Thoughts on proposals and some other stuff

[eenti]

So, in these days we’ve seen a new wave of proposals in the Honeypot to finance our swarms, and while the Support Swarm proposal has been published for more than two weeks (I want to emphasize that until recently there was no other proposal that could have fragmented the available HNY to stake) and still doesn’t have enough conviction, Tulip’s proposal got enough HNY in less than 24 hrs.

And I’m not going to lie, that made me feel some kind of way.

(tulip’s proposal)

(supporter’s proposal)
[Screenshots taken July 20th 8:00 PM UTC]

But… what does that mean?

On paper we would assume that it’s the result of the community signaling its conviction towards the Support group, however, if we look at the images we see how in the Support proposal, “others” corresponds to the highest stake in honey, here I suppose that more members of the community support it, while Tulip needed just 5 members to reach enough conviction to pass.

At this point, I was thinking about the current way we distribute Honey to those who contribute and although we try to get rid of common structures and wages, we end up close to what the industry is used to pay for each position. But in our case, it doesn’t work as in the outside world, our form of payment also represents our conviction about how our society is built and this is where I think we have a problem.

I don’t mean to earn as much as a developer, but it seems certainly unfair that the difference in the wage results in a difference when voting and so we have to trust and rely on the responsibility and judgment of the developers to support proposals out of their area of expertise, especially when the support between guilds doesn’t appear to be mutual.

We all stand up for dev-related swarms’ proposals or in discussions where devs are disadvantaged, but I’ve repeatedly seen how non-related dev proposals take a fairly long time to reach conviction, conviction that due to the wages is acquired in greater volume by a group that doesn’t necessarily understand the tasks and responsibilities of other groups, I don’t expect them to understand them as I don’t understand theirs, everyone is focused on their area of knowledge.

Sometimes I think that part of that is because many believe that anyone can be a Supporter, and although that’s mostly true, it’s also a position that on the long run is pretty sacrificed. To justify supporter’s payments:

• We must keep up-to-date reading and learning stuff we oftentimes don’t even understand from all swarms (which isn’t an easy task) to give accurate information.

• We are incapable of having a schedule, what we earn is relative to the demand which of course is unpredictable. (This last point in particular for me has generated some anxiety issues, it’s not easy and healthy to have one eye 24/7 here)

• We depend on the amount of help we provide, regardless of the time and effort we put into being always ready for the action.

Yet the most we earn is an average of USD ~$150/week, meanwhile Tulip members’ recent average has been about USD ~$390/week, this is without pollen.

How long would it take for a non-dev member to acquire an amount of conviction comparable to them? Who stands up for the mundane small players’ initiatives?

All this makes me wonder if we’re on a truly community-driven DAO or a in a devs technocracy.

We can’t raise our wages because everyone would complain and find it uncomfortable, yet when everyone supposedly agrees the conviction feels clearly vague, like if there wasn’t clear incentive for them to vote; for now, all we have left is to appeal to the support of the other members of the community for these initiatives and hopefully start a conversation about how we could mitigate this problem and give the different areas of 1Hive the same ability to stand up for themselves.

I want to end up saying that here I’m talking as a member of the Support Swarm, as I feel there’s where I contribute the most, but I don’t want the particular example I used to steal importance from my premise, if it turns to be true that the community has such vague conviction towards us, I won’t be the one to force it.

Wanted to open this thread because I’ve seen this situation repeated with swarms like Terra and others.

[cryptoclip]

It’s something I’ve seen too and I’ve definitely noticed the issue before independently.

How about when putting up a proposal, you cross post it to the other swarms asking for some support from them? In turn, the favour is repaid when they put up their proposals.

Perhaps they are not actively looking on forums and 1hive.org, only checking when they know their own proposal has been loaded and they need to add support.

[cryptoclip]

I think the huge amount of honey in abstain proposal makes this problem a lot worse.

Why do we even need abstain any more, we have celeste. Abstain is to prevent bad proposals from passing, because they need a lot of honey staked to pass. But now we have celeste we can just dispute and block bad proposals, and that will actually generate some use of celeste - to date I think there had only been 1 test dispute?

[eenti]

@cryptoclip

How about when putting up a proposal, you cross post it to the other swarms asking for some support from them? In turn, the favour is repaid when they put up their proposals.

I’m sure everyone’s decently up to date on the proposals posted on the honeypot (and that are shared on discord’s proposals channel too), especially the big players.

I think they don’t see a clear incentive or the clear benefits of initiatives other than theirs; and their ignorance on some topics may cost us in the long run.

[ceresbzns]

Excellent points.

In Discord, you mentioned the idea of applying quadratic voting to Honeypot. That seems like a great concept that would probably help address the issues you’ve raised here.

[eenti]

Definitely, I’d love to see someone more capable taking the time to look at it and check if it’s actually feasible and doable for us.

[befitsandpiper]

I have seen the idea of lowering the minimum conviction for proposals come up multiple times now. @lkngtn has brought it up multiple times for example. As more HNY is locked away in different use cases voting will become more difficult across the board for those who do not have large stacks of HNY to begin with.

[Monstrosity]

I haven’t had time to voice my opinion but I suppose I will. As one of the original supporters of the supporter role I haven’t supported it with honey recently for a few reasons:
1.) I would like to see more turnover in leads
2.) I would like to see improvement not just something we do each week. What I mean, are we developing a community of supporters to be the next leaders? How have we improved this swarm to make it better.
3.). With the market cycle we need to be able to adapt quicker.

[fabio]

@eenti

We must keep up-to-date reading and learning stuff we oftentimes don’t even understand from all swarms (which isn’t an easy task) to give accurate information.

Exactly, this is also the hardest part of being support. We should be not only up to date for the swarms, but also in other different areas of blockchain and web3 technologies that take time and effort.

[D0SH]

Those are great and interesting points you have brought up @eenti and i can’t say i haven’t been down this road with similar feelings.

When i first started at 1hive there was nothing to help any of the people that did tech support, pollen did not exist for the help channel, the meme channel minted more then all channels combined and really most seeds dint care what was going on. With all those challenges faced a few of us were able to prevail and help out where ever it was needed until Luke grouped a few of us in what is now #fauna and at the time we became a funded swarm. Fast forward 2 months we got de-funded due to negative price movement and the community felt like we did not do enough for what we were asking but we still retained the same responsibilities

There were a few reasons as to why this happened, and i believe the main reason was everyone had put it on auto pilot and really dint push for any improvements as a group. As to why i am not voting for the support swarm at this current time are the points that @Monstrosity has made as well as it has been dreadfully slow to have extra funds onto of heavily weighted help channels. I do take the time to go back into certain channels to reward people with emojis that do awesome work like @fabio and i know others do this as well and i think at this current time without drastic changes i stand at those points for not supporting this prop.

[Stonky]

indeed, an interesting conversation, and thanks @eenti for bringing this up.

I remember one of my first comments on Discord when I joined was how easy it seemed for a proposal to pass with only the support of the “right guy(s)”.

I believe the support swarm is something quite needed, especially with the growth of 1hive. To create a wider turnover, we would need several members to be active, and lately this has not been the case. Low activity, summer, depressing price action, but 2 3 months ago there could have been so many people doing support…and now it is less, for numerous reasons.
I don’t think to be in mistake by saying, but i’m not 100% sure, that even some seeds have gone completely MIA, which is a further proof of this fluctuating commitment.

I do believe that such swarm is, in a way, creating possible “next leaders”. Maybe not in the meaning of a leader, but someone that can truly participate more and more in the life of 1hive. @fabio has been a successful late example, and like him more people in the future will get an incentive to be more active by joining the swarm.

@Monstrosity pointed out also:

@Monstrosity

3.). With the market cycle we need to be able to adapt quicker.

In this case, I believe as a DAO we are a bit slow, but I guess this is due to the nature of the DAO and the fact that, in my opinion, everything on xdai feels very slow.

As a positive auto-critique, I did read on some TG channels of projects on xDai that 1hive is considered very slow. This is true, and sometimes i wonder if our careful and cautious approach (which I support fully) doesn’t prevent us to be a bit on the spotlight, which could potentially bring on board more devs, contributors, writers, and interesting personalities.

I’m going off-topic so I’ll close here, but i think that every swarm has, to my eyes, an importance related to a certain target. By wanting to onboard and create a warm feeling around newcomers, having a trusted list of contributors is a great way to start with the right foot.

[eenti]

I’d agree that support channels are heavily weighted, but I can also argue that as a working group we need our own funds and organization for our own protection and decision making.

I’m happy to know that @befitsandpiper is always open to feedback, but at the end of the day the PollenDAO makes the decisions and we supporters don’t have a word there, as a matter of fact I think we need the funds probably more than ever as the PollenDAO is making adjustments, one of them is lowering the weight of support channels; and while I support that because 2.5x is way too much, I think it’s unfair for contributors as @fabio to work as hard as he does without any word on its compensation and workflow.

Anyways you’re in your right to decide whether to vote or not. My point in this post is more a question of distribution of conviction, which I think it’s not that well distributed.

[eenti]

@Stonky

I do believe that such swarm is, in a way, creating possible “next leaders”.

YES! I think as we’re expanding and trying to build a community, we also need more working groups focused on other areas, even if they don’t seem to be as cool or innovative as the swarms that are currently pushing for the disruptive tech we’re all here for.

EDIT:

@Monstrosity

I haven’t had time to voice my opinion but I suppose I will. As one of the original supporters of the supporter role I haven’t supported it with honey recently for a few reasons:
1.) I would like to see more turnover in leads
2.) I would like to see improvement not just something we do each week. What I mean, are we developing a community of supporters to be the next leaders? How have we improved this swarm to make it better.
3.). With the market cycle we need to be able to adapt quicker.

Just saw this @Monstrosity and yeah, I agree overall, posted some suggestions on the discord channel yesterday, if you have any other suggestion let’s keep the conversation going
I feel like there’s much more we supporters can do with our advantage of being always on top of the latest updates of every swarm.

[befitsandpiper]

The idea to lower the support channel weights is less about it being too high, and more just questioning whether setting weights on the support channel works at all to get money to supporters. I wonder if the support swarm alone is maybe a better mechanism than pollen.

People often don’t give emojis in support, and the people who would are new members who don’t have minting roles. This is to prevent pollen abuse from new members, but it’s a catch-22 since support members primarily interact with new members.

[eenti]

@befitsandpiper

questioning whether setting weights on the support channel works at all to get money to supporters

Well, I think most of us didn’t even know that weights were set up that high until recently, I’m sure that if some users knew we would have more people trying to do support (and some gaming).

So, if you wanna run the experiment for some more time is okay, but at the same time I’m fine with lowering them as I think the support swarm can take care of that.

edit: it may have worked indirectly at least for me, i kinda sticked in 1Hive because of pollen, and if most of the cred i get is from the support channels (although i’m not sure) i’d assume that it did what it was supposed to. But hard to say for sure.

[befitsandpiper]

maybe we’ll keep it as is for now then.
I think if pollen could measure this better then it could be an organic way to reward supporters, but from what I’ve been hearing the earnings from the support channels are pretty hit or miss.

[youre_hot]

Wondering if it’s a question of time scarcity for devs? Devs are, generally speaking, often very busy. Most complain they can’t keep up with programming languages/frameworks/etc. Not to mention governing. It just took me a good 20 mins to read through all the comments and form an opinion (I voted yes). And I wouldn’t have done that of I hadn’t seen this post. I think a little ‘get out the vote’ campaigning could do it?

As for conviction voting, as a relative outsider I know it’s hard for me to see in the trenches, but the fact that the proposals do pass seems an improvement on most DAOs. Perhaps some of the tweaks around it could improve it…

[gabi]

@eenti thanks for sharing your thoughts in a critical and orderly way. I have to apologize for not share my opinion before. It was on my to-do list and took longer than I would have liked.

There are a few points that I would like to make to give my personal view.

First, if we consider the past events in a vacuum, I consider that the Honeypot system behaves as expected. In some sense, the community brain was not fully aligned with the Support Swarm proposal so it took longer than expected to pass.

My personal stance was similar to what @Monstrosity share:

@Monstrosity

1.) I would like to see more turnover in leads
2.) I would like to see improvement not just something we do each week. What I mean, are we developing a community of supporters to be the next leaders? How have we improved this swarm to make it better.
3.). With the market cycle we need to be able to adapt quicker.

And I was waiting for some of the concerns raised in this post to be answered before adding my conviction to the proposal.

Second, I agree that we need a better way to compensate in the long-term those that are committed and contribute full-time. This is not an easy task, solutions like Pollen (Sourcecred) or Cordinape are looking for ways to solve them. But they are yet far from perfect.

I have been thinking about other alternative solutions to keep experimenting until we find something that clicks. One initial measure is agree together as a community what are competitive hourly rates in the space, to incentivize current contributors and attract new talent.

A more involved idea that I would like to experiment with is having a Payroll DAO manage by Celeste. This is an idea that I am still actively working, and will be sharing more details when I finalize the details.

[eenti]

Hey @gabi I really appreciate your feedback on this topic.

This community is known for how open and collaborative we are, and after seeing the concerns from all of you here I honestly felt disappointed by the lack of communication.

Most of the Support Swarm members are relatively new or with little experience in the crypto space, there are a lot of things that we don’t understand and some other stuff we can’t handle because they are outside of our abilities and I’m surprised that the older and more experienced users here (which are the ones raising concerns) haven’t spoken before.

There’s no day-to-day feedback on how we operate and if it weren’t for this post there would be no feedback either.

See how after I saw everything the community was concerned about, I came up with some ideas that cover most of them, you can read them here from there we discussed some stuff and got to this conclusion Support Swarm Changes.

Quoting Monstrosity here, if the intention is for us to be the next leaders in the community, I would invite you and everyone else to share more words with us so we can learn and develop.

If anyone else has some ideas about how the swarms should operate, please feel more than welcome to share them.