Time for a change - Governance trajectory concerns

Governance General Governance Conversation
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I have been concerned about how governance is unfolding in our ecosystem for some time now, and I feel I need to make some changes in my DRep behavior. I hope this post will spark discussion among other DReps.

I want to start by saying that I will highlight some things I dislike about our current governance in this post, but this should not be taken as meaning I find the entire governance of Cardano to be undesirable. I firmly believe that we are running one of the most interesting and meaningful governance experiments of our time, and I am very proud to be a part of it. I also have no intention of stopping from performing my function as a DRep; however, I will be making some changes, which I will try to explain.

In order to make the rest of this make sense, I will first describe what I envisioned as the average governance journey of an ADA holder looking to delegate to a DRep and what I thought/hoped our system was going to eventually look like when fully implemented.
An ADA holder wants to delegate to a DRep. They open a tool, and the tool starts by asking them how they would have voted on a selection of votes that have already been voted on. Based on that user feedback, a list of DReps that have voted in the same way is shown to the user, and the user can browse the different choices and look at the rationales for the votes before choosing a DRep. Once they have chosen a DRep, they are asked if they would like to receive a notification when their DRep casts a vote. When they receive this notification, they are reminded that they can always redelegate if they are so inclined.

Ok, so that’s a very oversimplified version of where I was hoping to see governance go. The main point that I want to stress in this scenario is that users do not put their trust in individuals but in voting records. There is no politics, no social media personalities, only verified blockchain records.

Let’s compare that to what we have in governance today in Cardano. Most DRep delegation decisions are being made based on social media. The delegation is highly centralized to a handful of large DReps. We have many DReps, but now half are inactive, only about 100 to 150 are voting with high frequency, and that number is shrinking rapidly. An argument could be made that many of the popular DReps should be the ones getting the voting power and that it’s fine because they are the ones people like, but I always come back to the same question: How is this different from our current political systems? How can we expect this to yield better outcomes if we allow it to turn into the same games of personality over substance? We have ample evidence that our current political systems pick terrible candidates as leaders. We also know that if we let this run long term, we will get consolidation into a smaller and smaller group of powerful DReps. Eventually, we will likely see two or three “parties” form, and we can say hello to every political system we currently live in. Is this the best that we can do? I don’t think that it is. We have the option to make this a true blockchain governance system if we want. Currently, it is mostly a standard political system with a blockchain veneer.

So, how much do we need to change to move away from the politics and towards a “don’t trust, verify” type of system? Not as much as you might think. This is what I plan on doing myself moving forward. I will continue to vote and perform the functions of a DRep. I will remove my DRep ID from all social media, and I will no longer identify with my DRep name in public forums. I will continue to engage in conversations about governance, but if anyone asks for my DRep ID or DRep name, I will not provide it and instead point them to this post and ask them to look for DReps with similar voting preferences to their own and delegate based on that information alone. How is that supposed to help you, might ask? It won’t if it’s just me, but if even a few DReps start acting this way, it very well might.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that we make some big change to the system to keep DRep IDs secret. That isn’t feasible or necessary. Also, many will undoubtedly choose to do old school politics and will continue to advertise themselves just like politicians. Additionally, if people want to dig a bit, they will be able to figure out who DReps are, but in the end, those cases probably won’t matter. I believe that, given a choice to move away from the current system, many will, and all it would take is a socially driven change. After that, nobody will want to know who their DRep is. Most of us are here because we want something different after all. What could be more popular than saying we can take the politics out of our system and ask people to use the blockchain record to make decisions instead?

What are the main issues that are in the way of creating this new system?

  • The voting tooling isn’t built with this system in mind, but it’s not too far off either. You can currently look up DReps and easily see a list of all the actions they voted on and read their voting rationales. This isn’t enough to make this a user-friendly experience, however, and we would need tools that are able to first probe the user to establish their voting preferences, then present like-minded DRep options. This is very much possible to get done, but would require someone to take that on.
  • In this system, nobody could engage with their DRep directly to let them know how they want them to vote, since you don’t know who your DRep is. This is perhaps counterintuitive, but I see this as a good thing. The voices of the users should be felt through their delegation choices. DReps will get feedback by either getting more or less stake. There are also system improvements that could be made here to help this be more responsive. For example, a vote could comprise two stages. In the first stage, the DRep votes, and at the end of that stage, their choice is locked in. In the second stage, which could be as short as a single epoch, the delegators have the option to move their stake before the vote is final and the voting power is counted. This would give immediate feedback to DReps regarding their decisions and perhaps also help with the “sticky” delegation issues we currently have. It is also much easier to redelegate when there are no allegiance issues because you don’t know who your DRep was anyway.
  • Those who choose to play politics will be easier for average voters to delegate to and therefore will get most of the stake. Perhaps this is true if the social change is not successful, but I would argue that it’s still very much worth trying.
  • This doesn’t solve the issue of incentivising DReps to be active, and we will continue to see declining numbers. This is true, but it also doesn’t make things worse than they currently are. Currently, the incentives to be an active DRep are mostly “skin in the game” incentives. This is to say that most active DReps have large holdings or other personal interests such as projects, stake pools, etc. There’s nothing wrong with that in the short term, but long term, I see no possible way to have that system not consolidate to a handful of groups. Alternatively, with a DRep system where delegation flows towards good voting decisions and voting rationales, then even small incentives could prove to significantly increase the overall DRep numbers and diversity. This is still a problem the community needs to tackle either way.

If you’ve read this far, you hopefully have an idea of why I am concerned and what I think would help us move to a better governance system. Fairly straightforward really; create a culture that shuns politics and embraces making decisions based on information that is on chain. That should mean DReps continue to actively debate and discuss matters openly, but never try to recruit voters… because that is not the blockchain way.

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Thank you for this!

I have been very critical of the design of Cardano governance for years:
https://forum.cardano.org/t/why-i-voted-no-on-the-cip-1694-polls/125539
In a way, this is a: “Told you so!”

I like this design a lot! We can’t force every governance portal and every wallet app to implement it, but would be good if it would at least be available.

This could also be an indication that it’s not that easy, that the hubris of the crypto crowd towards traditional politics and any and all politicians has always been misplaced, that collective decision making is hard and frustrating.

Yes, I do think that we can make the voting/delegation system better. Your idea is good. I wouldn’t have introduced dReps at all in the first place. Just let ADA holders vote directly.

But, no, I don’t think societal problems can be solved by technology in general. Even if we would have a better delegation technology – according to your ideas or others – we would still have to a) convince users to actually care and take the time and b) the question would still be where they get their idea of what a good vote is. Even if they actually check if their dRep aligns with their opinion instead of just going by (social media) vibes, exactly that opinion can still be horribly biased … or at least appear as that from someone of the opposite opinion.

You are doing politics with exactly this post.

A lot of the problems of current society are because of people shunning “politics” altogether as if it was something bad rather than something necessary.

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Thanks for the reply. I agree that we can’t remove politics from our systems entirely of course. There will always be a need for it and people need to debate openly so again politics is introduced there as well. This post is an example of that as you pointed out, but I removed my DRep identity from view. Even if someone wanted to delegate to me because of this post they would not know who to delegate to. I prefer that people find me through my voting record only. The part I find objectionable is having perfectly good metrics available to have people vote based on and choosing instead to get them to pick based on a social media debate for who they will delegate to. At the very least we should not be promoting this. We already have DReps holding meetings with project teams. We will shortly have paid lobbyists. This is highly unfortunate in my view mostly because it’s avoidable.

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I came here looking for a way that I could know what the DREPs would be voting for before I delegate to them before each voting session.
To be honest, this was my second search after attempting to register myself as a DREP, but not having all of the information and links established for myself before shooting 500 ADA deposit into the hopeful custody of my password manager.
When I found time to navigate the voting procedure in the past, I did at least have the pleasure of rating project proposals based on what I was excited to see developed. The degradation from that granularity, to the current blind blob voting of entities whom one should expect to have particular interests, is staggering.
Your suggestion of having DREPs lock their votes in before an opportunity to redelegate, seems like the minimum expectation to me.

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I think that selecting DREP based on their voting similarity to my own voting decision might no be that good as it might seem. Mainly because:

  • I don’t think average user has time to properly educate himself on doing good voting decision
  • if user doesn’t have time to educate himself properly, he might be doing the “test voting” based on his uneducated or popular/populistic decision. DREPs might be intentionally voting the same way to appear to these types of users.
  • if user is willing to educate himself, he might be doing so on the resources intentionally distributed by DREPs in order to steer the user decisions to his side and here you have the “social media” aspect again

I think providing as much information as possible - social profile, voting results, achievements, … and let user decide on what seems best to him is a better way.

At the end it is about users who are voting - their motivation, level of knowledge and their time they have and are willing to invest into the voting decision.

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Thanks for the reply, it’s always nice to see that some people read these :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:.

I agree with you if you only consider the current tooling in the ecosystem. That’s why, in my example, I looked at having a tool that could ask you a simple set of questions that would take less than 5 min. For example, the tool could present you with a list of recent governance actions. The user simply selects if they are for or against. The number of actions selected is up to the user; more choices creates more refined matches. There could also be a random selection option. For example, random selection of any rep having at least 75% participation in the last 6 months. Follow that up with a quick message to the user when their rep votes with an option to change their delegation, and you have something far superior to our current system. This is quick brainstorming, there are lots of easy and fast options.

Importantly I never advocated for stopping reps from going out and advertising themselves or talking on social media etc. If people want to be politicians, they should be allowed to. I just don’t think we should promote it. I am also not advocating for any system changes. The system is fine, how we are choosing to use it is not.

One thing I am certain of is that politics will kill this ecosystem long term. It kills every ecosystem it touches long term. We have run this experiment hundreds of thousands of times in the world with the same outcome. The character traits for good leadership and the ones that make a successful politician are diametrically opposed. In our current ecosystem our “politicians” are early adopters. That’s great but it won’t last. We will move to a political class soon.

We are doing something different with blockchain so I think we could do better than the same old broken thing, particularly when it seems relatively easy to do. After all, why would blockchain enthusiasts want to vote based on anything but what they can trust on chain? Seems like out of any audience this should be an obvious choice.

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You raise valid concerns, and many of your conclusions about the current state of Governance are accurate.

That said, I have the following comments:

  • You describe a system like a “configurator” where users are asked about certain issues and, based on their responses, a list of DRep options is presented. However, we do not have this system, so hiding DReps from social media cannot be effective at the moment.

  • A ship is better steered by a captain than by the crew. People who are not involved in governance daily - besides not wanting to be involved - may also lack the knowledge, data, or facts to make an educated decision. What I mean is that uneducated users could easily make bad decisions, and using this “configurator” would amplify the current problems in our Governance. It might steer people toward the popular or “easy” choice on difficult matters (for example, “this proposal seems expensive - we don’t want it”). Governance is hard.

  • Sometimes the community or fellow DReps want to communicate with other DReps to get their opinions or to draw attention to a matter. It’s not only “lobbying”. As a DRep on my own, I always read the rationales of other DReps, especially those I deeply respect and know are highly knowledgeable in specific areas (e.g., technical). I have even shifted votes because of my exchanges with other DReps, because I didn’t have all the facts straight.

To sum up, I am also very concerned about the political side of governance, but I’m afraid I can’t see a way to fix this by changing how the system is operated. Even if we find a way, people are always very inventive in exploiting the system to their advantage; “influencer politicians” will find their way. I think it’s mostly on us (DReps and users) to steer away from those behaviors and engage in truthful governance.

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I think we have similar concerns but as a rebuttal please consider the following:

  • The tooling I am describing admittedly does not exist currently; however, it is very simple. Matching someone to a like-minded Drep should not be difficult technically or time consuming for the average delegator to initiate. Once that match is made that Drep is the “captain” as you describe. No difference from what we currently have except for the choice of Drep being made without the need for politics.

  • As far as Dreps communicating with other Dreps, and the community more generally, nothing really changes there either. As an example, I am a Drep. The only change I made is that my Drep name no longer matches my social media identity. I still participate in conversations with other Dreps, log into calls, talk to community members, rely on expert info to make better voting decisions. I identify as a Drep in all those conversations, and I tell people how I plan on voting when I feel it’s relevant. The only difference is that I don’t provide my Drep ID to anyone. I let my voting record and on chain rationale do the talking particularly for the purpose of voters delegating to me.

All that to say that it’s already possible and would just need a bit of tooling to make it viable for more people. I’m going to keep doing things this way and I hope that others who have similar concerns do the same.

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As someone who doesn’t always have the big picture view or in-depth understanding for an informed vote, I trust the Drep is informed and will vote for the greatest good of the community. Politics is failing because it doesn’t work like we’re on the same team and votes are for/against - instead of another format such as likely/unlikely to help reach some shared vision or goal.

Ensuring Dreps come from diverse experiences, have time and resources to dedicate to education and educating, and maintain a commitment and focus toward community goals would make the who less important than the how/what. As you put it:

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Come to this post late and this resonates with me. No guarantee this is a best system, but our community definitely deserves some alternatives. Would try prototyping this out

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I already am prototyping to some degree. I removed my social media/public-facing personality from my DRep credentials. I have a DRep website and a DRep name, but I no longer interface with the community with it. When I engage about topics with others, I inform people I am a DRep; I just don’t tell anyone what DRep. I find it to be a very interesting experiment at a personal level. I’m already quite familiar with what it feels like to be elected into a position and represent voters from my work unrelated to the crypto space. This approach of disconnecting personally from voters/delegators and allowing your work to speak for itself without the insertion of politics feels better to me, but that’s obviously subjective.

What I can say for sure so far is that it’s definitely viable. I don’t feel the lack of direct input from delegators has been an issue at all. I simply vote the way I think is most appropriate, and I make sure I provide a rationale for all votes. Delegators can then make up their minds.

The governance tooling is improving all the time, and it is getting easier to check rationales and voting records. I would love for someone to take on tooling that specifically matches DReps with voters based on voting preferences, and I’m sure that will come in time. That said, I am not a programmer, so that’s not in my wheelhouse for me to do personally.

I’m a small DRep, and I have not seen much movement in my total delegation, so it’s very hard to know if people are even engaging with the voting rationales or if my delegators just picked me out randomly. That would be interesting to know but would also likely change significantly if easy-to-use matching and redelegation tooling were available.

The biggest hurdle, I believe, is actually psychological. People are so accustomed to wanting politicians that they “like,” so it’s hard to change the mindset and have voters be responsive to voting records.

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You have made a good valid point, being political turns us back to normal traditional politics, it should be the best interest of our community

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Agreed with all your points and your expectations of how governance run based on merit and pov than just popularity , we have power with wrong people , they may have good intentions but not enough will or power to be strong about their own choice , they are afraid that the cardano community or their delegators will cancel them . and the governance has just gotten a lot worse from when you wrote this post , its needs a change not just social but structural too