If a crypto anarchist and a boring green-center-left reform believer agree, there has to be something to it.
kieransimkin:
One of the issues we have, and have had with Catalyst, is that proposals are often too technical for the every-day user to really understand, so they don’t know what they’re voting for (as evidenced by Turbo Daedalus).
My proposal for solving this in a permissionless way was:
Fix Proposal: Combinable Public Recommendations
Instead of PAs, vPAs, and dReps there should be public recommendations on how to vote by a diverse range of people.
They should state their general principles. – “I’m going to vote for projects with a proven track record of providing essential technology for the ecosystem.”, “I’m going to assess the proposals of newcomers very carefully.”, “I don’t believe that Metaverse/NFTs/SSI are a promising use case and am going to vote against them.”, “I will put an emphasis on ecological sustainability.”, …
And they should give a whole slate of votes also considering the comparison between proposals, optionally with rationales for single proposals. – “This does not seem auditable.”, “We cannot continue without this.”, “I’ve looked at the proposers in detail and don’t think they can do it.”, “This seems to be one of the killer applications for Cardano and the team already showed they can deliver.”, “This would be nice, but it requests too much money and the other proposals in the challenge are more important.”, …
A voter could then choose multiple of these recommenders who they think are trustworthy and the voting app would give them options to automatically vote if they agree, show the proposals where they disagree, override on single proposals where the voter has a strong opinion themselves, …
Having them public will hopefully also spark much more discussion before the vote instead of the host of “I had no idea! Why didn’t anybody tell me beforehand?” we have now. Additionally, if a recommender followed by a significant share of the voters is publishing something that is not okay in the view of the public, it can be called out, discussed, and hopefully corrected before the recommendation becomes relevant in the voting phase.
Of course, there is ample source for potential conflicts here, but better have them publicly before the vote than half-publicly in assessment QA and only really publicly after the vote when it is too late.
If we think that a monetary incentive – like for PAs now – is necessary, it could be given by letting the voters distribute their voting power among the recommenders they found particularly helpful and distribute the recommendation rewards according to the cumulative voting power shares.
That was originally posted in Everything that's wrong with Catalyst regarding Catalyst. But I think, it could also work for Cardano governance if the votes get more complicated than a couple of yes/no decisions.
The Catalyst dRep concept seems even more broken to me. As far as I understood it, the dReps are not even encouraged to vote on all proposals, which then requires for me to decide which “challenge” or subset of proposals I find important, because my voting power would only be used for that, but not for the rest. (If the dReps even publish in that detail what they intend to do. And if they then even do what they said that they intended to.)
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