Proposal to Mitigate NNS Advertisement Spam - a Temporary Solution

Seeing as this is a thread on how to stop potential advertisement spam, I don’t think a move from $70 to $700 will affect advertisement spam, advertisement budgets are significantly higher than $700. So the real affect will be to suppress individuals who can’t afford to risk the money, and this goes away from decentralization. This will have no impact on whales and companies from coming in and advertising on the NNS, if anything it will clear it up so only they can afford to advertise.

Bad actors probably won’t care and will see it as what it is, a bigger speed bump that they can still just step over. If you can crowd fund enough to make legit proposals, they can crowdfund enough to make advertisement spam proposals.

Also if this is such a big risk and threat to the NNS then I feel like the priority of an actual code fix should be moved up to pri 0 by the Dfinity team and not left to the community hacking together a “fix” that doesn’t fix the issue.

3 Likes

Maybe we can implement auto decline from certain neurons. And I can just always auto decline @ysyms everytime.

My final submission in regards to the NNS, rewards, dead neurons, activity and spam.

Reading the many discussions put forward over a long period of time I have a proposal that I hope meets all the concerns brought forward from the past to current that I feel need to be addressed.

The first point to consider is about neuron holders. There seems to be 3 types of owners that have focus.

Dead Neurons
Inactive or Following Neurons
Active Neurons

Any neurons added to the NNS have decisions made about the level of rewards due to the quantity of icp and the length of staked time that they will receive for the owner. This should be upheld as any class action or court decisions may be at the cost of the voters on the NNS and not Dfinity.

This would apply to Dead, Inactive and Followers neurons.

Any extra rewards should then be given to the Active neurons.

The Followers list should only have groups that are approved by the active neurons and to Dfinity approved groups to update the NNS.

The NNS should have a link to this forum for nominations and discussions put up for changes to the Followers List and NNS updates for Active neuron holders to participate for extra rewards.

This is achieved by conversing on discussions and voting by Active neuron holders that are in the category of Governance. Voting power would apply as per the structure set out in the NNS and a neuron settings for investment return.

Governance discussions allow active neurons owners to put up discussions and would have a voting scale that when the levels of 75% has been achieved or as stated by the NNS the votes are transferred to the NNS for updating without further voting.

Any spam would have to come through the forum and I would assume that spam would not produce a result and be rejected.

The default cost of a rejected proposal on the NNS set to 1 billion so any hacks would fail and all updates for the NNS by the Approve Followers List must also come through the Governance discussion but all Follower neurons votes must be included in the voting.

As for the argument about a resubmit of the owners neurons to Follow after a set period must be avoided.

This is my suggestion to fix the spam concerns but to include all the issues raised to get all active neurons involved with their concerns included.

This is my read on all the topics on this subject over time and I have bundled it all together as a possible solution not the rule.

2 Likes

I like your idea. I wonder how much work it would take to implement. There could be an NNS proposal to block named neurons from submitting proposals (perhaps with a timer), which would ensure it is “hard” to block a neuron and the majority of the governing body agree they should be blocked. This idea might be a good discussion in a dedicated forum topic since it is not aligned with this proposal. If this feature were implemented, it could make it practical to decrease the proposal reject fee.

1 Like

This is obviously a bad idea. You may just make NNS more centralized.

I’ll point out that the need to mash the “spam” button is only an issue if the vote counts for rewards. It seems to me that in an ideal world the spam proposals won’t count…if we have a way to keep them “hidden” until we have to deal with them then we can do this. Maybe we still need a spam button, but with Proposal to restrict rewards qualification to a threshold we might not(depending on the threshold we pick).

I do not agree with this statement that a good proposal will pass and bad ones will be rejected. I have seen a very bad proposal passed. Proposal 48623 was to evade tax, for a limited number of individuals, and was not benefiting the IC network at all and it passed. 48623 was a spam to my interpretation of spam, the worst spam seen so far that have the potential to harm the network much more than all the others we have seen. That will happen when IRS will be stepping in. 100% convince it will happen.

1 Like

Personally, I am going to vote for the proposal made by @skilesare mentioned above. I think that a temporary solution might not be needed when we have a few solid long-term solutions available, and they will make the user experience more enjoyable.

Maybe you are wrong ---- Proposal 48623 is indeed a good proposal as a whole.
A proposal is good because it is passed, not that a proposal is passed because it is good.
No one can define what is good or bad; only the voting results of NNS can define what is good or bad.
Of course, different voting rules will make different definitions of what is good or bad. But the truth is that there are no perfect voting rules according to modern social choice theory (i.e., Arrow’s impossibility theorem).

2 Likes

You are right. Maybe I am wrong. But maybe I am right too. Only time will tell. Some proposals will take some time before being proven wrong or right.
As much as I follow the SEC and IRS stance and evolution on cryptos and rewards, I can only think that this was a bad proposal that may put some investors in a bad situation with their taxes. Again, time will tell. But we cannot deny that there is an important risk. If this happen, it will create a crisis for sure. Not to FUD but being realistic. Don’t play with IRS or SEC. Their stick is much bigger and hit much harder than our.

One thing for sure, that proposal was not following Dfinity guide on proposals which one criteria is the need to benefit to the IC. That proposal is not benefiting the IC. It benefit some, and only some, individuals and Dfinity foundation, not the network.

1 Like

Isn’t it easier to just add a “second” button? Not seconded proposals are “hidden”. As long as you can submit a proposal it’s easy to raise awareness.

Then you can control in the UI the details, eg “see proposals seconded only by Dfinity”, “see proposals seconded by X% threshold”.

I don’t get why so much discussion and this issue is still unsolved.

1 Like

Why not 150icp?
Or 300?
Or even 1000?
Add a 2nd button in every proposal of
Spam. Not Spam
If the proposal is spam by voting decision then neuron is banned forever and 0 rewards for everyone.

In my opinion more voting options in general are needed, regardless of the combination of solutions the community chooses to implement:

  • Abstain to make sure people who don’t feel they are informed enough and don’t want to delegate their vote can still get rewards

  • Spam so that malicious proposals can be more easily detected, filtered and deleted, for instance with Proposal to restrict rewards qualification to a threshold proposals without enough Yes votes would be less visible and that shouldn’t be the case, there should be a distinction between “I don’t support this” and “this is spam”. With a spam option it could also become possible to charge the rejection fee only if the proposal is considered as spam, incentivizing more people to participate in governance without fear of losing tokens, this would promote more named neurons submissions and a more active governance process.
    The NNS is the best tool we have to gather the community’s consensus, being able to use it even for apparently disliked proposals will give us a better idea on how much stakers actually support or dislike a proposal.

Because most changes that help solve the problem take time and resources to develop and implement. DFINITY resources are working on other projects and there are currently no incentives to enable the community to develop and implement the solution. There is only one mechanism build into the NNS that can help mitigate spam and that is the network economics proposal type that can be used to increase the proposal reject fee. Everything else takes time and resources.

That fee is the narrowly defined scope presented in this proposal. None of the other ideation that has occurred in this forum topic (even though I agree with some of it) is in scope here.

1 Like

I understand the concern, but I think 100 ICP for rejection is gatekeeping. The average user loses the ability to create a proposal, which is the opposite of decentralization.

How about keeping the 10 ICP rejection fee and adding a waiting period if a proposal is rejected? For example, if this ysyms person has a proposal rejected, they lose their 10 ICP and can’t create another proposal for 10 days.

Could they geta round it by posting 10 proposals at once? Sure, but then they lose all 100 ICP when the 10 are rejected AND they can’t propose again for 100 days (10 x 10).

All I want to say is, please don’t do that, I meant don’t raise the proposal reject fee to 100 ICP, all you need to do is just stay clam and not panic, imo, I meant just forget the crazy guy until you become crazy, moreover, burning some 10 ICP is good for the community anyway.

Anyone can be a named neuron. It’s not centralized at all no need to fear it.

It’s pretty clear not everyone should have a voice. @ysyms has proven this by abusing it.

1 Like

The IC was created by some of the brightest minds in existence.

In a hundred years people will look back at the blockchain renaissance the same way we look back at Einstein’s time, which was a Renaissance of natural science the likes of which we have yet to match.

Surely there are better ways to address spam than raising the cost to 100 ICP.

By raising the cost you are gatekeeping.

The SNS is already in the hands of gatekeepers, now this?

Someone like myself simply couldn’t afford to pay 100 ICP for a proposal. This is absolute ludicrous.

If this ends up a proposal on the NNS and passes, I will humbly part ways with the IC. I’d rather find a chain and community more in line with Web3 philosophy.

Thank you and take care,
Pwoseidon.eth

2 Likes

I don’t think this would be too effective. What would stop a person with multiple neurons from circumventing these measures?

1 Like

For what is worth, a poll about the rejection fee value between 20 ICP and 80 ICP: https://twitter.com/SeerMarkets/status/1569713340875964416?s=20&t=grmqaacaPxYP2q5Dgo_llg

It seems that ~30 ICP is ok for most people, would you consider reducing the cost? @wpb

1 Like