Thanks for the clarifications and apologies for having misunderstood the proposal: re-reading your question I now see that it was clearly saying “governance proposals”. I think I was reading this as “proposals in the governance canister” rather than “proposals of topic governance”, this was totally my fault.
Does this address your biggest concern?
You are absolutely right, this eliminates my main concern!
If the minimum voting period (previously 24 hrs; now 4 days) changes again in the future, then this delay timer should adjust proportionally
It makes sense to me to apply this relative ot the minimum voting period. This minimum voting period is actually just a constant in the code, so it should be easy to express this relative to it and ensure that it would automatically be “adjusted” if we ever change the minimum voting period again.
One note on implementation: currently the process how votes are processed is independent of the proposal’s topic, i.e., when a vote is cast following is also triggered. If we now changed this behaviour for proposals of topic governance only, this would mean that vots are processed differently depending on proposal topics. I think this can be implemented by an extra check. I just want to point out that this makes the logic of how proposals are processed a bit more involved, which for example might make it harder to argue about and prove security properties. (Just another thing to consider in weighting the pros and cons).
If a lot of votes are suddenly cast, especially if they swing the outcome, isn’t that a signal that the vote really should be extended by W4Q?
Right, I think this could be a valid argument.
I guess I was wondering about the following scenario: Say there are many, close to 3%, yes votes and only one no-vote. However, the no-vote is coming from a neuron that has extremely many followers, so many that all the follower’s votes would add up to 50% of voting power. Now, should we view the actual result 3% yes + 1 vote no as the “trend” or the 3% yes + 50% no (that we know will take effect before the voting period ends) as the “trend”?
One could argue that everyone who knows the algorithm would know that the expected outcome is a no already. This could for example mean that if I want to vote no and follow this one neuron, I might abstain because I know my opinion will be reflected correctly. Therefore, when all the no-votes are then cast by the following that kicks in, we could consider that this is not really a “change in trend” as this was predictable. For this reason, one might argue that the voting time need not be increased in this moment.
What I mean is that we mainly want to increase the voting time to give people chances to react to new trends that might be surprising, but in that case the change in trend was predictable.
Therefore, I think it is a valid option to consider the trend with or without taking the following (even though not applied yet) into account.
Do you know what I mean? Do you think in this scenario only the effective current result should be considered as the “trend”?
Do you envision the Governance proposal type being executed by Absolute Majority in the future?
You are right. I don’t think proposals of topic governance are emergency proposals and rely on the fact taht they can be executed quickly with an absolute majority.
Of course it can still be that some of the future proposals will achieve the majority threshold, but I agree that this will be less likely and we don’t rely on this.