Using Randomly Assigned Neurons to Filter for Non-Actionable Proposals ***VOID***

I think the system you proposed is too complex, a better solution would be to not show other people’s votes on a proposal and only give reward if the reviewer’s choice turns out to be aligned with the majority after the voting period ends.

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I understand ! Thank you for your feedback ! :pray:

I have not explained myself well, and deserve to be out-adaged for that.

My question - who watches them? - really is about trust. Many of the reviewer-reviews you mention exist also because trust is required. Until now we didn’t have a trustless element on which we could rely, and so I only take these parallels with other industries so far.

The connection I am trying to make is that, now we can build on the foundations of a trustless system, why reintroduce trust (and its baggage) back into every proposal? This is exacerbated every time a new element is added, making it increasingly burdensome.

I agree that we need review, I see that reviews need trust and I think this retrospective assessment of spam is a fantastic idea. It provides a really powerful feedback loop that fits neatly within a smart-contract architecture, as reviews can be kept on their own ledger.

Your answer moves fascinating topics, and I have thought about this a lot lastly (not computationally), and I don’t have an answer yet of course. Sadly. Just as you formulate it, I was wondering above :

I agree with you : we must avoid trust. I don’t want to reintroduce trust, this is why I was promoting “greediness” for the average investor and reviewer as ‘engine’ : greediness of the reviewers of the first layer of review, and greediness TO COME of the second layer of review. But I would love a more formal and computational discrimination.

To find a incentivize to review genuinely without having to base us on the trust is a wonderful topic. Let us find this.

I have an idea for addressing this:

It still has the review concept, and deliberately doesn’t try to say how review should be done. Instead of “default hidden until reviewed”, it works on a “default visible until flagged as problematic” logic.

I can see how the ideas in this topic follow on from the ones described there; the arrival at a review stage could be done following a spam reporting mechanism that is decoupled from governance incentives.

An interesting view, well structured and explained. I think there are 2 different matters to be considered:

  1. SPAM - In a anonymous decentralised coupled with a low proposal barrier creates a nothing at stake problem, which means anyone can abuse the system for a very low cost.
    A peer reviewer system introduces complications and does not really address the fundamental issue as reviewers can also suffer the same spam levels. further more it means they must be active on daily bases, as there is no notification system in place.
    Simply increasing the price per proposal will not stop bigger ICP holders

  2. Quality of proposals - this is a matter of competence and knowledge and difficult to address when anyone can submit proposals. Nor the knowledge level of the proposer or the reviewer can be determined.

For the 2 points above I do not consider a peer review system based on these type of incentives are an effective long term solution for a governance system.

I red your interesting and rigorous proposal. But as you guessed, my concern with your well designed proposal is that eventually, you trust the fact that people can think about the network wellness before how much they get paid. Some are capable of, but the majority will think with a greedy mind (I don’t tell it pejoratively), and we can’t base us on a such passionate state of mind.

You could say “but the wellness of the network will bring big money”. I agree with you, but the majority of investors don’t or can’t think like this, because we have a lot of shorters, some retired people etc.

So i do love your proposal, but one of your statements is, indirectly, that the majority of investors is not greedy. But they are. And they want reward by reward, day by day, or at least week by week. So you understand know why I was pursuing a model where everybody was rewarded enough to not be corrupted.

If this is how it came across, then I wrote it badly. I mean no such thing. Even if the majority of people are greedy, spam reporting can still happen. The reporting does not need a majority to be successful (think whistleblowers).

Despite this being a somewhat one-dimensional view of people, I think you are pretty much correct, which is depressing. However, I would like to let the majority be greedy, while also finding a way for those who care about the network to have an impact.

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@Roman
Apologies for the late response.

I agree with @willguest, another review group layer falls prey to the same issue. As you said your self it could continue on ad-infinitum, who reviews the reviewers who review the reviewers and how do we make sure rewards we give actually reward quality reviews. I do think your initial statement holds a lot of weight however. The true end goal of any of these concepts is that proposals are reviewed accurately without the need for too many layers or mechanics, we definitely need this. soo with that in mind.

How about if during the voting phase we also just have each neuron make a comment about their decisions and after voting is done each neuron rates all other neurons comment responses. Kind of like yelp reviews but with randomization. this can also work to build a neurons trust status so they get chosen more often and Since neurons are chosen randomly it would be hard to game this system. I could see that solving your infinite review dilemma. So within the same group, we are now not only reviewing the proposal for accuracy but at the end we review each neurons decisions for accuracy by using comments as an identifier for bots or individuals who are not really participating. The get pushed down the totem pole and the good neurons go up the totem pole. You dont know who is who so you wont go out of your way to help a stranger if they wont help you. social dynamics for the win.

@Zane I also really like the blind voting idea, like that is a really good idea. Its so simple yet so powerful.

now combine everything we have so far and holy shit this is very complicated but I have no doubt it will stop spam proposals or at the very least heavily mitigate them lol.

I’ll admit that I’m confused at this point what is the actual proposal. Do you plan to re-write it so the full scope can be understood in one post? My recommendation is that you edit the first post to reflect the latest and greatest version of the proposal so it is the first thing that people see. It’s a good idea to also make a new comment that you have made an edit to the proposal. My recommendation is to revise the proposal at least a few days before you plan to submit to the NNS so people know exactly what you plan to submit.

haha. There are just to many good ideas now, my short attention span kicks in and I really don’t want to plagiarize either by cherry picking all the good stuff. Yeah, Ill have to revise with a final version.

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We don’t have a regressus, thanks to the core of my solution : rewards at least equal to the average daily voting rewards.

The core of my solution : reward much better the reviewers of the first layer, by taking at least the average daily voting rewards as index. So the first layer is already incentivized to vote genuinely.

Once this main part is done, the addition of the second layer also composed mainly of average investors waiting for their own opportunity to join the first layer and get themselves such higher rewards. The feedback is less to make a review of EACH reviewer of the first layer, because statistically the average investors will vote the same thing, the second layer is more to spot a light on the rare reviewers who will have reviewed differently than the average investors, just for better rewards, to prevent them to keep being eligible and eventually join a pool of first layer reviewers where they would be in majority.

The key of my solution is the average. Even without a second layer of reviewer. The second layer is just to clean the whole process eventually. It allows to make little by little disappear those who would prefer the spam to the genuine vote, because they have a huge amount of ICP and préfère to be insincere.

So don’t forget the main part that : better rewards, since the beginning : more rewards for the reviewers.

But nevermind, focus on your proposal, thanks for having considered my point anyway :pray:!

I will write my own, later, because mine allows to spot the insincere people : those who won’t be incentivized enough with an average higher reward and will choose to let pass spam.

In your solution, I don’t see why anybody would not let pass spam, especially the insincere whale. I see why in mine : the average investor won’t take the risk to be insincere and don’t have any reason since he is enough « paid » to make a sincere review, and the not enough incentivized ones who will prefer that the spam pass will be « disabled » by average ones.

Again, the key is the higher retribution, enough to make the average of investors incorruptible. I don’t see such a mechanism in your solution : no reason to make average investor incorruptible, in mine : he wants to keep earning such rewards so he won’t take a chance of being thrown away of the future rounds. So, Immediately and mediately, it is not this interest to be insincere. In yours, he can be insincere without taking any risk. In mine the risk is a bad review, and the risk does nor worth it, because the guy is already well paid.

In yours the rewards are multiplied, independently of what he votes. In mine, he get better rewards, but if he does not pay attention on what he votes, it could be his last ones for a while or forever eventually.

If i write it a day or another, I d be happy to give you a draft on my proposal when I will have written it. Until there, don’t worry about me, focus on yours.

I think that right now, we have a system that:

  • incentivizes casting votes, no matter what vote is cast
  • incentivizes the long-term value of the network – which may relate to votes cast
  • incentivizes the largest possible quantity of governance proposals
  • does not incentivize quality of proposals, unless said quality relates to long-term value (for example, will having a spammy NNS impair governance?)

I’ve heard a lot of suggestions, in addition to this thread, that seek to make participants into “better citizens” by adding complexity on top of the current incentive scheme. The whole essence of permissionless decentralization, however, is like a great flow of water seeking the most natural channel. People will go where the incentives lead them, with different stakers having different time horizons as to what they consider “the long-term value of the network”. Anything we come up with is likely to be “gamed” to again increase governance proposal count. We’re trying to build counter-incentives to offset existing incentives.

Instead, I think that when we chose to increase the weight of governance proposals in order to increase participation, we also made it lucrative to spam governance with any kind of proposal. How about we go back to equal weighting across all proposals as it was before, where everyone earned steady rewards because of the sheer volume of other proposals happening every day. In that scheme, spam has no purpose because it would require significant amounts of ICP to outweigh the exchange rate and other types of proposals.

In short: By increasing the value of voting on governance proposals we did improve participation, but more on the quantity side than the quality side. Many voters are using automatic following, so there is no quality incentive other than the difficult-to-quantify “long-term value”. For short-term stakers, 100 spam proposals a day that can be voted on automatically is a far better proposition than 1 well-crafted proposal a week. So should we struggle to reduce the size of the 100, or should we take away the value of the distinction?

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If proposal weights are removed, then how does the IC move toward governance decentralization?

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Getting rid of the proposal type weights is a great idea.

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I like the question, though maybe in another thread to avoid distracting the discussion here? Quadratic voting comes to mind, for example, or reducing the minimum dissolve period that enables voting. I think there are other things we can do to increase participation, while keeping roughly the same APY as now. Paying to incentivize voters doesn’t create a vibrant democracy, rather a venal one.

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I could not agree more with you, with each point you made.

I have always wanted to go back to the previous system, with an equal weight for all proposals for the same reasons.

And I am afraid that we are acting like apprentice sorcerers by looking for solutions — to a problem we created ourselves in the first place — which will bring more and more problems. We are not far from creating bigger problems to solve the problems we generated. I see all of them as a « remède qui sera pire que le mal » (« a cure which will be worse than the disease »). I even feel it as having turned into a frenzy of solution proposals.

This is why I have always planned to and will vote « no » to all these proposals currently deliberated. We should be very more cautious : I see the initial settings decided by Dfinity as a Constitution, and in my opinion, we are very too confortable with its changing. We should add things when needed, rather than removing or changing those which were existing at the beginning. They have been designed by Dfinity for a precise purpose.

We should firstly try to go back to the previous rewarding system, everybody would see that things would go back to the normal.

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I also agree and would support a proposal for resetting to previous settings. equalized proposal rewards go in hand with decentralization. The internet computer feels very finely tuned and we need to be very care full when enacting changes that effect its technosphere.

However, even reverting to the initial point of error does not fully remove the spam dilemma. Spamming can still be a valid attack and needs to be eventually solved. it less desensitized now but it can be used to clog the NNS or for other malicious reasons not yet devised.

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Fair enough. I’d like to point you to another current Governance topic where this issue is highly relevant. Perhaps that is a good place to continue the discussion. I would love to hear more of your thoughts.

I think the reward re-distribution should be eliminated
Just divide the “reward pie” by the amount of existing neurons, every neuron that participates in voting gets it “slice”, then the non-voting neuron don’t get any reward instead their reward gets discarded some how, instead of re-distributing it amongst the voting neuron. This way the incentive of creating spam proposal to take advantage of the reward re-distribution goes away.
Then the periodic reset of neuron followees can also be implement every 6 months, this way if you don’t participate in voting you don’t get rewards.

This can be implemented for all proposals or for the Governance proposals only