Quadratic Voting improvement (?) - collective vote pool

Governance Governance Tools, Services & Platforms
,
1

Hi there!

Hope everyone is doing well in these exciting times. I have a question regarding quadratic voting and thought I’d post here before searching for answers elsewhere. I have tried looking for answers by reading the quadratic voting paper but have to be honest and say that it is like reading Chinese.

So, I’ve come to you smart guys to see if you may be able to tell me whether what I’m saying makes any sense.

As I understand it, using quadratic voting, it ‘costs’ more to ‘express’ a stronger position (in other words the voter is punished for expressing a stronger view). What would happen if this punishment was shared amongst the group by pooling the voting tokens (let us call them likes) together. So for example:

Rather than 16 likes buying you 4 votes, to buy 4 votes it would cost as a collective :
1 (for the first vote) + 4 (for the second vote) + 9 (for the third vote) + 16 (for the fourth vote).

Totalling 30 likes for 4 votes. To buy another vote would cost 25 likes (but this 25 likes could come from anyone). So for a new voter, they could add their likes to the pool and help to buy that 5th vote.

In this way, the voter won’t be punished for expressing a stronger view and importantly, voting for the less popular position (or in other words, taking a critical view) will always be cheaper than following the crowd (rewarding criticality - a good thing).

Does what I am saying make sense or have i missed a fundamental law of game theory or mathematics?

PS: I just linked to this post on telegram and got banned. Wasn’t aware that I couldn’t post a link to this forum. If someone could unban me that’d be great :slight_smile:

2

One is not punished for having a strong view but for having strong preference. Having a view doesn’t cost the community anything. But when it is a preference to be applied the community has to make provisions to accommodate that preference. That costs.
If the support is wide for that preference the individual doesn’t need to pay more than any one. One vote would suffice.

2 Likes
3

Ok thanks for clarifying that.

Do you have any responses regarding what I asked then if ‘preference’ was replaced with ‘view’.

4

I still think it all comes down to cost. If the majority is paying for something that it thinks doesn’t benefit them then the person who benefits from it must pay the most. If there is enough interest one doesn’t need to buy any vote. People vote for choices that benefits them, or vote against if it affects them negatively. And have strong interest to not-vote if they have no preference.
Not-voting when there is no preference is a desirable outcome.