I am wondering if we need a voting delegation at all. Sharing my concerns against delegation below. Prove me wrong if you don’t agree.
More centralization, less democracy and risks of manipulation
If a delegator knows that someone will vote for him, then he will be less interested to go through proposals, learn them deeply and make decisions. And delegates can use this in their own favour.
Consider a hidden or separated from ApeCoin community of those who delegated their votes to their favourite influencer/project. He can communicate via his community channels for what proposal and why he will vote with delegated power of his audience. But he has space to interpret a proposal in some way that will be easier for him to convince his audience that his decision for some choice is better when it’s not. Also, delegators can even don’t know for what exactly delegates uses their votes. This creates opportunities to use this advantage to utilize delegated votes for personal benefit of small groups of players. Sounds a bit paranoid, but this can really happen, keeping in mind that voting activity is low at the moment.
Delegation of votes makes holders passive and make the community less active
Active participation in voting is a key step of involving the holders in the decision-making process. People who vote tend to learn more about the subject matter. This leads them to go to the forum and start reading what’s going on there. When you’ve read enough, you start talking, i.e. discussing and proposing. That’s how a Holder becomes a Bilder.
If for some reason a Holder decides to delegate his vote, he is less likely to dive into our community and we lose a potentially active member.
Hey, I am someone who likes the delegate system! There are a few reasons for that. You’re not wrong to say that after delegating, a holder likely becomes less active in the daily community here on discourse or following twitter.
Last I checked, more than 70,000 wallets held ApeCoin. Not all of these people want to follow the daily happenings, or are able to! Jobs and real lives are important and it makes it hard to follow each vote or potential AIP idea.
We DO need more active participants here on the forum & actively voting. Many many votes are not being placed. People are busy doing other things!
I think that the delegate system is a good thing because an active dedicated person can say “hey, I’ll follow this stuff and vote smart,” and be able to increase their influence and voting power.
I also like to have the option to delegate. I have not done it yet, but feel that I will likely in the future. Learning who can balance your individual interests with the 40 thou ft view for me is key. The more I read others posts the more I start to understand them. Imho, many of those people who are voting more likely than not, just see where the “popular/prolofic” posters are voting and go with the flow. At present I have been able to read every single post since inception from everyone, however as this space grows this will be unrealistic. Gaining trust in another party to cast my votes is a good thing imo. Also, if you don’t like the way they are voting, then one can take their votes back, so this is a checks and balances of sorts. It will indeed cause less participation…but in two years from now…do we really need 2million participants? Those that are most effectual will surface and their logic and reasoning will give clairity. This is my opinion.
I’m a bit on the fence when it comes to delegation of votes myself. I think both sides of the discussion have very valid points.
I propose that instead of abolishing delegates, how about limit the amount of people a delegate can vote for. It would increase decentralization as well as provide the utility that delegate have.
how about this … if someone chooses to delegate their vote because maybe they have other things they have to attend to periodically.perhaps those that delegate can still vote if they choose but they could have a default so no one misses a vote if they don’t want to and can leave the decision up to their delegate when it occurs after a certain threshold of time… like a safety net… with fluid participation. or after said delegate takes your vote maybe it should only count as some fraction of a vote seeing as you aren’t reading and analyzing proposals… that’s totally off the top of my head may be crazy talk heh
Hey Sauly, I think your idea for a default setting is really good. If a user doesn’t vote, then their delegate gets to vote. I really like that idea! As its setup right now, users must manually delegate and revoke from the snapshot website: https://snapshot.org/#/delegate/apecoin.eth
There were early talks about quadratic voting - where the more tokens people had, the less they counted for - after a certain number like 100k. We haven’t seen any abuse of our voting system, so i’m not sure those changes are necessary. That could change in the future though!
We had a problem happen recently where many holders weren’t paying attention to these forums and they didn’t like the proposal that came up for vote. I think we’ll see many more small proposals come up that are trying to “slip through,” so in that sense, having watchful delegates helps prevent that. People have real lives and cant always follow the small day to day.
In one or another way we need the option to delegate, but it should be more transperent and distributed, so we would not meet the situation where we have a very small groups of players who can turn any proposal in their favor. Maybe to think about such a proposal to do so.
Something I saw on the FLR network might work well here also, essentially you can propose a CAP on the power given to any one individual. As an example if a CAP of 10 million APE coin’s was the cap any delegations above that level to that individual will have no impact that individuals voting power.
This is generally speaking how Snapshot delegation works. It would be good to get confirmation on this from the team, since it’s dependent on the Snapshot voting strategy setup.
From the Snapshot docs:
If you want to delegate your voting power to another wallet address, you can do this using the “delegation strategy”. In delegation strategy, if A delegates to B and both of them vote, then the delegated voting power is not calculated. Only the vote of A will be calculated. The vote of B will be counted if A does not vote.
I see this in action first hand with Votium, for those familiar. I have my Convex vote weight delegated to Votium, but usually vote myself, overriding the delegation.
As for delegation, I don’t agree that it reduces decentralization, in practice. People delegate because they don’t intend to vote. The likely alternative to not delegating isn’t being active, it’s being inactive. Which reduces the total vote weight being utilized, which increases the weight of any one voter.
Possible that a large holder could also become a large delegate, but also possible that the average delegate is a better voice of the community than a large holder.
Also, delegators can even don’t know for what exactly delegates uses their votes
Yes they do. You can see what your delegate voted for. They don’t vote separately for delegated votes, they vote once and their own vote weight is combined with the vote weight delegated to them (minus votes cast by delegators, as seen above).
You realize disallowing delegations increases centralization. Users delegate to delegates that share the same vision as them. Participating in governance is extremely time intensive which is why the average apecoin holder is likely best off delegating to someone they know will participate in governance actively. Having a diverse set of delegates is the way to go.