Increasing Pillar Participation

Zenon ╰ Network
1

The discussions around funding for the bridge have spurred a lot of discussion in the main chat. 2 things come to mind here…

  1. There are pillar operators with valuable input and we are not hearing from them.
  2. At any given point a small number of pillar operators could vote to approve or reject the proposal rendering the discussions “useless”

So, how do we get more pillar participation?

2

One idea - maybe it is time we revisit our minimum approval threshold for AZ.

3

Do you think some pillars are active but they choose to stay silent? This last upgrade went pretty well. So guys are watching.

What if we incentivize or penalize voting. Maybe that could be a topic for the governance module.

4

We’re in crypto with a large amount of people embrassing capitalism as the only way of life. Either I agree or not with that doesn’t matter, it is how it is.

Here’s a few thoughts:

  1. Give a small amount of rewards per vote and you’ll see participation increasing by a lot. Will this be useful participation as discussion and educated vote ? Probably not. For this to happen we’d need Zenon to play a major role in the whole crypto ecosystem.

  2. Another idea would be to weight the vote VS participation. Right now one pillar = one vote but this could be changed. By default let’s say one pillar = one vote but if you voted let’s say 20 times, then your next vote could get a - for exemple - 5% bonus. Your pillar now count 1.05 vote. Keep voting and your voting power increases. This could be a good incentive to keep people active. The con is that it doesn’t incentive discussion toward proposals. The obvious pro is that it doesn’t cost anything as you don’t have to “pay” pillars for their vote.

  3. Following the same logic of rewarding activity, the rewards (!) per Pillar from the momentums produced could be weighted VS their voting activity : we need active actors, not silent and absent people. This could directly increase the attention Pillars owners give to proposals, which could increase their time invested in discussion and so on.

3 Likes
6

Perhaps a variation of this is a set of criteria that determines top 30 status, voting being one of those criteria. Like you said votes without thought are useless so only addresses activity not value + would have to be built but would be nice to have something other than weight alone determine rank IMO.

Of course another issue here is once quorum is reached voting is no longer possible. W/ the low number of votes required it may appear someone has low participation but in reality they may have been thinking their vote through while a small number of other pillars pushed the vote through.

7

It seems like there’s more than 1 type of participation:

  1. pillars engaging with the community
  2. pillars voting on AZ projects/phases

Ideally we’d want to increase both types of participation.

  1. pillars engaging with the community

The only way for community members to reward those pillars is to change their delegations, except most delegators choose a pillar based on APR, so I’m not sure if that’s going to change.

Also, the pillars are likely watching the conversations and some of them might even be engaging without disclosing that they’re a pillar.

  1. pillars voting on AZ projects/phases

Based on observations, it would seem like the majority of projects get quorum before the 2 weeks deadline, so there doesn’t seem to be a lack of votes coming from pillars.

Also, we can’t really know if more pillars would vote, because the voting ends once the quorum is reached.

So even if all pillars would be willing to vote, they might not get the chance to do so, as detailed here:
https://forum2.zenon.org/t/flawed-az-phase-voting/1449