it also begs other questions: Like, why are retail degens (myself included) who stake neurons who are unqualified to speak on technical aspects of Internet Computer able to Vote on technical proposals?
There are more than enough people who own ICP neurons that are willing to follow other neurons that have the skills to properly review these technical proposals. Hence a degen pencil whip or automated vote doesn’t affect the result. DFINITY is a valid choice on technical topics like this, but so is CodeGov. Other known neurons can be found by reading through the forum topic called Grants for Voting Neurons. There are now 5 other neurons that are performing this work for specific topics. DFINITY is also working in NNS dApp updates that will help make it easy to identify known neurons that are committed to performing proper reviews. You can choose to follow any of them and they will do the work of reviewing and voting for you.
I mean, look at the screenshot I posted for this post. Can anyone understand it?? Is that even professional to post something like this?
I get the theory is to follow competent neurons but retail degens wont know who’s competent. or credible? Who’s best interests are they for? Like me for example, I selected DFINITY and Jerry Banfield to follow. Love Jerry but is he qualified? Moreover, I don’t even know where to click to see how they voted. so I just flip a coin and select Yay or Nay. Also, this system begs bigger questions, like if I follow someone, are their votes best for the community or does it serve special interests that THEY(individually) want.
Food for thought…
It does render poorly for you for some reason. Here is how it renders on my PC on the NNS dApp as well as the dashboard. Both look fine to me. However, in order to review a proposal like this, you really need to be following the links to the commits on GitHub. DFINITY does a nice job of providing links to each commit that take you directly to a line by line, color coded comparison of the changes (what is deleted and what is new). They also provide instructions on how to build the replica and verify the hash. Again, most people don’t have the skills to perform this work, but you do have the right to do it if you want and you have the right to choose who you want to follow if you find someone who does the reviews.
I don’t know Jerry’s voting strategy, but hopefully he doesn’t try to review these types of proposals himself. To my knowledge, he probably doesn’t have the necessary skills. Hopefully he has done his due diligence and has chosen to follow a known neuron that is known to vote in an intentional and educated way on each proposal. Since he is an influencer, that would set a good example for people in his community such as yourself. You are absolutely right that people should not be pencil whipping votes or voting automatically yes or no. I think some people think it doesn’t matter right now, but it should matter to everyone who is staked long term and is looking out for the long term best interest of ICP.
You can find out how each known neuron voted by checking the vote history of each individual proposal. Or you can go to the known neuron page to see all votes cast by that neuron. Below is an example for the proposal you highlighted. As you can see, none of the known neurons in the list have voted yet. As you scroll down, there are neurons that have voted. Of the neurons that have voted so far, LORIMER is the only one that voted based on an actual review. He is a member of the CodeGov team, so I’m quite familiar with his work. He is an excellent choice for IC-OS Version Election as well as Subnet Management. The CodeGov team votes on all proposals, but has team members that specialize in IC-OS Version Election, Protocol Canister Management, Subnet Management, Participant Management, and Node Admin.
https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/proposal/133397?s=100
Also, please know that DFINITY is actively working on changes to the NNS dApp that will make this a lot easier in the future. They intend to make it easier to find credible known neurons to follow so people don’t have such a hard time educating themselves on these choices. It will get better.
Hi Zach,
I agree that the screenshot you’ve shown is quite a mess. Somehow it hasn’t rendered properly on your device. If you try reloading it it might possibly come good. Proposal details can usually be seen using either the NNS Dapp or the IC Dashboard. The dashboard link for this one is https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/proposal/133397 and it should display something like this:
You can see which teams have grants to review and recommend votes on some of the topics in this post. Reviewing some of these proposals in full is obviously quite time-consuming, hence the grants. (I’m part of the CodeGov team.) All of these teams (or individuals) are linked to a known neuron. Elsewhere in the “Grants for voting neurons” thread you can find each team’s description of how they operate and how they vote. In the dashboard link for the proposal, if you scroll down you can see “Votes of Known Neurons” showing how each of these has voted. If you click on the neuron name you can see that neuron’s full voting history. What we’d also like to see is for every proposal in the funded topics to include a link to a Forum post discussing the proposal and showing the reviews, but unfortunately this is not yet happening consistently.
For other neurons there should have been at some stage a proposal to add them as a known neuron, usually accompanied by a Forum post. Jerry’s post is here.
Hope that helps!