Reset Followees for the "All Topics Except Governance" Category

Governance
82

@wpb Thanks for redirecting me :slight_smile:

I appreciate the intention and work behind this proposal, but am against this proposal as I believe:

  1. It would have the impact of disproportionately rewarding investors who are following the day to day or even week to week action, over more passive investors.
  2. It will not have the intended impact of stopping low quality proposals targeted at investor profit. If anything, the group of investors involved in this proposal spamming scheme are coordinated and active - resetting the followees would only give them a chance to temporarily earn greater rewards from governance proposals while the rest of us find time to set up our followees again.

We essentially already did this reset when the governance voting rewards and topic was split out from all of the other voting topics a few months ago, requiring all NNS participants to actively update their governance followee neurons. If this proposal passes, what’s stopping a proposal from being passed every 2-3 months to reset the followees and ask NNS users to “actively participate”?

If we want more people to become IC investors, we shouldn’t penalize them for their passive investment. It sends the message that “hardcore or more involved IC community members are looking to directly profit or benefit from their investment”, which is a dangerous label which that will scare off both small retail and larger investors.

Through tools like maturity merging (which can be done daily instead of annually for increased rewards), active investors are already rewarded over more passive investors.

I could potentially be on board with a reset cadence that might make sense, but it should give investors adequate time to preconfigure their new followees before the change is made instead of resetting at a distinct moment in time and only after the reset has taken place. For example, DMV car registration is on an annual basis, and car owners are allowed to purchase their next year’s car registration at some time in advance of the expiry date. I could definitely get on board with a scheme like this that resets neuron followees every year, but allows NNS participants a grace period in choosing their neuron followees that will apply once the next reset takes place. As a con to this approach, it makes the investing in the IC a more complicated and involved investment than most others that a retail investor would have in their current portfolio (i.e. Bitcoin, equities) → which can be a drag on overall IC investment and adoption.

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83

Holy cow, that wiki, I checked out half way through the first sentence…air-gapped computer? :wink:

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84

You either have enough skin in the game or you don’t, people care after a certain % of their money and future is at stake. Not trying to be rude, but I think we can all see where you fall on that spectrum by your statement.

85

I think you are way off-base here. Staking on the NNS was “sold” as a way to make passive income without needing to be actively involved…and in fact there are many articles on adding followees so you never MISS casting a vote. I try to vote on every governance proposal myself, not because of a hope of increased rewards, but because I want to be part of shaping this thing we are all building. I read the proposals and any discussions so I can make an informed decision. If it’s over my head or if I just don’t have the time, I rely on ICPMN to make the proper decision for me. On many of the other categories, such a node provider rewards, or technical proposals that I’m clueless about, I trust that the neurons I follow know more than me and will cast the proper vote. If manual voting is required, watch everybody just go with the flow anyway, or throw in an opposite vote because all that matters is getting paid, right? When your money (whether 1 ICP or a million) is tied up for at least 8 years, how can that be considered freeloading?

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86

For myself, I would add:

#4 The system should not be used for the intent of increasing rewards for any parties, talk of this kind should be taboo or at least highly discouraged as it presents the wrong ideology to new community members.

#5 The NNS shouldn’t be used for asking changes/features in 3rd party dApps, this is why the SNS is being built, there will be a time and a place for proposing changes in dApps utilizing the SNS.

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87

I disagree heavily, dedicated liquidity providers are the ones who provide liquidity when an asset opens for trading and that is determined by the exchange, not by individual investors. Dominic has already pointed a finger at FTX, he likely has information we don’t.

It is not normal to see any kind of IOU only trading for half of the opening price of the actual asset leading into the launch, highly doubt liquidity is the culprit because IOU’s were even less liquid.

88

@wpb @Kyle_Langham I noticed that Proposal spam prevention mechanism is part of Carbon release (ETA: Q2 2022) and most likely there is already a plan:

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So possibly we should involve in the discussion @diegop or other people from Dfinity…?
I feel that it would be good to prevent proposals with duplicated goals, each eventually taking different approach.

Plus to me it seems that the extra rewards for Governance proposals are decreasing, so it might even fix itself - if all (majority of) stakers will start to vote or follow some other neuron (they must have noticed decrease in rewards already).

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89

Good catch! Let’s see what the proposed spam prevention mechanism will be and whether the timeline is accurate. Could be that we could institute a temporary measure (as suggested by @Manu ) to reduce spamming until that feature is deployed.

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90

Thank you for sharing this information! We probably should have stated it in the original post, but I really want to hear from Dfinity on this proposal as well as their future plans for spam prevention. I have no interest in pushing forward any proposal that is a non starter from the Dfinity perspective or conflicts with current roadmaps. Whatever this proposal turns out to be, if anything, it will be shaped from feedback we hear in this deliberation that seems like the highest probability of success from both an effectiveness and an feasibility perspective. That includes information that is shared by Dfinity about their roadmaps.

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91

This proposal doesn’t prevent anyone from selecting Followees after a reset. It just forces people to make an intentional decision on a Followee if they want voting rewards.

If a reset of All Topics Except Governance does occur, there is no longer a driver to submit low quality governance proposals because voting rewards will already be the max possible for anyone who reconfigures (e.g. active participants). Submitting a governance proposal will not increase rewards for voters at the expense of non voters of governance topics. This is because there will no longer be a lot of neurons that have a Followee configured for All Topics but not for Governance. Everyone will be configured for both or neither.

I do think a reset cadence is something that is worth considering. It’s an act of reconfirming your Followee selections. If forces the staker to take an action of intent and it probably causes public known neurons to work harder to educate the community.

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92

Since Dfinity anticipated the problem and plans to fix it, I propose to trust them on the timeline and on the solution. Once their solution’s efficiency experienced, we will be able to change things if it is not enough, but for right now, let us just trust them.

If Dfinity can’t explain what their solution is yet, it does not mean that we have to set a temporary fix. We could not deduce of their lack of time to explain their coming solution to us, that their solution is not enough efficient or not enough fast. If they have located the solution at this place on the roadmap, it is because they had the big picture and where thinking that we could afford spam during first months. Se, let us not be more royalist than the king. I fully trust them. By wanting to do things by ourselves and by our rhythm, even when Dfinity has a plan about it, we could get some counterproductive effects.

I would not want us to be more in a hurry than Dfinity. They monitor the IC ecosystem more than we are, at least currently, so if they estimated that we could afford months with spam proposals, we can. So, in my case, I will trust them and won’t try to go faster than them.

Thank you @plsak, for having caught our attention on this initial plan.

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93

I agree, but Dfinity has asked many times in the past for the community to get involved by making proposals on things the community finds important. It has been said many times in social media by Diego and others, and never more clearly than on episode 28 of the Internet Computer Weekly podcast when Arthur Falls interviewed @jwiegley and @diegop. If nothing else, I’m sure the discussion here and the thread that @justmythoughts started can serve as a source of ideas that can be considered. It seems preferable though to shape those ideas further into an actionable plan(s) in a collaborative way. At the end of the day, there is no motion proposal regarding NNS code changes that can be executed by the community. Hence, it makes the most sense to try to engage dfinity in the discussion during deliberation in order to ensure that the proposal is feasible and doesn’t conflict with something they already have planned. I think this is what they want based on feedback they have given to the community in the past.

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94

There is no need to change the voting mechanism for NNs, because everyone should be responsible for their actions. If they care about the benefits generated by voting, they will participate in voting. It will eventually equalize everyone’s income so that there will be no junk proposals. When the time is ripe, we will increase the reward of high-quality proposals and limit the time of launching high-quality proposals. This can effectively solve this problem.

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95

I wouldn’t mind confirming once in a while my selection for a followee. Like I said on another occasion, I might get to a point where, for example, ICPMN doesn’t push forward the same values as mine, so I would change my preference anyway.

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96

A proposal must succeed in 7 phases in order to be available for voting

  1. The proposer
  2. Advisor.
  3. Developer or developers who are responsible for the execution of the proposal
  4. The above must participate in DAOs with clear aims and purposes
  5. They must first submit their proposal for voting in their DAO. If it succeeds then go to next phase
  6. The proposal will be discussed and get verified on a prevote period. If it passes then phase 7
  7. Proposal is ready.

The voters who votes opposite the result are not rewarded.

The DAO which submits the succeeded proposals will be paid into cycles. The voters into icp

A voting history must exist not only for the proposals but for the proposers too.

97

I don’t think it’s widely recognized, but dfinity didn’t vote with conviction on any governance proposals until late February 2022. This is because their vote would end any governance proposal immediately by way of absolute majority when virtually all voting power in the NNS would be triggered by their vote. This went unnoticed by almost everyone simply because it had negligible impact to voting rewards. The change that happened in late February is that Dfinity started voting on governance proposals.

Your action to follow a neuron that was participating in governance was the intended outcome of the implementation of changes from proposal 34485. I would argue those changes were highly successful because we went from approx 6% voting power participation in governance proposals to approx 45% voting power participation in governance. This includes dfinity foundation now being able to participate in governance proposals.

98

I agree with your assessment that the voting reward weights creates incentives for spamming governance proposals at this time. Those proposal weights also quickly produced greater decentralization of NNS governance, which I think is a greater good. There are going to be solutions to the spamming problems. Ideally it would be done without reversing progress toward decentralized governance.

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99

Governance is about direction and control of something, in this case to improve decentralization of the NNS by increased voter participation in governance.

More directly you are pointing to those who are less informed, less qualified and therefore less likely to vote, just lazy or don’t care as long as you make me rich.

You then point out the best method to punish people is through monetary penalties for investing and by calling them names.

The word followers to me means someone who supports and admires others.

There are no bad organizations, just bad people working there who, as pointed out by many of the replies, take advantage of those less informed. While you blame the followers it’s because of the leaders we have the problems. The answer to the last proposal was to reward the qualified and punish the followers. Which I think is less decentralized by rewarding the problem makers in the first place.

In a business structure you have many levels of participants that all work together otherwise the whole concept may not exist.

Most organizations reward their customers which are followers but you want to penalize them.

How about we give each person one vote, make it easier for the followers to understand and participate without more rewards to some and penalties to everyone else.

It’s like the many replies here, run through all the paragraphs, remove the duplications and you will most likely end up with a much smaller document with the main points of concern as most is off topic.

I am a follower and see that you are being disrespectful of my support and admiration of the project. But I support the organization’s ideas, not the bad actors who criticize me and my investment of time and money.

I see this proposal as no better than the leading 5 top tech companies making changes to reward themself while they themself see they have created a problem of leaders having power over those here.

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100

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and offering critique. You have made fair points and I highly respect your opinions. Please note that I do not want people to get fewer rewards. The goal is higher participation in governance. In my ideal scenario everyone would make intentional choices about the configuration of their neuron for both the Governance topic and the All Topics Except Governance “catch all”. ICP tokenomics are intended to incentivize participation in governance, so the objective is to create conditions in which we get as close to full participation as possible. I recognize and respect that everyone will not agree, which is fair.

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I appreciate your response. I like the banter and yes you are right about your intentions and I have written a response about this subject before which was not approved to be viewed. I felt it made some good points that where not brought up here but it didn’t contain a solution to higher Governance Participation.

To be involved in staking you would think that most of those not participating have some knowledge of what they are doing, even a follower like me knows the difficulties in setting up and knowing the steps must have some knowledge of what this is all about and maybe ask the people who do participate on this forum with a message

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