Reward More/Less For Governance-Related Action/Inaction?

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I've written yesterday about the one-year expiration time for governance-related votes. We are now 2 days away from the time it went into effect, a year ago (on June 30th, 2021).

A conversation I had in the comments section with @milaan gave me the idea for this post. That and some information shared by the LeoFinance team regarding the governance votes on the PolyCub platform. From there we find that:

Only about 20% of users have actually participated in the xPOLYCUB Yield Governance voting.

Now, in PolyCub's case, there are circumstances:

  • it doesn't have a governance UI yet
  • users only have a direct voting option (no proxy, like on Hive)

But still, 20% means 4 in 5 users didn't vote yet for governance.

Now, I don't have the numbers for Hive, but would be very useful for comparison. Hive must be doing better having both governance interfaces and the possibility to set proxies.

What however I feel is missing in both cases is the lack of desire to get involved, in many cases because the vote impact is too little and doesn't justify the effort in the user's eyes. Either that or simply people forget and they need to be reminded to update their votes.

You can't do much about people who forget, other than remind them, at the interface level, that they haven't changed their votes in a while. Or maybe if they vote for an inactive witness.

But what is an option is to either reward additionally or reduce rewards if people vote/don't vote for governance for a certain period of time.

vote-g4ab17b5af_1280.jpg
Source

Of the two options, I'm in favor of rewarding additionally those who do their job, rather than punishing those who don't. After all, not voting can be a choice. And I don't believe it should be punished.

But rewarding those who do take action, that's something to consider, maybe. Although, if we are talking about the same source for the rewards - and normally we would - giving more to some users automatically means giving less to others.

One idea is that the interest on HP is paid only to those exerting their governance votes during a certain period of time (last 3 months?). Since not everyone votes on governance actions regularly, the HP interest for those who do should be higher as well. While those who don't, will not receive any interest for their HIVE Power.

Another idea is to (partially?) reroute HIVE from some of the sources where it normally gets burned right now to those voting on governance regularly. Here are some of these sources:

  • creating new accounts
  • HIVE -> HBD conversion fee
  • ?

There are other sources of burned HIVE, like converting HIVE -> HBD or direct burning by sending to @null, but in these cases, HIVE needs to stay "burned". Burned author rewards and setting @null as a beneficiary is another way of burning directly, and it implies the express desire of the author to burn those tokens.

@taskmaster4450 proposed in some of his posts about improving HBD the introduction of very small transaction fees on the internal market, for example. Maybe other fees I don't remember right now. He thought they can be used to boost HP holders' rewards.

An iteration of that idea would be that such fees would be used to pay only users who are active in their governance role (including regular voters).

Please share your opinion. How do you think participation
in governance can be improved? Will tweaking rewards work? Should that be the incentive or the desire should come from within?



22 comments
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To support your work, I also upvoted your post!

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I am glad that finally, we are talking about it. Not just in Hive, on the whole, crypto has never been marketed as a governance token. Lack of education on crypto, disinformation or stressing too much on making 4x, 5x, etc. have somehow obliterated crypto as a governance token.

The political and economic order in crypto will also become asymmetric, and the governence will reduce to the circulation of elites/capitalists. But that will happen not because of any concerted effort by the bourgeoise, rather because of ignorance of the proletariat.

Although it will be unjust to impose sanctions on those sections that do not partake in governance, introducing an extrinsic motivation in the form of certain rewards, as highlighted by you is always a welcoming step. I hope the witnesses will take this into account when they will deliberate on this dimension.

Furthermore, the governance should be guided by the active community, just having a dormant account does not add much value to the dynamics of a decentralized social media. Social media, by definition, commands socializing, making a robust engagement, and building a strong social network. Therefore an active community should be given more weightage when we talk about political decentralization. In social media, it is the proletariat(the working class, those who regularly engage) produces value on a daily basis.

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HIVE only has value because people are willing to buy it. Treating investors who don't want to blog or comment like second class citizens is a non-starter.

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HIVE only has value because people are willing to buy it

That is even true for BTC and many other coins.

Treating investors who don't want to blog or comment like second class citizens is a non-starter.

No, the intention was not to disenfranchise them, but rather to add an extra reward to those who partake in governance, to encourage political decentralization. The investor's rights will remain intact regardless of whether they vote or not.

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I don't see this as a clash of classes. I disagree that tokens haven't been marketed as governance tokens. The problem is they haven't been used in that capacity by many of the participants.

As for dormant accounts, we've talked before that they are handled by the expiration time on older than 1-year votes. We can argue whether or not 1 year is the right time frame, but that was chosen, and it was talked about at the time. If reality proves it too long, it will be revised.

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I am totally against any financial incentives in "voting". I don't want to go down the path of treating voting as a source of side income.

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Only looking for a way to improve participation in governance. Do you have better ideas?

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(Edited)

I think we should stay with the status quo. The unintended consequences are VERY HIGH. I think it's almost certain that someone would offer an automated service for people too lazy to do the voting themselves. Knowing human nature, I think many people would probably sign up for it too.

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(Edited)

Hmm, yeah... That can happen. Maybe extra rewards wouldn't be a good idea in this case.

I'd still love to see some stats to see how we stand at Hive level, both on direct governance participation and on proxies set. Both the number of accounts and stake totals. And how long from the last governance operation. Maybe @dalz can do some SQL magic. :)

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I'm not in favour of bringing financial incentives/disincentives into the equation.

Some accounts may choose not to vote as a deliberate policy. For example, the accounts in the spinvest family don't vote, the rationale being that they are community accounts, so any vote should be the community's decision and that brings in a whole other layer of work for the operators, and to be honest, I don't think there would be much response. The spinvest HP was brought into action during the Justin Sun takeover, but otherwise is not used. At the same time, these are active accounts, providing facilities and benefits to Hive account holders - why should they be penalised for what is a policy decision?

Helping people to understand about governance is part of the educational aspect of HIVE, the same way as helping people to understand about the opportunities for organising alternative economies, the potential that Hive has for doing new things that weren't possible before blockchain technology, and as part of that, helping accounts to understand that they are part-owners in the platform, they literally have a stake in it 🙂.

Articles like yours are great for raising awareness, getting discussion going, helping people to understand ... I believe that's the way forward 🙂.

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Thanks for your comment!

I wasn't familiar with the policy spinvest family of projects has on governance actions. To be honest, I agree with it, now that I know it. Unless there is a risk for the community, in switch case you say they activated to do their part.

This can also be gamified. A notification like... "it's time to update your witness/proposal votes. You haven't done it in a while." Maybe earn badges like on @hivebuzz?

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Yes, a @hivebuzz alert and badge might be a way to go ... but I think the notification you got also worked? 😁
!CTP

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There is a notification on PeakD if your governance votes are about to expire. But 1 year is a pretty long time not to make any changes.

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There may not be any reason to make any changes.

I dropped an inactive witness recently but that's the first change I've made in maybe two years. The last time was when we got a new UK witness.

I also have a policy on who I vote for:

  • witnesses I've met, know and trust.
  • UK witnesses - to support the infrastructure and build the UK community.
  • some other compelling reason - one case this applies to was in response to a campaign by another (UK) account to get some recognition for a witness who does a lot of work for Hive but was under-rewarded. So I guess something like a recommendation.

I don't use all my witness votes ... seems a bit silly to vote for random people you don't know anything about.

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I tend to agree that having 30 witness votes per account is overdoing it.

About witnesses that I vote for, I vote for many witnesses outside of top 20, to support them to better decentralize Hive. Although many witnesses use the infrastructure of Privex, so it's a bonus if they have their own servers or rent them from a different part of the world.

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Interesting discussion. I dont know enough yet to form an opinion. But its good to discuss things.

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It's from discussions and often different points of view where the best solutions come.

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rewarding additionally those who do their job, rather than punishing those who don't. After all, not voting can be a choice. And I don't believe it should be punished.

I feel the same way. Rewarding is better than punishing. I think voting in the governance is a privilege which some are not using probably because they are not aware about it yet or they simply didn't want to get involved.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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voting in the governance is a privilege which some are not using probably because they are not aware about it yet

We have to be fair. It's not been talked about as much either. We talk a lot about rewards, but not much about governance.

As for not getting involved, this might stem from real life and the way politicians keep letting us down by lying as they breathe and basically being nothing more than parasites. But that's why we need to make sure this form of governance doesn't end up like that.

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Yes, not many are talking about it so it's great that you wrote about it :)

And you are right too of the kind of real life politics which we certainly do not want :) Hopefully, it won't happen here.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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I think the UI should be the first thing implemented for users. People would be more incentives with higher stakes but we can't control that. At least I don't think the rewards should be affected though.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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I also believe improving UIs for governance (including through notifications or alerts) is very important for increasing participation in governance.

Posted using LeoFinance Mobile

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