First I want to say Iâve really enjoyed having these custom discord emojis on the server, the pepe holding the honey pot especially, I use it all the time.
I also want to say that creative work is difficult to value, mechanically these emojis are derived from other work, some of them are essentially just cut outs and reformatting to fit the meme format.
I think that one of the challenges here is that there will be pretty drastic differences in the perception of value created by this work, itâs important to keep in mind that even if you personally donât see the value its possible that others have a different and perfectly legitimate perspective. This is one of the main benefits of conviction voting versus a majority rule type system, its possible for a subset of the group to find something valuable, while the majority disagrees, and that subset should still be able to pass a proposal to allocate resources based on their perception of value. Thatâs true decentralization. It may seem alarming, if a proposal is broadly unpopular but still passes, but perhaps its helpful to think of individual participants that hold honey as having an âallowanceâ that they are entitled to allocate to the things they find most valuable.
Obviously if we see proposals being made in bad faith, we need a way to dispute them and prevent them from passing (this is where celeste fits in, and Im planning on writing a longer post on that soon), but a good faith proposal that is a bit too âgenerousâ is not something that we need to outright block, as the budgeting constraints associated with the mechanism will force participants over time to be more careful with how they allocate resources. As long as we are all aligned around creating shared value together, we can disagree on the specific details about how best to do it or how much to allocate where.
That said the other issue with this proposal is one of culture.
Even though I like the emojis, and Iâm confident that eventually through negotiation we might find a reasonable amount to compensate the work, the ask for retroactive compensation in this way makes things complicated.
We want to encourage a culture where people enjoy and feel good contributing, to allow people to take initiative and add value where they think they are best suited to in an organic way. This has been happening all over the place, from people picking up and running social media accounts, creating content and guides, translating articles, and even (I assumed) creating custom emojis for the discord.
These activities are awesome, and positive sum, they create good energy and that energy flows through all sorts of things.
The pollen initiative is especially well suited to encourage this type of behavior, though it is still a very rough tool and doesnât really work well enough to capture things perfectly especially if people are actively trying to abuse the mechanism to maximize their rewards⊠but it does allow people to be rewarded for these organic contributions in a way that doesnât require pre-negotiation, proposal friction, or a hyper transactional culture where we need to put a dollar value on every positive interaction.
As we have grown, we have seen the pollen program struggle and even become a bit toxic, the future of pollen still looks really bright, but we likely need to scale it back until the mechanism can be made more robust.
That said, these contributions have atleast partially been compensated with pollen, and not just on a one-off basis, pollen distributions have been happening weekly and so a single payout may not feel adequate, its possible that over multiple distributions you may feel the compensation is fairâŠ
On top of that, I know myself and atleast one other user sent you some honey using the tip bot because we loved the emojis as a sign of gratitude (not as a payment), this was in the context of a community member doing something I thought was awesome, not someone who was already being paid to work on a specific project with a specific scopeâŠ
Anyways, sorry for the stream of conscious style rambling, but to wrap up a bit⊠I wonât be supporting this proposal not because of the amount or the quality of the work, but because I donât really like the dynamic that it represents.
I donât want to go as far as to say that any âretro activeâ compensation proposal should be avoided, or even to say that others shouldnât support this proposal⊠but I would express that I think it would be healthier in the the future if the expectations for people are set up front.
If you want to work on a project but want to ensure you get some specific compensated for it, I suggest making a proposal and define the scope and expectations up front⊠If you want to do something either way, do it, people will notice and you may get rewarded for it through pollen or tips or simply through the accumulation of social capital⊠in the future we might have a more sophisticated milestone/escrow workflow for proposals, but in the short term if there is a need for additional accountability, perhaps working with a swarm, and having the swarm serve as a escrow custodian would be a good way to go. This way everyone can be aligned, and not feel bad about not funding a proposal retroactively, even though the original terms for compensation were completely unclear.
