New pollen proposal for period starting Nov 30

🌿 Proposals
#1

Pollen Distribution period 3

proposal link: https://1hive.org/#/proposal/82

Proposal Information

This is a follow up to fund the pollen swarm again, you can find the previous post outlining the pollen experiment here: New pollen proposal for period starting Oct 23

The pollen distributions have now been running for about 11 weeks. There have been ups and downs, at times things seemed like they were on fire with people abusing the system, and recently things have been a lot quieter. Funding for pollen has finally run out and we need to request more from the community if we want to maintain this reward system.

There has been some discussion over the past few days in the pollen swarm channel on discord for how we should do pollen distributions in the future, and also a straw poll to vote on different options. There appears to be good consensus among the members there that we should start pegging the weekly rewards to a usd value rather than a fixed HNY value. To avoid potential hyperinflationary scenarios where HNY price drops we want to set a cap for the maximum amount of HNY that can be distributed per week.

pollen-straw-poll-nov-23
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According to the straw poll done in the pollen swarm channel, the overwhelming majority of members engaged with governance and decision process for pollen are happy with a usd peg for $15k / week, not exceeding 50 HNY per week. This is therefore the proposal we want to create after receiving some community feedback here. We are also waiting for the farm proposal to pass so as not to split conviction voting further. The $15k peg can be changed in the future, but this will require a conscious decision on the part of the DAO, rather than being dependent only only HNY price action.

The requested amount is for 5 weeks, roughly aligning the end of funding with the new year. The requested amount for the proposal then will be for 250 HNY, since this is the maximum distribution for the period, and how much would be distributed at current prices. Each week the distribution amount will be determined based on the HNY price on Monday at 12 pm EST, rounded to the nearest 1 HNY. If the full amount is not distributed over the 5 week period, the remaining quantity will roll over and be used for future pollen distributions.

What duration should this proposal have?

The proposal will have a duration of 5 weeks to approximately align the next proposal with the new year.

Team Information (For Funding Proposals)

Funding will go directly to the pollen multisig for distributions. The multisig is currently controlled by @befitsandpiper, @lkngtn, @luigy, @sem, @Rayne, @Jasper, @crisog

Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:
This proposal is an extension of previous work the above members have been managing

Funding Information (For Funding Proposals)
250 HNY

Ethereum address where funds shall be transferred:
0x94726a37ee00308dbead364eb3d2e10d366949f4 (pollen multisg agent address)

More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:
all distributions will be done through the Aragon pollen multisig, and will be voted on by the above mentioned memebers, or any other members later added to the multisig.

Polls for informational purposes only:

You can vote for multiple options, please vote for all options that are reasonable to you.

Should we peg distributions to a usd value?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Abstain

0 voters

What should the usd peg for the weekly distribution be?

  • Less than $15k
  • $15k
  • $20k
  • $25k
  • More than $25k
  • No peg
  • Abstain

0 voters

What is the maximum HNY value that should be distributed per week?

  • No HNY, cancel pollen
  • Less than 30 HNY
  • 30 HNY
  • 33 HNY
  • 40 HNY
  • 50 HNY
  • More than 50 HNY
  • No cap, usd peg only
  • Abstain

0 voters

How many weeks should this proposal be for?

  • 2 weeks
  • 3 weeks
  • 5 weeks
  • Abstain

0 voters

13 Likes
1Hive Weekly Recap CW 52 (28 Dec - 4 Jan)
#2

Looking good, I totally support this proposal!

3 Likes
#3

I have always been an advocate of never pegging HNY distribution within the community to fiat, but rather to what percentage it translates to of the honeypot, the only exception being when we need to interact with outside of the 1Hive ecosystem at which point it becomes inevitable to deal based on HNY’s fiat value.

This is because not only does it show that we don’t really believe that HNY is money and that we are deceiving ourselves when we say we are creating a circular economy powered by this money, when in reality we are using fiat and HNY is just a means of accounting for fiat. But also, not pegging to fiat reinforces the philosophy that HNY is money that alone accords a certain value to the HNY coin, plus it makes our controlling of HNY distribution less complicated and makes for a better administration over the HNY economy. Bitcoin’s value isn’t derived from its worth in fiat, it is derived from its independent stance as money itself, not controlled by anyone or organisation and operates according to already defined software algorithms that can’t be changed.

Anyway i’m just one individual and this is my take, i’won’t have any choice but to go along with whatever the community wants regarding this.

4 Likes
#4

I will like to remind all of us that the Pollen DAO which currently is comprised of only a few people does not have the final say over what the pollen budget which affects the entire community should be, it can only propose/recommend, which i believe is what it is doing with this post. It also with consideration to input from other community members have the power to decide how pollen is structured and distributed(weights, cred minting, what channels mints cred, etc that sought of stuff).

I am not in support of this budget and think it should be increased. I suggest 20k and i have my reasons.

#5

1Hive cannot be successful if the community does not grow. It does not matter what we do, without people coming over contributing and holding HNY we won’t succeed. We should stop taking people that come here and invest their time trying to participate and earn HNY for granted.
People only come to where they can get value and will invest their time to whatever brings them the most value. People join 1Hive because of what they can get. We have to keep it attractive and encourage new people to keep coming if we want to keep growing to transform from the tiny community that we are now to become a large community which is vital for our success.
I believe that people actively participating and contributing to the DAO should be the most incentivized because they are the life of the DAO, especially at this stage that we are still actively looking to grow. If we can give away over 600 HNY to people for doing absolutely nothing but claiming HNY every 48 hours, why cant we distribute 69 HNY weekly to the whole 1Hive community members to encourage and motivate them to continue to be active, plus lure new people to join because of the value they’ll get IF THEY CONTRIBUTE. Who else to distribute HNY to if not active community members that bring value to the DAO.

Pollen rewards sadly has instead been dwindling and with that less active interactions and contribution. Our social interaction platforms especially discord and discourse have seen a sharp decline in activity, its as if people left or just no longer feel its worth it to continue to invest their time, the only people that steadily contribute and interact are the same few familiar bees, a sharp contrast from a few weeks ago when pollen rewards was much more valuable(i agree it was a tad bit much) and people were highly motivated to join and contribute, causing an influx of people both good and bad actors, which forced us to innovate, especially in the area of moderation as a result of the teeming population which is a good thing.

It seems we are placing priority on swarm DAOs rather than the people that the swarm DAOs exists for because i don’t understand why a swarm DAOs HNY budget is increased 3X to reflect the current fiat value while the community pollen budget is rather slashed or restricted despite growth. There are bees that only earn via pollen and they should be motivated to continue contributing. 10 swarm DAO members alone already earn the equivalent of 12% of this proposed HNY budget supposed to be for the entire community.

#6

I agree with you in your desire for increasing the pollen budget. The $15k usd peg imo was a compromise to those concerned about the inflation consequences of the pollen budget. At $20k usd peg, pollen alone would create a 9% inflation pressure for the next year at current prices. I do not believe current prices will stay suppressed for that long, but it’s not a possibility we can rule out since markets are unpredictable.

As far as usd pegging goes in general, I understand your point of view, but the fact of the matter is most things are still paid for in usd. HNY is not accepted anywhere except within the DAO currently, and people need to pay bills still. Also high upward volatility can hurt us as we saw during the last rally and pollen rewards spiking tremendously. I think during price spikes increasing the budget for these things may make sense, but we should do this purposefully, not accidentally just as a product of price volatility.

But, this is just my opinion, and the wonderful thing about a DAO is we can all hold our own opinions and hopefully come to some sort of consensus or compromise.

An interesting alternative which has not been discussed but could be cool for paying people for pollen, swarms, and other distribution methods would be to peg payouts to the HNY-xdai LP token. This is an interesting hybrid between a volatile cryptocurrency and a usd pegged token, and also provides yields prior to withdrawals.

3 Likes
#7

Looks good to me (Disclosure: from the SourceCred community).

My distribution this week was ~$26 worth of HNY, which actually is eerily accurate:) I think a bit more, say $20k would be good too.

Pegging to USD is fairly standard in other DAOs, for good reason I think. The volatility in payouts can be brutal to contributors on the downside, making it hard to budget for those with less financial means.

2 Likes
#8

I can understand your concerns @Kryptobi about the new members that will only depend on pollen at the beginning, but we are now few steps behind by only depending on pollen/cred, we need to open and activate all swarms to be fully functional as a community. Many of the contributors will be included into the swarms as soon as we get organized, those that have enough cred and are showing enough potential and desire to get into a swarm will be elected.I am happy that we have skillful contributors which will help gladly and join the forces in organized and planned fashion.

Furthermore i am not sure where did you get the number that we pay 600 HNY for the faucet, i calculated it’s around 23.41 hny per week for that, while cred is 50 hny per week.

Like @befitsandpiper said, if a price of hny rises we can discuss about raising the pollen from cred and I am also agreeing with that idea. I respect your or everyone else opinion on this matter , but this is what i think is better solution for 1hive to be more productive, voting the important proposals and organizing the swarms , getting contributors into the swarms and planning various projects and campaigns.

#9

I agree with you. Pollen rewards in the last 3 weeks have dropped dramatically, especially with the reduced rewards from 50 HNY / week to 33 HNY / week, which I agree with, but the community voted for 2 weeks 50 HNY / week and to change it in short notice it’s not fair.

Another good point is that people have stopped contributing to discord/discourse because the rewards have dropped and HNY price has also gone down and not much has been done to stop this.

Moving forward, I think everyone has learned something from the mistakes of the past and 1Hive is now in a much better situation, with a more rigid pollen system with proper rules, a good strategy for farms, an improved marketing strategy and good funding for swarms.

:honeybee:

3 Likes
#10

I won’t support this proposal because I think the current payout at 33 HNY/week is fine. In my opinion pollen shouldn’t be treated as a salary but rather as a small little bonus for contributing to the community. Increasing the pollen payout, increasing fauna salary and funding the farms are all catalysts to further dropping the HNY price in the future.

At this moment we shouldn’t be increasing payouts, I think the HNY asked for in this proposal could be better spent at attracting new members and investors.

I agree that pegging HNY to usd is a good idea to avoid inflation, however I think the baseline should stay at 33 HNY/week

1 Like
#11

There is no mass distribution of HNY that will not register some value of inflation, The only way to achieve zero inflation is to not distribute. Inflation is healthy as long as it is controlled and kept within a certain threshold. I don’t know how the 9% was arrived at but i say its pretty decent if it’ll get people excited to want to join so that they can earn a decent amount of HNY. This puts HNY in the hands of more people, thats how we make HNY valuable, thats how we grow.

Yes i understand that most things are paid for in USD, that is why i said we have to consider usd value if it has to do with something outside of the ecosystem. Contributions within the ecosystem is basically time and skills, i don’t think any genuine contributor working for the success of 1Hive would have any problem accepting a decent percentage of the honeypot as compensation for effort regardless of its worth in fiat.

1 Like
#12

Nobody is treating pollen as a salary, the way it works makes it grossly inefficient to be used as an ideal means for reward for value talk more of salary. I am talking about making it more rewarding to motivate and encourage members while making it hard for outsiders to resist joining and contributing to earn.
People won’t come if they won’t get anything or show commitment if they see they get close to nothing. Don’t you think that when people earn decent amount of HNY just for being active, showing up everyday investing their time and contributing to the community, won’t it make lots of other people want to join? Its unlikely Genuine contributors will dump anyway.
I am not saying we have to overpay but we have to encourage and motivate bees and new people to continue to invest their time. I see some active bees who spend all their energy interacting sharing ideas, helping newbies, promoting the project anyway they can and when the list for pollen is out their earnings isn’t encouraging. These bees do not receive compensation any other way. They might not speak out but i don’t think they are happy. no harm in bumping it up a bit.

#13

Thanks @solarmkd. I still think community should come first and swarm DAOs second. The total HNY mapped out for faucet is actually 644 HNY. about 513 HNY has already been distributed and about 130 HNY is currently available.

1 Like
#14

I agree. I also won’t be supporting this proposal. If HNY was more valuable and 15k a week equated to removing less of the common pool I believe it could be justified. 50 HNY a week ~ 200 HNY a month, is too much in my opinion. The Celeste Swarm just requested 120 HNY for roughly 2 months of work finalising a core piece of infrastructure which I believe is significantly higher leverage than this. (Note the total cost for Celeste including previous work is likely ~250 HNY at the current rate)

Also @Kryptobi I think comparing this to the faucet at this stage is irrelevant as the faucet is not currently being funded, it was a great experiment but we’ve learnt from it and due to the little income it is likely making us now, it’s unlikely to get funded again anytime soon.

Sourcecred has also been an excellent and valuable experiment, it’s encouraged a huge number of users to get involved, it was a great method for bootstrapping this community. However, I don’t believe the return it will get us at this stage is comparable to that which we got at the start, for the same amount of HNY (15k ~ 50HNY). I’m also yet to be convinced that the exploits that previously encouraged toxic discussion are fixed. I think it will take time and careful observation to ensure they have been.

I believe most funds should be put towards building and refining core infrastructure, Celeste, Gardens, Luna (Issuance), Documentation (a wiki or whatever), Buzz and maybe some others I’m overlooking, and once that’s more established we can consider increasing pollen rewards to fund the general community in order to encourage engagement.

Documentation/a wiki is particularly important because a good wiki would mitigate the need for people to help out as much in Discord and therefore reduce the reward required by helpers through sourced (sorry @fauna).

I’m also unsure if weekly total payouts should be valued in $. As has been reiterated above, sourcecred should not be used and therefore relied upon as a form of income that will pay bills. And valuing weekly payouts in $ reduces the incentive to encourage pollen members to add value, as there’s less return if the price increases during a funding period. However, when using HNY valued payments I can see that if the HNY price increases too much it encourages toxic engagement.

To mitigate this, and considering my general objection to the current proposal above, I propose a weekly distribution of 30 HNY if 30 HNY is worth less than $20k, or the HNY value of $20k, if 30 HNY is worth more than $20k.

4 Likes
#15

Do other people agree with willjgriff’s changes? The lesser of 30 HNY or $20k worth of HNY?

#16

Speaking on the exploits: I think the highest impact change we made for fixing many of these issues was a soft permissioning for cred minting on discord by basing minting on cred scores themselves. Discord was the primary site of abuse, and this prevented almost all of the problems we were seeing, although much of the abuse was very naive.

We also have a moderation system now, where we can disable pollen accounts of suspect members. There have been continuous improvements even during this quiet period, like updating to the “recent” policy, and cred budgeting which will be live next week.

It’s definitely reasonable that pollen could be abused again, but I think it’s unlikely to be as naive and widespread. We have more well defined social norms around the system, ways to enforce those norms, and a less abusable algorithm overall.

5 Likes
#17

We need some consensus on what this proposal will be. I have to create it tonight so that there is not interruption in pollen distributions next week. Atm, while @willjgriff and @Kryptobi have voiced concerns most other members were behind the original $15k up to 50 HNY idea. That said, having no seeds behind this proposal will make it difficult to pass in the timeframe.

Perhaps $20k up 40 HNY / week would be a reasonable compromise? My impression is that most people picked $15k as the initial target bc it seemed more conservative than $20k. But if the large HNY value is the concern, maybe this could achieve the goals of those who want increased distributions and those who are worried about inflation/ the high HNY cost of pollen.

@lkngtn do you have an opinion on this proposal?

#18

It still does not change the fact that HNY was spent to fund it.

You are approaching this with the mindset that people are taking pollen as
some sought of income, i’m approaching it from the angle that pollen is a way to lure people over and encourage those already here to continue to invest their time.
120 HNY split among 6 people for 7hrs/day of commitment at max 20 days is wayyyy more than 200 HNY split among the entire community for 30 days of engagement.
200 HNY is not as much as you are making it seem, that’s exactly what has been distributed for as long as i can remember. it is about 2.5% of the pot.
Not to downplay celeste or anything but celeste alone won’t grow the community, it won’t make new people join us, pollen can. if we do not incentivize people to join the DAO and use celeste then it means nothing. Therefore I strongly disagree that celeste is of “significantly higher leverage” than pollen.

I am struggling to understand why you agree for 20k worth of distribution in the first place but still saying you don’t support it.

#19

5 weeks of pollen at this stage is not worth the whole development and deployment of a core piece of infrastructure. Especially this piece of infrastructure that can make the 1Hive DAO more secure and encourage synergies with other projects (eg prediction market platforms and likely many more). Not to mention the potential impact on price through staking.

Ultimately I favour targeted development that returns explicit results over throwing money at something that hopes to encourage community engagement. I don’t believe we will get that much more community engagement than we have now (partly because chat rooms are kind of saturated) and I don’t believe the community will disappear if the rewards are lessened for the time being. We have a great community and I think funds should be put towards building a solid foundation through the various swarms, for a few months, then we can reconsider pollen’s place.

I’d also like to add pollen still doesn’t reward people fairly eg designers and marketers platforms are not monitored.

I’m not suggesting cancelling pollen, I’m suggesting a reduced rate. @befitsandpiper I’m afraid I think the 40HNY/$20k is still too much.

I’m agreeing to 20k if the price of HNY is higher and therefore the proportion being taken from the common pool is smaller. I’m not agreeing to 20k now. I’m agreeing to 30 HNY now.

EDIT: I made an inaccurate reference about Issuance which I have removed.

2 Likes
#20

30% issuance is >650 HNY a month at current total supply