While reading through the current proposals list for Hive, I once again noticed that we have a lot of "long term" proposals that hang around in the list, but will likely never be approved. While it's not a problem at the moment, this seems like it could get to be a bit of a mess eventually.
One way we could discourage long term proposals would be to increase the cost of creating them. For example, increase their cost by 1 HBD for each day a proposal lasts over 10 days. Currently it costs 10 HBD to create a proposal, so proposals shorter than 11 days would cost the same as previously. But a proposal that stays in the system for a year would cost 356 HBD.
A price increase of this type might encourage proposal creators who are not sure they will get funded to create shorter term "milestone" type proposals (e.g. phase 1, phase 2, etc), instead of creating one post for the entire development interval. Of course, each of these subsequent proposals would need to be voted-in, but this would also allow for more oversight of the project.
At the very least, I suspect that proposers would take more time to consult with the community before making an expensive long term proposal, which also wouldn't be a bad thing.
This is just an early idea, so mostly I'm looking for feedback from the community...
Edit: Based on feedback in the comments, I've created a community for discussing ideas for potential improvements to Hive that might involve an evential proposal to DHF:
I think the price increase you suggest is too much for the average user, and I think the system should work to incorporate proposals from the average user.
What if all proposals ran for a standard amount of time (maybe 30 days), after which they could be resubmitted if so desired?
I recently suggested a parallel system which may serve this purpose a little better. Perhaps you'd like to weigh in.
My first thought is that we could just create a community for HIPS and people could make suggested improvement ideas in that community. People can vote on the ideas via the regular mechanism, effectively rewarding proposers of new ideas. The purpose of the community would be to collect them in a nicely consolidated area.
The beauty of this approach, from my perspective, is that no new code has to be written...
You even add a kickstarter fund (which could act as a proposal) which is managed by a trusted committee of people, who could send smaller budgets to those most-wanted ideas and help to mature the idea or build a mvp.
Just an idea.
I also like that idea, and I thought along similar lines (not exactly a community though) before I wrote the post, but ultimately decided a longer voting period would be necessary as well as a central place designated by the blockchain. You or I could create a HIPS community, but it wouldn't be an official place for it. It would also give off the impression of centralization as it would be under the control of the community account.
I guess you could publish the posting key for the community account, but I don't know if that would accomplish what we want for a Decentralized feature proposal system.
Which leads me to a question that I've been meaning to write about: Why hasn't anybody made an anonymous account by publishing the private posting keys?
AFAIK, you can create a community where anyone can post, the community aspect just allows for moderation (e.g. removal of posts that aren't really related to the community topic). For a community of this sort, it would probably make sense to give the owner key to several people, just to ensure it's not lost.
Regarding your last question, someone did create an account of that sort, but I forget it's name. Edit: at least I think they did...
As far as the post voting time goes, I see this more as a "brainstorming" community than a formalized proposal structure. So there's no reason someone couldn't just create a new post to extend on the old one with new ideas about it, to allow for further voting.
I guess my question would be why wouldn't that also be a solution for the DHF proposals?
I'm not sure what you mean. How would a community handle DHF proposals?
Couldn't you just collect all of the same information in posts to a community and designate the results in that community to indicate the will of the stakeholders?
Well, you inspired me to create my first community:
https://hive.blog/trending/hive-102930
Gaaah, you beat me to it! That's ok. It's better to come from you than me anyway. I'm proud to have been the inspiration.
Let's see what kind of traction it gets.
If you'd like to be a moderator, let me know...
I'd be honored.
I do think many proposals could benefit from this.
I'm all for shorter "milestone" proposals. While I understand campaigning to raise yet another proposal is a hassle, for most founders/teams it's an integral part of life and I think if geared more towards milestones it will become easier for them to actually raise.
Now, this is a proposal I support!
Also is there a way to increase diversity of the accepted proposals. I mean add a variety: classes of proposal
These are in no particular order, just my quick brain dump.
Also can we have a clear view regarding open-source and closed-source.
One way we could do the above "cheaply" is to create a "recommended template" for proposals. For example, at the head of each proposal post, proposers could fill in the answers to standard questions like : opensource software, closedsource software, marketing, community management, charity, and others you mentioned.
This wouldn't allow the interfaces to sort the proposals, but it would make it easier to get a "feeling" for the proposal before diving deep into it (some of the current proposals I've seen can be hard to understand). A larger step would be to allow for proposals to contain meta data for this type of information, but it's probably better to start with the template approach and see how it goes.
I like the idea of 'recommended templates' for proposals - this way everyone has a guideline for what information to provide instead of the rambling proposals we sometimes get now :D And the community could use these templates to ask further questions if some info isn't provided.
I'm working on a draft template tonight, I'll publish one tomorrow for discussion in the new community. We may want to have several templates, depending on the "type" of the proposal, but I'll start with a somewhat generic one.
I think this is really a good idea. Thanks!
That's a great idea. I like it.
A good idea here by @azircon for a template. Maybe it should have sections that can can be scored on points.
Basic stuff like milestones and reporting policies should also be stated!
Great idea on making a few templates.
I like the idea of a higher cost. People can ask for an extra dollar a day to cover it....and yes I eant to see this level of accountability.
Another idea is to improve polling features for Yes and No questions.
I personally feel really strong about number 6. I say this because it’s because of important small projects that we have new and well vetted members joining the community.
Please note the following is not objective as I am involved in one of those proposals directly targeted (#91). But I will try to answer in a quite objective manner, including my feelings about my own story case here, and your suggestion.
We exactly discussed a very related consideration when we drafted our proposal. How to proceed? Should we go on a quarter by quarter basis and do the PR more often to get people voting for each proposal update? Should we go for a one-year-long thingie and then be happy and focus on our work (even if it is only partly funded). Where to put the bar in the daily amount? etc.
There was basically no guidelines, no inputs, on what the community (actually the big stake holders) would prefer. We decided to go with the latter option (the one-year thingie). As there is no much support for it (we are very far from the 22 MHO threshold and I don't think we will ever get there in a realistic manner), this was probably the wrong choice. But would going quarter by quarter change anything? Would asking less have changed anything (although we justified later on, in an update, how we were planning to spend the grant and give back the un-used part if any). We never got any feedback. It is thus difficult to judge.
To come back to the point of this post, I am not against this. But I would like at the same time more feedback on the proposals themselves, so that they could be better designed according to the wish of the community.
I feel your pain, truth is a lot of major stakeholders won't give you feedback on the chain! And possibly it's a matter of how much they know you and trust you as well as the objective merits of your proposal.
Both on and off chain, believe me! And I have tried to get hard to get some return...
I am now giving it a last chance here, following the discussions in this post.
See my reply to @moeknows above, where I'm suggesting we create a community to collect ideas for work to be done via the normal posting system. I feel like the normal posting system can solve this problem, assuming we have a place where it's easy to find all such posts.
Yes, this would be great, together with allowing for decreasing the requested amount (cf. the latest dev meeting). IMO, if correctly followed, this could solve the issue.
+1 HBD for every day after 60 days or 90 days... That sounds reasonable to me.
Long term proposals are expensive, but shortterm still the same.
I favor 60 days over 90 days, but that also seems reasonable to me. There's a reasonable argument that most work worth a proposal will take 30 days at least, unless most of the proposal is to cover fixed costs (like buying an advertising contract).
Simple is best! charging daily for a proposal that never gets read, doesn't excite many to write proposals I'm sure. My vote is what ever is fair to all :)
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Some proposals also seem to quote high daily payments that do not match the work being undertaken. We need to make sure that the DAO is continuously maturing to prevent exploitation.
It is not an infinite pool of resources so prudent management is all I am hoping for so that future thrives long term.
I hope that is put into consideration.
There's a separate issue in gitlab now, to allow proposal creators to "lower" their daily payout, which I'm in favor of doing (this idea came out during the last Hive developer meeting). This would allow a proposal creator to "bargain" with the voters by offering a lower price without having to create an entirely new post and get everyone to vote on it again.
Beyond that, the simple solution to "too high" of amount requested is to not vote for it.
But the problem with long term proposals is they linger in the list, regardless of whether people vote for them or not, and they could potentially make it hard to find proposals you might want to vote for.
On the question of if too high, then don't vote on it, the truth is that it is not that simple.
Popular Hivers will 99% of the time get funded because most are voting blindly. For example, most will not question a proposal by you because most of us associate the beginning of Hive with blocktrades.
We should be able to account for each and every HBD regardless of whatever role we played in the realization of Hive or our level of visibility.
Basically make people accountable and make it trustless.
In most DAOs, the proposal system only judges the proposers by REALITY (don´t say that blocktrades is wrong but reputation can be a weak proxy for reality). In a DAO you claim that your proposal will have a certain influence on the network parameters like "this proposal will increase the number of active users ergo the long-term price (like a moving average) by 30cents". Either it will and you get payed a reward proportional to the price-move or your proposal was shit and you lose your stake, so will anybody else.
It is called prediction market (aka. futarchy) and it eliminates all trust. It is provably a collusion-resistant mechanism.
the best guys in the space research in that direction
Hanson, Robin 2013: Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs?
Buterin, Vitalik 2014: An Introduction to Futarchy
Merkle, Ralph, C. (Nick Bostrom, Vitalik Buterin, Robert A. Freitas Jr., Robin Hanson, Charles Hoskinson , John Oh, and Melanie Swann) 2016: DAOs, Democracy and Governance
Hayes, Ryan, Tran, Alexandra, Xu, Henry. 2018: Futarchy Considered: a guide to blockchain-based prediction markets and futarchy
The "DAC" described by Stan and Dan Larimer was not the same as a DAO, same as Steem is not a "Crypto" (because there is zero crypto inside the consensus mechanism, it purely is based on economics and a race condition). One could say that dPOS is a crypto-substitute and a dPOS DAC is similar to a DAO, but you cant make it trustless in that gametheoretical collusion resistant fashion. Not without changing the fundamental structure.
Reputation is definitely an important factor in getting funded. This isn't just true of Hive proposals, it's true of just about everything in life.
But I don't think this indicates a problem, as long as the person's reputation is deserved. Theoretically, a reputation should be strongly correlated with past performance, and maintenance of that reputation includes continuing to meet expectations, so it's generally only logical to fund people with good reputations, assuming their proposals also make sense.
Now, where this can break down is when someone's reputation doesn't accurately reflect reality. Unfortunately, this does happen more often than is desirable, generally through a process of rampant self-promotion, false claims, shilling, etc to create false reputations. This mostly happens when you don't get a chance to personally interact with the person involved (or at least, not an interaction where the reputational characteristic is observable), so that your knowledge of that person is mostly second-hand, and therefore more difficult to judge.
And this can lead to serious harm, as history has shown us, when people blindly follow someone who's supposed to be a great leader or some kind of special genius, but actually only possesses a complete lack of morals and can lie about their abilities without any compunction (and have others lie for them as well).
Because of the problems with our current methods of determining the correct "reputation" for people, one of my main goals is to enhance Hive so that it can allow for better "computation" of someone's abilities in various areas (e.g. various forms of reputation). After we get through our initial optimization of Hive, this is where I plan to spend a lot of my time.
Also, as an aside, I can say that it's not so simple as "founders get funded". For example, in BitShares, which was the precursor chain to Hive, the founder of that chain wasn't able to get funded for a number of proposals he made for that chain's worker proposal system. And arguably, that's one of the reasons he stopped working on that chain and started Steem. Now there were definitely reasons why he didn't get funded (he made a bunch of mistakes that had damaged his reputation), but it does show that being at the beginning isn't always enough.
A step in the right direction. Perhaps the same logic could apply to the amount asked for, where the fee is a % of the total amount requested?
If the added fee is flat for any daily amount, it will affect a modest proposal for ~15-50HBD and encourage asking for higher pay in shorter time. Imo, I quite like the idea of having multiple proposals for community work that ask for modest sums as a way to replace the need to use upvotes to fund activities. For them, needing to re-do a proposal all the time would be an unecessary cost.
Thanks for bringing it up! The DHF has been on my mind a lot the last few weeks. I'm mostly worried about how we will attract proposals from users who don't have 'a name'/rep on Hive yet - and how we will encourage teams without the means but with skills to add to our ecosystem.
I'm currently looking at the Dapplr team, who are clearly doing a lot of research, design work, and promotion on both Twitter and Hive for their app, answering every question from community members about the choices they make and why they make them, but have difficulty funding. Every time a user of 'intermediate' influence posts about their app they are gaining a few more votes, getting closer and closer to getting funded, but they're still a long way from the Return Proposal.
Still, I think they might get there, because they are actually grinding their way towards getting the votes in by building up momentum and releasing previews of their work regularly.
I can only guess why their Proposal hasn't been funded yet, but knowing from which part of the world they are combined with the (extremely low from Western perspectives) pay they are asking for server costs and paying the junior design team I would guess they might never have made a proposal if it had costed them money.
And I do think we should allow those without financial means but with skills to have a change on Hive. I'm fairly certain they will deliver the app regardless of getting funded - it would be ridiculous if they were going to add value to our system without getting funded and even having to have paid a 'fee' in the meanwhile - 1HBD (I know this is just an example, but still) is pocket change for some, and a decent amount for others.
Cost me more words than I intended to write to make that point, but okay.
What I do see working, or at least being a general direction for solving this 'issue' is having proposals slowly phase out of the DHF overview each week or month they didn't get votes. That would mean that most proposals that were meant for Steem and are still on the current DHF would slowly go to the background. It would also mean that proposals from people that lack both 'rep' and/or 'promotion' and/or skillset to not mess up the DHF overview list.
Cheers.
I can't say for other stakeholders, but I can say why I haven't voted for dapplr yet: they aren't starting opensource, but plan to migrate to it eventually, if I read their comments correctly. That just doesn't make sense to me (and I've seen several projects make similar claims, none of which I voted for).
If they were opensource, I would vote for them.
I respect that choice, and if they hadn't publicly/on chain promised to open source their app I wouldn't have voted either, but I can see why that's not enough for others to vote on now.
Still, my main point is, let's not create (financial) burdens for people to participate/add value to Hive. Although I do appreciate people having to prove their worth and thus our vote, I don't think financial burdens should be the (only) way to do so. A 'phase out' of irrelevant proposals over time (where the proposals still can receive votes but are simply 'below the line' for not receiving votes for x amount of weeks) would be a decent way of cleaning up mess.
I like your statement, with the exception of the rep requirement. Rep is too easily bought and too easily targeted IMO to be included as criteria on anything important.
"A price increase of this type might encourage proposal creators who are not sure they will get funded to create shorter term "milestone" type proposals (e.g. phase 1, phase 2, etc), instead of creating one post for the entire development interval. Of course, each of these subsequent proposals would need to be voted-in, but this would also allow for more oversight of the project."
Proposals should have milestones, giving an open check for a work where we won't know if it'll be done in the future is like a bit of nonsensical. They should add a "rejection or downvote button"
I'm glad you're looking ways to improve the system, in the end we all can solve things whithin communities. Regards!
I think this is a good idea.
Also as a bit of off-topic people should pull votes out of the return proposal, it is limiting too much. Someone wrote it is a good idea to penny-pick and all the damn herd just followed.
I'm a fan of "quarterly" proposals. But I don't see why this must be blockchain enforced. The front-ends can just allow you to filter "unlikely to fund" proposals, depending on the user's preference.
I also wouldn't be upset if there was a blockchain enforced process either.
You're right that the "attention" part could be resolved on the frontend, although it would likely result in a less uniform experience across different front ends (and that might be a good thing, who knows).
Another maybe more theoretical argument for handling it at the blockchain level is that fewer active proposals means less computation. But I don't think this is something that's likely to cost too much computationally, from what I remember.
I would also say that whatever requirement you put on any of the proposals should also apply to the return proposal as well.
I think the proposal goes in the right direction. One thing that might be considered is the amount of payout. I haven't thought about exact figures, but if you just add 1% for each HBD to the basic fee, you could get users to think about the amount of the payout of the proposal. On the other hand, it would not be a disadvantage for votes on the community opinion, because there is no payout.
I like the idea, but I think it could be 10 HBD for less than two months (or one month). Then the cost immediately rises to 100 HBD for more. And that's it.
We need some speculative proposals. If it will cost 50 HBD for a two month proposal, then no one will dare make a proposal unless they are already a witness/ 100% sure to be approved.
It's important to allow anyone to create a proposal cheaply that won't only last 10 days. Two month seems a good compromise to leave a proposal there long enough while keeping the DAO clean.
I think this is a good idea, but pricing needs to be reworked. For smaller proposals, the 1 HBD/day can be a pretty large % of what they are getting. Maybe 1 HBD/week instead of 1 HBD/day?
Seems like a sensible idea to me.
Greats idea, we Will support this hive proposal @blocktrades 👌
https://esteem.app/photography/@africka/flowers
the cost of proposals should be different between times indeed
Hace dos meses, consideraba la comunidad steemit como algo muy sólido.
Cuando se presentó la bifurcación, acudí a mis hijos para que me explicaran como hicieron Uds, para lograr que naciera HIVE.
Yo soy el # 14590. Se que la cifra es superior a los cienmil.
Creo que es justo saber que pasó.
Necesitamos una explicación, para poder asimilar bien nuestra decisión de seguir a testigos como BLOCKTRADES o CERVANTES, en quienes confiamos siempre.
Ya no importa lo que dejábamos atrás.
Pudieran dedicar algunas publicaciones en ese ámbito. aliriera
And it's a great step to streamline the process as well as improve the visibility of the project.
I do support it. We must have filtering mechanism to filter out non-serious proposal creators.
not a fan of price increase because it may cost out a smaller but potentially valuable project. To me it makes more sense to reduce barriers to entry rather than increase them. But I have to agree with you on the matter of shorter proposals, but not necessarily for the reason of preventing proposal clutter but because I think in general that proposals should be more geared towards funding based on achieving mile stones, as you eluded to above.. But the risks for a project manager then become, what if we meet our milestone but still manage to lose funding on the next round of proposal, then we're left with an incomplete project. Great to see people discussing ideas! Thanks for asking for feedback.
That would be a step in the right direction. More structure and order is needed when it comes to proposals.
@blocktrades Is there a community to discuss proposals ?
Yes, I just created one here: https://hive.blog/trending/hive-102930
Perhaps proposals should cost to keep them higher on the list as they age and don't get funded.
Once a proposal starts, but isn't funded, charge a fee to stay visible, or above unpromoted proposals, for a week/month's continued visibility.
Until we get more dilution of users the popularity circle jerk is going to persist.
That is just how people work.
We are prejudiced by our biases.
Now a further thought how to improve the proposal-system is to add the down-voting to it. Right now one upvote to return-proposal is going to screw alot of other projects and it only takes one campaign to get people to vote for it whilest each new project has to be marketed separatetly and voted. A quick fix I see for this situation without coding would be to make the return proposal only last for couple of months so that uninformed people can't leave their vote to return-proposal for a year.
If you wanted to do a charge like this it shouldn't be linear.
10 HBD for 10 days but also 100 HBD for 100 days?
That doesn't make sense.
You should be giving a discount on some kind of logarithmic scale.
i would make the DAO escrow type of service pay on completed tasks.
user/dev makes a proposal/job (support votes reached = means start work but not payable until product delivered)
product delivered checked by the witness to reach a consensus for payment. 19/20 need to approve.
features auction type priced.
if increased all support reset.
if decreased no change.
use case
live events confirmation.
make witnesses work a little bit :)
attract outside devs looking for work.
good value.
Definitely agree on this idea. Seeing a potential for a long list of year long project to cull through. Would there be a way or consideration having secured funding for an initial phase that it might assist, in someway, with subsequent phases. The reason I say this it that you might get funding for the first phase, might be flashy and cool, but phase 2 might be a little more mundane and not so flashy - may potentially derail a project if a second phase can't get the funding required to continue on.
I can see it forcing the proposal creators in to having to think more strategic about their road-map... but a potential concern; on the other hand as I type this it may not be a concern at all... just be more strategic in your road map. Feel it's still a solid idea to increase the cost.
Good work
Hi
we, @themagazine, have just done few days ago a proposal (https://peakd.com/proposal/@themagazine/themagazine-a-simple-and-concrete-proposal-to-enhance-the-contents-and-authors-of-hive) that starts from the 1° of June and has a duration of 578 Days.
I think that when you write this post you think about proposals that have a chance to be founded, because are done by someone that is, like you, a leader.
What about proposals like our?
We have no chance to be founded, we just want to tell to people like you, hey guys, we have a great idea, what about this?
We just do this spending 10 HBD of ours to let someone like you to know that this idea exists.
If we have to spend more than 10 HBD, you will never know this idea.
Can be you think that is a bad idea, can be you think is good.
With your system you will never know.
At the moment there very few proposals and only 6 for less than 1,500 HBD a day, if I count well.
Note that, for example, PeakD's proposal is non funded, and PeakD is used by many many users, so I see no chance, at the moment, to loose money for nothing.
What about a system like that:
Every proposal have a 30 days time to be funded, if don't, the proposal is lost.
So we can have a clean proposal system and all know that have to foster an idea in the first 30 days, or die.
This way everyone, also we that does not have any "Queen bee" behind, can check if the idea that we have had is good or not.
I think your basic premise here is flawed. You seem to be assuming that you must make a proposal first to check if your idea is good or not. But we already have a good system for vetting ideas before proposals using normal posts, in my opinion.
If your proposal is for some new idea and you're not sure if people will be interested, make a post about it first and see what feedback you get. We even have a specific community now for getting some extra attention for such ideas: https://hive.blog/trending/hive-102930. This can be done without spending any money.
If the feedback seems good and you think there's a reasonable chance it will get funded, then you can take the next step and make a formal proposal.
If we try to check with a normal post we can have 0 feedback, I leave in a completely different world here in Hive.
If we try with normal post this can be read by 10 people and that tell us nothing about our idea.
If we enter a proposal it is read by many people, because there are very few proposals in the system, so we have a feedback that has some value.
But, what about our system?
One of the main points of creating this new Hive Improvement community was to allow ideas to be proposed and get attention without needing to make a proposal first. In other words, you can get visibility somewhat similar to the extra visibility of the "proposals" page, without having to pay the proposal fee.
The advantage of this method is you still get some attention and feedback for your ideas (as opposed to a random post, where you don't think anyone will see it, apparently), but the blockchain doesn't have to do the special processing for voting on it.
As for your timing idea itself, I don't think it should be fixed to 30 days. Of the ideas I've heard suggested so far, several seem workable , I like "10 HBD for up to 60 days, +1 HBD for each day thereafter" best.
Sorry, can be I'm not able to explain my idea.
I try again.
The idea is that you can ask for funds as you do now, but you have only 30 or 60 days to collect the necessary votes, if you don't, your proposal is deleted.
You don't have to pay more for a long term proposal, everyone as a limited time to successfully have an entry level support.
Let me know if is not clear again.
Hello I am trying to use your platform and my transaction failed, my funds have not been refunded to my account, I filed a ticket and never got an email back please respond 9f919dee4daf4eab7159bf34a0ba5f070b82bcc7
Hey Dan. Just wanted to stop by and say Balls of Steel! Regarding the creation of HIVE. Well done brother! and all those involved.
Hope you and the misses are doing well in these strange times.
Me, I got back into Thailand on the last flight out of Vietnam back in March. Got an apartment 5 minutes from the beach in Ao Nang. One of the beaches here is rated top ten in the world. Life is still good. No virus here and no lock down.
Glad you are still driving things home on the new platform.
Take care,
-Dan
Gotta love dpos.
“Hey I have an idea” then votes support or decline.
All working towards improving and growing the same network in their own way... investing in hive should be my mission for a while.