Since I posted my yield decay suggestion, I’ve been reading the community’s responses to gauge what problem we’re trying to solve. Here are some more thoughts re: voting participation and incentives.
I found source material for the Zenon delegation/voting system here. There isn’t much documentation for this topic.
[Pillars] also represent the backbone of the network, having a governance role by voting community initiatives, Vested Pillars or the projects raising funds through Accelerator-Z.
They can be seen as governors that have greatly contributed to the network and are the best to represent its delegators’ interests.
The community is meant to ‘elect’ thirty pillars that represent the best interests of the ecosystem. We vote with our funds and in return, the pillars enjoy greater yields.
Part of the pillars’ responsibilities is to vote on community initiatives. It is their duty and as participants of the ecosystem, we have a fiduciary incentive (or obligation?) to elect those who represent us.
If a pillar doesn’t want to interact with the community, the least they can do is vote on the proposals.
I was going to propose an alternate perspective, such as positive reinforcement.
Voting incentives can be positive or negative.
Negative: Yield decay increases with each missed vote
Positive: Yield growth increases with each cast vote
+/-: Total yield is impacted by community delegation
These are incentives to actually participate in the democratic process. Without these, we’d have a much harder time encouraging those in power to consider change.
“…But what about the proposal spam?”
Obviously, the proposal mechanism isn’t expensive to abuse. We’ve considered a few mitigation strategies to combat the spam but I may have a solution.
Similar to voting incentives, there are spam disincentives.
A negative disincentive could be burning the 1ZNN cost to submit a proposal. This applies a negative consequence on all who participate in the proposal submission process, also hurting those who are genuinely trying to help the project.
A positive disincentive could be locking the 1ZNN fee until it is deemed a valid/official proposal.
Rewarding those who do well is positive reinforcement.
“…But what’s a valid/official proposal?”
Proposals must reach a floor of positive votes before they can be deemed official. Once they’ve achieved this status, they are subject to voting incentive strategies. Only official proposals are visible to all pillars in the Syrius wallet; the unofficial ones can be seen if a setting is toggled in the wallet.
Unofficial proposals must garner enough support via social mechanisms in order to achieve the floor required to become official.
We don’t want to waste anyone’s time with trying to decipher a legitimate proposal from spam. Spam in the future could appear more sophisticated, similar to phishing techniques.
If there is something we can do to simplify the voting process and lower the time/mental burden on pillars, I think we should try.