would be easiest?
If the main concern is that the neurons cannot be merged, another option might be to just remove this restriction from the merge_neuron functionality… But I prefer to think a bit more about the consequences of each choice with the team.

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And also remove the "join crowd funding " button; which is the source of this conundrum.

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Hi all, so we thought about this a little more and think that an easily implementable fix for this would be to remove the restriction in merge_neuron that does not allow community fund neurons to be merged.
This would mean that a community fund neuron could be merged with any other neuron, in particular it could also be merged into a non-community fund neuron.

Note that we are also working on a clearer design for the community fund and will of course share news with you one we have a more fleshed out design!

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The track record of the promise of community fund detailed design has been not too promising. The community has been asking about the details of the community fund for MONTHS in this forum on multiple topics.

The Join Community Fund button should never have been introduced if the user doesnt know , at all, what joining the community fund means.

Accordingly we SHOULD remove the Join Community Fund button till the design is clear; so that it doesnt trap unwitting users.

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This is a good idea and solves the problem of merging community fund neurons. Voting on this can start. Everyone should be able to decide for themselves.

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Let me maybe try to provide a bit of explanation: One of the reasons we haven’t been making quick progress on the community fund design is that the NNS team is very focused and working on shipping the SNS features. As you see on our roadmap the SNS is planned to be released before the community fund. This also makes sense as the community fund is building on the SNSs to some extent (e.g., the community fund can be invested in SNSs).
I know that this does not fully address your concern, but maybe it can shed some light on our thinking.

This being said, we do actually make progress on the design (I was just participating a meeting yesterday) so I really hope we can share some ideas in the next few weeks.

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Thanks @lara for your explanation. Let me clarify my position.

A. I believe that community funding will be a very good feature when implemented based on tweets from Dom, a medium article referencing Lomesh and several other tweets from others.

B. I do think that the team is working hard in churning out features that are higher priority than community funding and in certain cases the community funding is dependent on these features.

Now, the facts:

(i) join-the-community fund button appeared in NOV 2021.
(ii) Till now (MAY 2022) , we have none of the details about what the joining the community fund would entail. Would it even be legal in certain jurisdictions without passing the Hewey test? Would it expose the participants to undue loss?
(iii) Others have inadvertently joined the community fund by mistake.

Clear questions:

Q1. My issue is that join-the-community-fund button was ill-concieved at the time(NOV 2021) of it’s appearance on the UI and it still remains so. Would you agree to that?

Q2: If so, why should we not have a governance proposal that removes that button from the UI so that it does not ensnare future “clickers”?

Q3. What are the advantages(if any) of having a join-the-community-fund button if NO ONE can even tell us what joining-the-community-fund will do in very specific terms for the risk-reward envelope?

Q4. Why not remove the join-the-community-fund button, cone back with the design and THEN enable this button again?

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The best fix is to let people reverse the community fund.
It’s outrageous how people got tricked into this.
Why taking the restrictions away if people want to exit?
In which sentence this looks okéy for you or the team?
This is just another way to let them be stuck into this outrageous community fund.
You basically took every hope away for those who are stuck in this and payed a lots of money for those tokens.
Outrageous, i demand a revert option asap.
No more bullshit, get it over with and let people exit that community fund that is clearly not up to date and shouldn’t have been released in the first place.
Al the rest is exuzes to let people be scammed in this outrageous community fund.

You state that the team is “very focused and working on shipping the SNS”, THAT THIS IS THE REASON THEIR IS NO TIME FOR THE COMMUNITY FUND. BUT FOR RELEASING THAT COMMUNITY BUTTON THEIR WAS TIME ENOUGH?! WHERE IS THE LOGIC?!
AGAIN OUTRAGEOUS.

Else this needs to go in debate for court in my opinion. Can’t believe the way everything went can be approved by any judge.
Do the right thing or get sued for this. The END!

I share your frustratition and, unfortunately, more and more people are getting frustrated with the direction IC goes. We all understand this is the best blockchain technology. The problem is everywhere else.
I started investing in June 2021 after they announced Endorphin on Medium. Remember Endorphin? That was this incredible phone OS system.
Then, there was Badlands
Then, people’s party
Then, community funds
Then, last summer, staking was a passive investment. Now it is a governance token.
Then, the best of all, a TAX evasion system with price modulation where 100ˋs of millions of $ would evade Taxes with a simple price modulation system.
I am very confident this Tax Evasion system will be the first to come out before everything else on this list. Good chances before the community fund button removal.
This is how I, and many other people are seeing Dfinity now. This is sad but have no choice… 8 years locked.
Hope post like this one will make Dfinity thinking more about how they manage in general. Stop announcing things that are not happening (or happening very soon) and stop to be a tax evasion developper.

Still, the greatest blockchain of all time. Really impressed with the tech and all the programmers working on it.

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I refuse to accept the status quo; if it needs to be changed.

I am giving the community including the conversational leads @lara and @jwiegley from dfinity for their alternate perspectives to see if they can convince the community; prior to creating a governance proposal.

While i am fairly certain that dfinity will be working on their own priorities for now, we can change minds by perservance.

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I encourage the community to raise its voice whenever it feels the system could be improved, even if that improvement is by simplification or removing features. This is the only way we can prove that governance has truly become decentralized: when people are no longer waiting for DFINITY to pursue new design decisions.

So, I encourage the community to find its own voice, as it has been doing here in these forums.

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I initially hesitated replying because my thought is a subtle one and subject to misinterpretation, but while I disagree with the low-level examples and reasons you provide, I think we end up at similar high-level places. we reach similar conclusions.

Allow me to explain why I disagree with your examples:

  1. Badlands, Endorphin were all ideas and proposals, not feature announcements - These are proposals and were NEVER announced as features, but floated as ideas. Badlands even has the disclaimer, " Everyone, please note: this is a technical pre-post for those interested in the Badlands concept, rather than a formal post announcing details of the project. There are several competing demands on the teams developing the Internet Computer ecosystem at the moment," They notably were written on Dom’s personal medium post as proposals (which is an exception).

  2. People Party is in active development - The team working on it has been working on it for a long time (at least since Fall 2021) to make everything work and even answer questions on dev forum. It has been a slog working through the edge cases and kinks.

  3. These features you mentioned are minority - there have been dozens of other features and improvements across the IC since Genesis. It seems to me that many times once a feature is shipped it recedes to a forgotten land (this is not new to IC, common in tech where all that matters is the “next thing.”)

  4. ICP + NNS was always designed to be a governance token. Fwiw, I have always written and thought about it this way. Not sure why you think it was “passive investment.” If anything by DFINITY said that i would be honestly surprised (and a mistake imo).

Where I do think you and I agree

  1. It’s clear to me that even though Badlands and Endorphin were posted as just ideas (the kind that Vitalik and others have done in crypto space), that they were seen by many in the community as promises. To be blunt: If 99% of people read the tweet, but did not read the articles or dev forum articles, I can understand why they may think they were actually in the roadmap. It is clear DFINITY should learn and iterate from that.

  2. It’s clear to me that even though we post estimates and constant updates on features, there is a disconnect where readers cannot tell what is in the camp of “straightforward, mechanical engineering" that just takes X hours”… and what is in the camp of “highly innovative R&D which has dead ends, project restarts, edge cases, etc…” People Parties is such an example, and I do not think the costly side of innovation is properly communicated.

Well on the other hand, I think it is perfectly reasonable to have a roadmap where we lay out the direction of the IC: https://dfinity.org/roadmap/

The roadmap is what we update and see as the things we are working on. You will see both badlands and Endorphin are just “for consideration.”

If you think, “yes, diego but community does not consider the roadmap when complaining about X”, I think that is fair and it shows that the roadmap is not sufficiently the artifact discussed.

So I disagree with you that there should be no roadmap (imagine a world where only features about to be released were discussed or released? No developer or design discussions, etc…)

I do agree with you that the communication went awry in a few places:

My ultimate writing principle if that the reader does not understand something, it is the writer’s responsibility. So I think you are right in being frustrated @coteclaude (regardless of what DFINITY’s intent is).

  • People think some ideas floated to the community were active projects (they never were, and I even actively wrote that).
  • People are not aware about the hard part of estimating Research & Development. Some features are mechanical work, while others involve doing things no one has done before so estimates are very hard to pin down and sometimes we only know once we start. I do not think people are aware, nor do we make it easy for people to be aware.
  • I think features like Canister security sandboxing are extremely difficult and important, but they rarely seem to be brought up when discussing things DFINITY has accomplished. I think its clear (and very natural) that user-facing features are remembered more than security or developer-facing features, so I think more care should be made to make their user-facing impact clearer.
  • I think the announcement of community fund was premature, everyone I know thinks the same and that is why the intent is to give users the ability to undo actions from that button.
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I 100% agree with this. Folks’ opinions hold significant sway.

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Any news for community fund on nns??

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Thanks for taking the time to clarify your points and for the honest feedback!

Note that I was not closely involved in the decisions of releasing the community fund button, but let me try to answer your questions as well as I can. In addition, I am happy to bring your feedback back to the rest of the team to consider it when planning the next steps.

Q1. I agree that the design is not finalised in detail.

Q2. I just wanted to add another alternative for solving the problem that community neurons cannot be merged.
Of course community members can and should make proposals with their own ideas. I think this is core to decentralisation and do not want to discourage that!
If you see requests like “please discuss on the forum before submitting a proposal”, I think this is rather for people to be able to engage prior to the vote and, for some topics where some DFINITY members are experts, I think it makes sense that we also leave enough time for them to contribute to make design proposals as good as they can be / point out possible alternatives. But no matter the discussion, anyone can and should submit proposals that they find important.

Q3. One motivation for having the community fund button might be that those who like to show the support of this high level idea can already do so.

Q4. As mentioned in 3, one advantage might be that those who want to “show their support for the community fund” can still do so.
In any case, we also have to provide a solution for people who joined accidentally. We could also “plan” the best solution for how neurons can opt-out of the community fund and for what the button should show now / during the opt-out period / after the feature exists together, e.g., when we discuss the design of the feature (that we are working on).

I hope this provides some additional inputs!

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I still support the creation of an icp return opportunity from the public fund, as I wrote about earlier in this thread. And I received confirming assurances, and now the silence, although I was promised to fix the situation and that it will happen as soon as possible.And I also do not intend to stop. Pay attention to us. There are many of us.

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I also think it’s taking a long time to fix this problem. A lot of people are affected. Maybe the developers should prioritize it?

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I want to be helpful and I saw your comment. Can you clarify which is the problem you think should be fixed? (I have successfully merged neurons for example), so there is some edge case or corner case you refer to (but I’m unaware of) which I can escalate to the team

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I would like to return one of my neurons that I accidentally assigned to the Community Fund as a normal neuron. After that, I could merge it with the other normal neuron.

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I want to confirm that being able to remove a neuron from CF is an upcoming feature for the CF.

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