@Lorimer your power law concerns will be addressed when DFINITY implements the following items, which are on the roadmap and being worked on actively.
- implement private/public neurons
- implement periodic confirmation of neuron followees
- implement known neuron registration enhancements including registering for specific topics and deregistering known neurons that are not active
- displaying a list of registered known neurons for each topic when users are trying to decide who to follow for a specific topic in the NNS dApp
- displaying warnings in the NNS dApp regarding topics that are not included in the All Topics catch all category
- displaying warning in the NNS dApp when people have neurons that are eligible to vote, but are not actually receiving rewards for voting on specific proposal topics for whatever reason (Followees not configured, Followees not doing their job, neuron owner not voting manually, etc)
- There may be value in considering removing topics from the All Topics catch all when there are known neurons that have registered for that topic. I haven’t seen this proposed anywhere, but it would make sense as a mechanism to encourage people to select known neurons for topics that have the potential to be decentralized because people and organizations have stepped up to present themselves as a valid option. I’m sure DFINITY will register for each topic individually, so they can still always choose to follow DFINITY.
- offering NNS sourced incentives for people and organizations to perform the work of proposal reviews
These items above still don’t address the concern that has been expressed previously about why neuron owners would choose to follow someone other than the dev team, which in the case of the NNS is DFINITY. Regardless, I feel very confident in saying that nobody in the ICP ecosystem believes more strongly in decentralization principles than folks that work at DFINITY. I believe that their goal is to carefully and intentionally move the ICP community toward decentralized governance on the NNS as well as SNS projects. Decentralization is a spectrum that will follow a transition measured in years and we are already on a trajectory that advances decentralization. DFINITY has enabled this to occur with the changes that they have made since genesis and all signs point to that continuing.
I was a strong advocate for offering grants to many people and organizations with the Grants for Voting Neurons initiative. The program is currently underfunded and I believe everyone who put themselves forward for the role should have been given the opportunity. However, that is not what was scoped and it is not going to prevent CodeGov from continuing to do our part to help advance decentralization as well. We have a team that I believe is well suited for all the grants we received and we have spent a year and a half demonstrating the capacity for these technical reviews. Our application was put before the NNS on every grant that was offered and we competed with all the other applicants on equal footing and based on the current state of decentralized NNS governance. It’s not perfect, but it did move NNS governance decentralization forward. More changes are planned including those listed above that will continue to advance decentralization.
So if your goal behind changing the core principals of NNS and SNS governance with this Manage_SNS_Controlled_Neuron method is to give other neurons a better chance to become known and recognized as credible Followees, then I believe that will already be achieved with these ideas that have already been discussed extensively in other threads and are already on the DFINITY roadmap. I do not believe any individual neuron should be given preferential treatment by being controlled by the entire DAO that it is meant to serve. All neurons that are contributing to the governance of the DAO should be controlled by individuals or smaller groups of individuals within the DAO.