I like this idea a lot. It would disincentivize spam, but allow good proposals to surface even if they have a risk of rejection. The penalty of a spam proposal falls directly on the proposer, not on the voters, because you are not trying to nullify the proposal result or change voting rewards. I could see implementing a very high spam fee. I agree that designating a proposal as spam should require a little more effort such as confirmation of that selection.
The burden of the spam penalty is squarely on the proposer. There is no loss of voting rewards for the voter. The proposal is not cancelled and it is not hidden. There is no incentive for the voter to vote yes in order to get rewards. There is only a large spam fee for the proposer.
I think it also addresses concerns about high proposal reject costs…especially for people who think high proposal reject fee is a violation of freedom of speech. A rejected proposal could have a very low proposal reject fee because this idea introduces a new spam fee. Hence, those great ideas that come from community members who are not whales and don’t want to crowdfund their proposal can still surface without having to worry about the risk of a rejected proposal that is still a quality proposal that meets community defined standards.
I don’t agree with a lot of the details in the Proposals Should section though. I don’t think we should expect Governance proposal to rise to the level of implementable code. I fully agree that Governance proposals should be specific, actionable, and well reasoned, but full details of implementation don’t need to be worked out at the time of the initial Governance proposal. For example, I think Dfinity had a reasonable use case for the 25 Long Term R&D proposals back in Dec 2021 where they were specific about the scope and asked the community to approve the plan. That seems like a reasonable use of the governance system that isn’t about code changes.