I don’t think that makes any sense, since a person delegates their tokens to someone who they trust to govern the DAO. By prohibiting nominees from voting for themselves, you are disenfranchising the very voters who would likely most want to see that nominee become a DAO steward.
3 Likes
My own views on this have evolved, and I agree with @serenae and @neiman. If a nominee cannot vote for themselves, someone who wants that person to be nominated would have to delegate to a different person instead; the very tokenholders who are most likely to want that person to be nominated/elected are the ones disenfranchised.
3 Likes
I think that’s a good thing, which solves the inevitable infinite popularity contest-loop that results in people delegating once, and never re-delegating (or keeping track of what goes on in the DAO)
Re-delegating often is something I think should be encouraged, as it increases activity and participation.
We should encourage people to be active, yes. I don’t think we should do that by setting up perverse incentives like requiring someone to delegate away from the person they want to be elected, in order for their vote to count.
3 Likes
I support the proposed amendments because they reflect changes based on learning from the current/first set of Stewards and processes. We are still early in this evolution.
5 Likes
While it sounds backwards, that actually solves the most common complaint I received about delegation and voting while doing support: “Help, my vote was used to elect someone I didn’t want elected!”
If a re-delegation was necessary before elections, it would filter out inactive delegations and people who don’t actually want their vote delegated there. In an ideal world, they would just decide to un or re-delegate out of the blue – but they don’t and so we need to adapt to that reality.
The alternative, to me, is far more perverse: That most people are not active in the DAO, delegate once (not based on any metrics) and then people elect themselves and their friends in elections infinitely. What’s the point of that?
1 Like
There are two different types of voting that are being conflated here. There is voting on EPs, and there is voting which pertains to positions in the DAO. In my opinion there is no reason to assume that delegators would want their delegate to be elected into any special position above just a voting member of the DAO. Just putting that out there. I don’t know what the solution is. I would like to believe that if a candidate is favored enough for a position like Steward, they wouldn’t need to vote for themselves. But I do see the issue with redelegation being counter-intuitive, too.
3 Likes
If there were any forced un-delegations, I think it would cause the actual token participation to crater down to almost nothing. As much as I would love to see more and more people be active voters in the DAO, the truth (I think) is that most people do not want or care to be active in DAO governance. They delegate their votes to someone else they trust, set it and forget it. And maybe they’ll check in every once in a while, maybe not.
I can just as easily see: “Help, I voted for this delegate, and now I find out that my votes have not counted for anything in years since you forcefully undelegated me!”
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that mechanism exists in the token contract today anyway. We could enforce that for social proposals if we created a custom Snapshot strategy though.
2 Likes
We can’t do this technically, so it’s not an option under consideration.
Prohibiting delegates from voting for their own candidacy as a steward doesn’t prevent this, though - as you observe, they can still elect their friends.
If you’ve delegated your votes to someone, that implies you trust them to make voting decisions on your behalf. Why should this one be different?
2 Likes
This goes back to the debate about Brantly voting. There seems to be two schools of thought, neither of which I am claiming is more right.
- Delegation is absolute. Delegators want their delegate to vote on their behalf, even if it is a vote that is almost entirely to serve the delegate’s self-interest. Set it and forget it.
- Delegation is done because the delegator wants someone to vote on governance matters on their behalf. Votes involving positions in the DAO are unique and should be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Both positions make assumptions of the delegators and their reason for delegating.
2 Likes
I’m not sure that’s the way to go either, but there definitely needs to be a way to differentiate between active and inactive votes. Hypothesize* that all stewards would be unfit, yet they elect each other with delegated votes from inactive voters.
Very few of us in the DAO, and none of those working under those stewards has the power to do anything about that.
If you scroll up to my response to daylon’s post you’ll see that I proposed that people running for steward not be allowed to vote in that steward election altogether.
Yes, to numbers that likely accurately represents the reality of the number of people actively working in the DAO I would imagine.
1 Like
It sounds like you’re framing that as if it is a good thing. But what about all the people that are not “actively working in the DAO”, are not actively paying attention to all proposals, do not want to spend gas on every executable vote, but still want to use the $ENS token for the one and only piece of utility it was designed for, and still want their voting power to count towards the DAO? Are you saying that “only people who are actively working in the DAO should be able to vote”?
The delegated token system is definitely not perfect, but it is how the ENS token works today.
If you want to move to a different voting and governance system, I’m all ears, but that’s a separate conversation I think.
3 Likes
Oh, that wasn’t intentional 
I don’t think it’s a good thing, I think that shows a problem.
Not even remotely.
2 Likes
Gotcha, sorry I misunderstood your intentions then. 
1 Like
No worries
I’m definitely not trying to say that only those actively working in the DAO has a right to vote, anyone with the token obviously has that right.
What I am saying is that in a scenario such as the one I hypothesized the fact that there are inactive voters becomes a problem that somehow needs to be addressed.
This is also one of the lesser points that was made early on, one of the better points is that we’re proposing that there should be historical performance metrics for stewards, that helps people decide on who to vote for in elections.
3 Likes
This has already been discussed before and the issues with disenfranchisement were raised. My point is very simple – a vast majority of voters did not care who they delegated their votes to. They are also not going to return to re-delegate despite the free re-delegation windows. Disenfranchisement is a cool buzzword if ENS tokenholders were informed decision-makers, but the reality is that they are not. DAO has two options now, a) either get caught up in the theoreticals and continue asserting the wrong assumption that delegates/tokenholders are informed decision-makers, or b) get pragmatic and solve issues with the delegation process as they come dynamically. No process set in stone is ever going to work when it caters to a very fluid demographic. If someone really cares enough to be an active tokenholder, I am sure as hell that they will re-delegate to vote for their favourite nominee, if they need to. It is time that the DAO doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator.
Analytics & Research subWG will conduct a survey to estimate the percentage of inactive votes and I won’t be surprised if this comes to a very very high percentage (above 90%).
I support re-delegation, even if it is forced in some sense. To repeat myself, disenfranchisement is a smaller issue at the moment than inactive votes that were mindlessly delegated and never looked at again by tokenholders. Inactive votes are going to be a far bigger problem for the DAO than disenfranchisement.
That is a big ‘if’ and it only applies to less than 5% of tokenholders. I asked 6 people at ETHAmsterdam how they selected their delegate; most/all of them said they picked the first name they ‘recognised’ on the list because they were too excited for the airdrop. 5 of them said they do not remember who they delegated to. Note that these are participants in a conference and likely the most active users of Ethereum ecosystem that we can imagine.
That is a very small issue compared to the larger problems we will face if we do not move from a static delegation strategy. There is no perfect solution; only one that works better than the others. Someone will always be mad at ENS/DAO.
That will be a sad reality but reality nonetheless. If we see no participation, then it means DAO did something very wrong in their chosen delegation process. Covering up our problems won’t solve them.
We should avoid removals; it doesn’t help in the long-run to build trust. 200 words is not long; such things are expected in the very basic of workplaces. Plus, I tried to hold the Meta-Governance WG accountable as you know. Nothing came out of it; Meta-Governance WG is still dead.
I am fine with six-month term for now. I guess we can wait for active stewards before increasing it to one year, if necessary.
1 Like
This is not about “pandering” in any sense. It’s simply that requiring someone to redelegate their vote away from the person they want nominated, in order to vote for them, is a really weird norm to set, and extremely unintuitive.
“I’m standing for Meta-Governance Steward! If you agree I should be elected, whatever you do, don’t give your vote to me.”
I think making decisions based on the assumption that people don’t mean what they do is a bad example, and very paternalistic.
Can we please focus on the topic here, of EP4 amendments? If you want to discuss wider voting reform, that should be its own topic.
2 Likes
Fair point. We do not have a good enough solution to replace the current system with. Something the Meta-Gov WG will have to give a deep thought to.
+1
“The people do not vote as I have expected, hence it must mean that they’re voting is wrong!”
Using this starting point make a series of guesses (“voters did not care who they delegated their votes to”, "They are also not going to return to re-delegate despite the free re-delegation windows. “…if ENS tokenholders were informed decision-makers, but the reality is that they are not.”), which you seem to treat as “facts”, and your all course of action follows that.
I do not agree at the moment with these assumptions, as you understood from my humourous reply (take it in good spirit!), but I especially don’t think it’s a discussion for here.
EP4 doesn’t discuss the delegation process. It assumes the process exists and is good. This means that the rules of EP4 should come from an assumption that if people delegate their votes to someone, they did it intentionally and for their own good reasons.
Now, adopt for a second this assumption. Under this assumption, do you think people should be able to vote for themselves with coins that were delegated to them?
If not, then why?
If yes, then I suggest having the discussion on how to make sure the delegation process achieves this assumption (redelegation? decay weight on delegated votes? or maybe the current process does work?) in another thread, since it’s a completely independent topic.
1 Like
I am inclined to agree. I expected that this amendment will be controversial and it indeed requires a longer independent discussion on its own next term.
On a sidenote: I am timed out from liking posts for 10 hours. Who did this to me? 
Please let me use the emoji reactions 
2 Likes