In honor of respecting everyone’s valuable time, instead of utilizing it arguing back and forth the merits of what constitutes “minority interests,” why not prioritize completely removing this seemingly abused voting mechanism “NWV” in favor of simplifying voting for all?
We have seen, through on-chain governance, time and time again, and understandably so from their perspective, Validators team up against proposals that go against the grain of their collective personal/political beliefs. We have also seen other members voicing their observation of this behavior sprinkled throughout the forum. Therefore, minimize governance voting to:
Great question. Sincerely appreciate your time here, @freak12techno.
Would there be a huge difference in collectively utilizing a “NO,” versus “NWV,” to fight scam proposals?
A) Extraneous Solution:
How operations currently run to rid spam “off-chain” seem to be working, but could be assisted further. To help, in addition to further decentralizing our network, the birth of a new committee/DAO, perhaps funded through AADAO, could assist by being held responsible for maintaining a minimal, threefold mandate:
Governance: “NO” towards all spam proposals (limited vote participation)
Security: Help maintain the Cosmos Hub’s 2/3 stake ratio via staking
Community: Alert via all social channels
What is deemed “spam” must be clearly defined. If any of these mandates are neglected, dissolve the committee and return all funding immediately. In addition to point 2 and 3, a majority % of the rewards earned are immediately sent to the Hub community pool as a non-negotiable.
B) Constitution
@Quentin seems to have reinitiated the Constitution idea, which could lead to a sincere solution, also eliminating the need for “A.”
Fair point. In that case, why not add the burn consequence unto the “NO” vote?
Would call for higher stakes to those who submit proposals. This way we omit the need for “NWV,” simplify voting and avoid spending resources to modify the deposit minimum altogether.
Burning deposits for proposals that do not pass will severely discourage people from bringing up valid questions to the community.
For example, Proposal 69 asked the community if we wanted to include CosmWasm in the Rho upgrade. That’s a valid question, and it was valuable for it to be posed to the community and receive a ‘no’ answer. Similarly, an oversight committee for AADAO was elected via three proposals, one of which was rejected via ‘no’ votes.
However, Hub governance currently burns deposits for proposals that fail to reach quorum. I’ve brought this up before (that if voting NWV on spam is done solely to burn their deposit, we could get the same outcome by not voting at all) but folks rightly pointed out that NWV is a strong signal that spam is not welcome on the Hub. It’s a stronger social message than not voting at all.
I don’t feel strongly about keeping, abolishing, or further defining NWV. But, I would also ask if NWV actually does get abused. Do proposals get vetoed in a way that people think is counterproductive to healthy governance? AFAIK, ATOM 2.0 is the only proposal to have been vetoed. While some community members do end up arguing about it and judging people for voting NWV instead of NO, it doesn’t seem like it’s having an impact on the actual results of proposals.
I also agree with @lexa that I haven’t see any cases other than ATOM 2.0 where a decent proposal was vetoed because people disagree with it, please correct me if I’m wrong.
But I think it’s important to distinguish the cases when one just disagrees with the proposal (aka “I do not like the idea behind this proposal”) and when one thinks this proposal harms the ecosystem (aka “I do not think this proposal should have ever been submitted in the first place”). IMO there should be some penalties for people who submit proposals which are not supposed to be subject to governance (two cases I know are 1) scam proposals and 2) stuff like Bostrom chain did, with their promotion of their airdrop - even given that it was legit, this isn’t a subject to a governance and is an attempt to use governance for non-governance reasons).
For example, imagine if there’s a validator who wants to get free advertisements and submits a proposal saying how awesome they are, or something similar (this example is an extreme one, but it should show the idea). This is a case where people use governance for totally non-governance reason, and we should punish people who are trying to do things like that. Just voting NO would make it fail, but won’t punish those submitting it.
If on the other hand we decide to burn the deposits of those proposals voted NO upon, this gives a message to the depositors: “we do not like the idea and you should be punished for even voicing your opinion”, which would totally discourage anybody from submitting something when they are not sure if it’ll pass.
So for me, having No/No with veto split and deposits burned only if the proposal is vetoed sounds like the best approach, and I’d keep it this way.
Thank you @lexa for sharing your time on this topic, as well as your meaningful contribution helping author Proposal 75 (Defining NWV).
Good question. Not sure, but would love to hear others thoughts on this.
Unless I am mistaken, there doesn’t seem to be a place where “irrelevant,” “minority interests,” and other such terminology, are clearly defined, hence supporting the need for some sort of foundational constitution to collectively serve as an agnostic middle ground. Therefore, IMO, this “NWV” feature could easily be “abused.”
Valid point. Can agree with you both here. Appreciate your continued discourse @freak12techno, hope all is well.
This is highly subjective. Wasn’t the Cosmos Hub conceived to serve as a minimal hub? I can be wrong, but doesn’t adding features, such as the NK LSM and CosmWasm, unnecessarily “bloat,” therefore “harm” the system? In addition, proposals such as #848 (ATOM Halving) does not seem to have provided any remedy, harming the original purpose of ATOM (governance/staking, not “money”).
Agreed. Same should go for esteemed validators who (repeatedly) vote in favor/support proposals such as the notorious, yet seemingly well intentioned, #101 (yet to be responded).
Fair enough, but still seems NWV can be abused if, for example, a group of validators simply dislike certain proposals.
My concern here is that IMO the only reasoning to remove NWV voting option is that it might be abused to burn the deposits of some proposers, even if the idea behind it was not harmful. This is indeed possible, but practically, outside of ATOM 2.0 proposal (I think it was vetoed not because it was harmful, but because you need a lower threshold to veto a proposal than to make it fail via NO votes, so in my point of view it was abused here, but I see what you’re saying about it being subjective) I don’t recall any cases when a proposal was vetoed without a valid reason and NWM option was abused.
I also can’t recall any cases when a proposal that should’ve been vetoed wasn’t vetoed and was voted NO upon instead, causing to not burn proposers’ deposit (proposals which should’ve not been passed are a completely different story, I think).
So given that throughout the whole governance history we only have 1 case where NWV option was (subjectively, but still) abused, I think by removing NWV option we are trying to solve the problem that kinda doesn’t exist in the first place.
@freak12techno though I may not fully agree, I can follow your logic. Thank you for continuing to share dialogue on this topic.
Thank you @StunZeed for sharing your time here and showing that NWV can, in fact, be abused.
@julien a SPAM vote feature sounds like a solid solution for the time being. At the very least, this helps evade the potential abuse of the NWV vote. A sincere thank you to you and team.
Actually, replacing NWV vote with the SPAM vote might solve it. Either that, or treating NWV as SPAM and only using it for proposals that are promoting free airdrops or so.
Keeping both doesn’t quite make sense though, as as of now they serve kinda the same purpose and can be used for the same reasons technically (nobody stops anyone from voting SPAM on a proposal they do not personally like, right?)
A SPAM voting option is great, super looking forward to v0.52!
I think “protection of minority interests” just isn’t the right way of describing this use of NWV – maybe both the voting option and the spirit of it could be better described as “call for supermajority”.
As a protection of minority interests: ‘NoWithVeto’ allows a 1/3+ minority who is against the proposal require a 2/3 ‘Yes’ supermajority (rather than a simple >1/2 majority) to pass a proposal […]
I think of the 1/3+ NWV as a sign that such a proposal is important and divisive enough that it warrants a supermajority rather than a simple majority.
But when a validator uses NWV on many many proposals, I question whether that validator has a keen sense of which issues are important enough to demand a supermajority. It is more likely that they are behaving in a game-theoretic manner and just trying to get their ‘no’ to count for more, which I think is against the spirit of NWV.
One thing we can definitely agree on:
Having a voting option that can be both a game-theoretic strategy for failing proposals AND a thoughtful indication of a major issue that warrants a supermajority is confusing and encourages people to waste time arguing about whether it’s appropriate to veto or not. Of course the “yes” side will always argue that anyone vetoing is abusing that option. Of course anyone vetoing will always argue that they are using it appropriately.
Here’s a weird solution that I don’t know how to implement lol:
I haven’t see any cases other than ATOM 2.0 where a decent proposal was vetoed because people disagree with it, please correct me if I’m wrong.
Depends on how you view it. If we consider ATOM 2.0 as one of the most political and controversial proposal for ATOM’s, the fact it has suffered abused isn’t nothing. We also witnessed some tentative to abuse NWV more recently with important proposals regarding AADAO. So it seems that, even if it’s not often or all the time, some people do try to abuse when it matters (for them).
In that light I’m supportive of a change. Though I still want scam proposals to be burn !
I like Lexa’s idea with the supremacy vote which seems to be a good middle ground
Good point. What stops someone from voting “SPAM,” due to “personal” gripes.
Good idea.
Agreed.
Question:
Should these “signaling” proposals explicitly exist on the Cosmos Hub forum instead of going on-chain?
The forum offers the “anonymous” voting feature in discussion threads. It could be argued that past on-chain “signaling” proposals were used to “bypass,” in a way, governance to push certain ideas forward.
By requiring signaling proposals to explicitly exist on the Cosmos Hub forum, we are simplifying voting back to:
YES | NO | ABSTAIN | +SPAM
To achieve burning deposits, without the need for the SPAM feature, can we not join the “Call for Supermajority” details into the Y/N vote, or something similar?
Though this extends the goal of this direct thread, RE “Signaling” proposals, which were arguably utilized to auto “pass,” certain props, how do you feel if these were explicitly to exist within the forum, instead of on-chain?
All this continues to painfully point to our (subjective) “lack” of foundation, and our ultimate collective need for a working constitution. Perhaps it is time to start modeling ours, the Cosmos Hub, based off the respectful lead of AtomOne.
Not a good idea I think. The forum is explicitly for communication/discussion. Even if there were a consensus I think it would still need to be codified onchain.
