These are some great points. Before responding, lets take a step forward into the future of the NNS, assuming the IC is wildly successful. In this future:
- Hundreds of proposals hit the NNS every day. Maybe 200-300 are spam, but at least 20 are legitimate proposals.
- Some new proposals contain wasm and/or code that will hooked into the updating the actual governance code/constants of the NNS, meaning that many proposals are now more technical in nature.
- There are many more issues with canister content and censorship, in the sense that a canister may contain objectionable or copyrighted content and a proposal is created to take that canister down.
- Many more proposals are created to bring attention to various campaigns, or to preach a certain philosophy or vision for the future of the IC.
This future is therefore one full of proposals that have interesting ideas, are actionable or tightly integrated, with lots of spam mixed in.
Now imagine being an NNS voter in this environment. What is your voting strategy?
Are you going to take the time to read and vote on every single proposal (like a local political activist)? Are you going to follow a few trusted neurons to vote for you and check in every now and then to vote on a particular proposal you care about?
In the case where you choose to follow a few trusted neurons and sometimes vote, you’re putting the majority of your votes in the hands of those who’s judgment you trust, but then manually vote on a few specific issues that you care deeply about. In your own words, the followee system we currently have already…
I see this as an identical process to the incubation period, in that your votes can be cast by you or your followees to bring proposals out of incubation, but if you really want to vote on a specific incubating proposal → you can manually go in and vote on it. The only difference is that proposals that are live on the NNS last 2-4 days, whereas incubating proposals last up to 2 weeks, meaning voters have more time to exercise or refuse their voluntary support for an incubating proposal than a live proposal.
The 2% minimum support threshold also puts an onus on proposal creators to bring their proposals to the community (on the Developer Forum, Twitter, Medium, etc.) before submitting those proposals to the NNS in order to gauge support, gather feedback, and iterate on feedback from the community to improve the proposal further.
Proposals that skip this feedback step and are published straight to the NNS risk being ignored completely, but by not engaging with the community before suggesting a change to the system, the proposal creator is actively taking that risk. As noted in the “Additional Benefits of this proposal” section, this also has the side effect of incentivizing proposal creators to make their ideas for changing the IC public, which allows proposals to be viewed, challenged, and vetted to a degree in order to reach that necessary minimum support threshold and pass incubation.
Arguments Against
-
Proposal Creator: “What if I have a really great idea, but no one knows who I am and I have no support/voting power. Surely I have no chance of my proposal passing”.
Rebuttal to (1): Make your governance proposal idea public on the forums, tag a few prominent members of the community, engage people on Twitter. If your proposal is worth its salt, it would easily pass the minimum support threshold if got approval from this community. In fact, support from any one of @wpb, @Kyle_Langham, @skilesare, Bob Bodily, or DFINITY employees/alumni like @nomeata, @paulyoung, @claudio, or @kpeacock would probably get you past the 2% threshold.
-
This proposal puts the voting power in the hands of an even smaller group of individuals.
Rebuttal to (2): In the current voting system, we have those who vote manually, those who follow neurons for all votes, and those who do a little of both. Voting that takes place during the incubation period would have the exact same rules and therefore, the same “voting power dynamics” as voting on “live” proposals. This proposal just reflects the power dynamics of the current system.
It also incentivizes the voters who are most active and knowledgable in a particular area of the IC to engage with those proposals. As NNS Proposals become more diverse and specialized, certain NNS Voters may actually be more inclined to go in and manually vote for a proposal that covers an area they specialize in (say boundary nodes, or cryptography) to ensure that proposal passes incubation and receives a live vote.
-
No @justmythoughts, you weren’t listening! (that’s me
)
Introducing a filter hides proposals from the public and reinforces the voting power inequity of the NNS.
Rebuttal to (3): There’s no perfect solution here, but I think there’s a balance that can be reached between usability and accessibility. Asking NNS voters to read and vote on tens to hundreds of proposals per day just isn’t scalable, nor is it accessible. It wears out NNS voters, and doesn’t allow them to due the due diligence to read and vote on the proposals they most care about. We want people to make good votes, not rushed votes or even worse, give up and just default vote.
To build a system that scales for NNS voters, we have to build a system where they feel empowered to vote, and not overwhelmed. This means:
- Searching for and voting on proposals an NNS Voter truly cares about, or has expertise in
- Allowing an NNS voter to ignore a proposal or delegate their vote to a neuron they trust to do the proper due diligence on a proposal.
The NNS App already has filter functionality, but this could be extended to be able to search for proposals with a specific ID or topic name as the system scales up and more proposals come in. I actually see this search functionality not just for the incubating proposals, but soon for proposals that are live on the NNS (i.e. I’m looking for proposal 178988 that Wenzel just posted about on Twitter and the forums saying its live).