Reward More/Less For Governance-Related Action/Inaction?
I've written yesterday about the one-year expiration time for governance-related votes. We are now 2 days away from the time it went into effect, a year ago (on June 30th, 2021).
A conversation I had in the comments section with @milaan gave me the idea for this post. That and some information shared by the LeoFinance team regarding the governance votes on the PolyCub platform. From there we find that:
Only about 20% of users have actually participated in the xPOLYCUB Yield Governance voting.
Now, in PolyCub's case, there are circumstances:
- it doesn't have a governance UI yet
- users only have a direct voting option (no proxy, like on Hive)
But still, 20% means 4 in 5 users didn't vote yet for governance.
Now, I don't have the numbers for Hive, but would be very useful for comparison. Hive must be doing better having both governance interfaces and the possibility to set proxies.
What however I feel is missing in both cases is the lack of desire to get involved, in many cases because the vote impact is too little and doesn't justify the effort in the user's eyes. Either that or simply people forget and they need to be reminded to update their votes.
You can't do much about people who forget, other than remind them, at the interface level, that they haven't changed their votes in a while. Or maybe if they vote for an inactive witness.
But what is an option is to either reward additionally or reduce rewards if people vote/don't vote for governance for a certain period of time.
Of the two options, I'm in favor of rewarding additionally those who do their job, rather than punishing those who don't. After all, not voting can be a choice. And I don't believe it should be punished.
But rewarding those who do take action, that's something to consider, maybe. Although, if we are talking about the same source for the rewards - and normally we would - giving more to some users automatically means giving less to others.
One idea is that the interest on HP is paid only to those exerting their governance votes during a certain period of time (last 3 months?). Since not everyone votes on governance actions regularly, the HP interest for those who do should be higher as well. While those who don't, will not receive any interest for their HIVE Power.
Another idea is to (partially?) reroute HIVE from some of the sources where it normally gets burned right now to those voting on governance regularly. Here are some of these sources:
- creating new accounts
- HIVE -> HBD conversion fee
- ?
There are other sources of burned HIVE, like converting HIVE -> HBD or direct burning by sending to @null, but in these cases, HIVE needs to stay "burned". Burned author rewards and setting @null as a beneficiary is another way of burning directly, and it implies the express desire of the author to burn those tokens.
@taskmaster4450 proposed in some of his posts about improving HBD the introduction of very small transaction fees on the internal market, for example. Maybe other fees I don't remember right now. He thought they can be used to boost HP holders' rewards.
An iteration of that idea would be that such fees would be used to pay only users who are active in their governance role (including regular voters).
Please share your opinion. How do you think participation
in governance can be improved? Will tweaking rewards work? Should that be the incentive or the desire should come from within?
