Suggestion to improve voting structure

General DFINITY
1

Hello fellow ICP Community Members, I am relatively new to this community, and I believe in the potential of ICP. I vote to be involved, and also as I understand it, my 8 year stake won’t offer monthly rewards unless I participate.

A lot of times that I vote, I’m only partially certain that I’m voting for something positive or against something negative, however I’m not a programmer and don’t understand the majority of the technical jargon used to describe what one is either voting for or against. My suggestion would be to have a section that shows what the likely consequence would be in voting for or against the proprosal.

For example “voting for Proposal xxxxx to remove a node will result in ‘Y’ taking place, where as voting against the removal of this node will result in ‘Z’ taking place.”

I feel that this would help make more informed voting decisions, and bridge the gap between those who are here participating that do not understand all the programming langauge and those who do.

2

In general, what I think you are asking for is hard to do.

FWIW, in NNS and SNS upgrade proposals, we now hand-craft the “Features & Fixes” section. We try to write this section with the assumption that the audience has 0 programming skills. Ofc, some amount of knowledge and intelligence is required and assumed.

To take a recent example that I am intimately familiar with, if we require neurons to periodically confirm their following, does that actually cause neurons to be more active? Intuitively, it seems like it would have that effect, especially since there is a financial incentive. Indeed, more active neurons is the intended effect. However, whether that effect actually ends up taking place in real life is far from guaranteed.

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Let’s take an example from “real life”: rent control. Seems like it would reduce rents, right? Well, what if rent control causes developers to not build as much housing? Even though it is intuitive that rent control would lead to lower rent, and even though that is the intended effect, developers might decide to forego projects that they otherwise (i.e. in the absence of rent control) would have gone forward with. If so, then rents would in the long run end up higher with rent control.

Just to be clear, I am not against rent control. I am just saying that predicting “the likely consequences” of some action is generally not a slam dunk.

Ultimately, figuring out the likely results of a proposal is largely what voting consists of.

1 Like
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That’s well thought out and considered. I see too how it would be difficult implement this to the specific type of ballot issues that get proposed. I just wish I understood a little better what was at stake in the vote.

I guess I’ll just spend more time reading through and learning more as I go.

4

You could assign your neuron to follow another trustworthy neuron for only some categories while you work on learning to better understand other categories. Then you could gradually increase your understanding of proposals and effects, without losing rewards.

2 Likes
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Thansk you Katie, Im so happy you are here to manage our node provider onboarding experience. From a SNS developer I want to say how much it means to me