Really appreciate everyone for trying out Optimism Agora Beta with the first test proposal and giving us such helpful feedback.
Weāve been reading all the posts, comments, and messages on Discord/Twitter/Discourse, and really appreciate the thoughtful responses. Special thank you to @lavande, @diligit, @TanBinh and the other mods for helping us triage, loop into convos and surface great feedback.
The feedback has been invaluable as we work to improve Agora and build the best governance system for Optimism. Over the last week, weāve consolidated a list of todos and also implemented some changes and feature improvements based on what weāve heard so far (see below!).
As many of you have pointed out, thereās still a ton of work to be done, and improvements to be made. Agora is far from a complete product yet.
So, in that spirit, wanted to kick off this thread to consolidate: feedback, feature requests, suggestions, anything really that you want to see built. At the end of the day, we are committed to supporting the Optimism ecosystem ā and plan to build in the public.
Our first set of changes from last week,
Feb 27th change log:
Fixed Quorum calculations
Confirmed that all known multisigs are able to submit votes
Improved voting & delegation on mobile
Improved UI clarity on the cast vote dialog
Added delegation & voting loading states
Added a profile dropdown to display more information:
Thereās still a bunch of feedback that we havenāt had the chance to implement yet, we plan to release another update in the next few weeks to follow up on those. In the meantime, please keep the feedback coming - it really does help shape the future of Agora for Optimism.
My discord is also open: zcf#9299 for any DMs (please donāt hold back, love all the screenshots, suggestions, and drawings! )
Hey! Thanks for the work being done by Agora. Itās very valuable. Was wondering if the front-end is open source currently? And if not, why not? I think it is important for large protocol DAOs to have a diverse set of governance interfaces and making Agora open-source/forkable is a way to help promote that. Also think it is important for the code to be front-end for community audit/verification purposes! Thanks.
100%, we feel the same. Weāre also committed to making Agora open and allow others to build on top of. Today, only pieces are open as we havenāt had the time to document and we prioritized implementing new features and fixing bugs as more urgent. We have it in our roadmap to open source everything we build as part of Agora (ETA: probably a couple of months) ā weāve made that commitment from our initial proposal: [REVIEW] [GF: Phase 1 Proposal] Agora
However, we have a few pieces that are already open:
As you can see here it is impossible to search for anyone other than those with the most voting power creating a pyramid scheme for delegates who are at the top.
The smaller delegates will work hard to help grow the network like myself but never receive any sort of delegation based on these efforts.
Nor is there any way to see activity here on the discourse forums or link to their account on the OP Gov forums from Agora ā¦
What about integrating the badges here on the forums with the delegates profile on Agora as well to show their involvement and get a good idea if the person you are delegating too is active or not ???
Instead it has became a huge barrier for anyone to become involved with the OP Governance as a small underprivileged or less fortunate team or individual.
Iām appalled at how the priority to fix this has taken not only a back burner but itās not even mentioned that there will be any updates in the notion documentation.
Here is what I had previously pointed out as issues with the search & discovery on Agora for other delegatesā¦.!
Let me remind you that these improvements have not been made all while the round two airdrop was put out!!!
Meaning that it was a lot easier for people to continue delegating to the people who had the most tokens at the top of the search, and creating a very unfavorable an unfair advantage for other delegates within the governanceā¦
This appears to be a coordinated effort to control the voting power on Optimism and direct the newly distributed tokens to the top delegates instead of any other candidates.
This is a huge problem, and the balance of delegations is heavily outweighed with members who are more active and who do not have as many delegation points.
It has caused a major segregation of class between delegates that have the power to vote and change things, and those who do notā¦!
One of which also leads to a discriminatory system of leadership where dominant power resides within the top percentile of the delegates who are not willing to give up their own self delegation power to another member of the committee.
As well as the way those delegates reputation are presented to the rest of the community as the most powerful people on the protocol, even though they may not even be active in the community discussions or developmental proceduresā¦
I believe this is where a huge part of the disconnect on these issues comes from when speaking to the teams on discord and the actual governance themselves who are not in charge of running or maintaining the discord.
Hopefully this open forum will provide the discussion that is needed here in the space to continue moving forward in an unilateral and universal way that we can all work together.
Delegates who have a voice and a passion for blockchain scaling technology on Optimism should be able to have their voices heard by the rest of the governance and help make important voting decisions. Otherwise there may be some serious issues that arise.
Once again, I waited, almost a full 10 Months to have my delegate commitment posted on the interface for the optimism websiteā¦ Then less than a few weeks after Agora comes out eliminating the need for attention driven to the OP website.
Supposedly, I had missed the deadline, even though I had submitted within the last 24 hours for my original delegate commitment last spring.
I was really hoping when the second airdrop came out that it would be a great opportunity for me to be able to get more tokens delegated to me, but this has totally prevented me from any sort of chance to increase my voting power here within the governance.
It has disheartened me and discouraged me from wanting to be involved with optimism, because it seems like it is just a pyramid or a Ponzi scheme, and there is no chance for me to ever gain any sort of recognition for any of the work that I do hereā¦
I am passionate about Blockchain technology and public goods, and really wish that it was easier for others to have an equal opportunity within the governance of optimism!!!
First of all, great job on Agora, overall the experience has been very pleasant as a voter!
I just wanted to share some of the feedback I shared on my delegate commitment thread. I understand some of my ideas are more related to metagovernance than for agora itself, but some points are still relevant imo (such as the delegate discovereability):
The creation process for the Delegate Commitment page was enjoyable. I like how much easier it is to modify than the legacy version, and how it keeps track of voter stats.
Voting itself was also fairly painless, the interface is pretty, and I enjoy how easy it is to read the justifications on the page.
Finally, one big concern for me is the Delegates page. Currently, the only two filters are sorting by number of votes delegated and number of delegations (both giving similar results).
Because of this last point, discoverability of new Delegates has now gone significantly down. Most of the visible votes are delegates which have been here from Season 0, with the most ārecentā delegates being from a month after that.
Of course, all of these people are incredible and have earned their top spots, but I worry that with the current system we will be encouraging new people entering the collective to delegate to the top ~20 delegates, snowballing their voting power. This could mean not only a significantly higher burden on those individual delegates, but a more difficult fight for new Delegates to acquire visibility and power. Iād love to discuss with others what ways we could avoid this centralisation, while also leading users to candidates to trustworthy and high-quality Delegates.
Some random ideas that come to mind:
Allow delegates with more than x% supply to hide their delegation from results. This action could be rewarded in someway to encourage it on active delegates, or could be automatically enforced after a threshold is reached.
Introduce the option to filter by delegate age (only allow delegates that have voted for either more or less than x months)
Maybe allow citizen badgeholders to select ārecommended delegatesā that currently have low delegation, but might be worth highlighting. This is my favourite idea, as it gives a further tie to the bicameral system, makes the selections flexible, and allows some critical curation.
TL;DR - I would suggest adding some other delegate filters so itās not only sorting by what is essentially two ways of showing the top delegates. Currently, if you do not actively know the delegate then itās unlikely youāll find them naturally using Agora.
Thank you @FractalVisions and @Oxytocin. Appreciate you both writing down such detailed thoughts (going to DM you to brainstorm more). This is fantastic feedback. Clearly lots more to do here, and we couldnāt agree more!
Overall, the problem of āhow do we (a) surface and reward high-quality delegates and (b) also bring new voices to the ecosystemā seems to be the theme here, definitely what weāre looking to focus on for this next iteration of Optimism Agora.
Going to summarize some of the feedback, please keep me honest on whether Iāve covered it all!
top of our mind too, added. Right now itās āexactā match only. Weāre starting to investigate fuzzy search or partial search for the next iteration.
these are great, added. Would love to brainstorm more on a few other ways to filter and sort for quality delegates. Let me know if any other ideas come to mind!
This idea of adding in incentives to ārecluseā oneās self from further delegation is interesting. It would certainly be a more complicated feature (as it begs the question of what parameters), but I look forward to see more of discussion of this direction by the community.
Generally speaking, we are starting to look different ways to āfilterā and āsortā, and this is all with the goal of better surfacing high-quality delegates. Some other ideas weāve heard and gathered are:
Voting streaks
Last 6mo voting participation
Filter based on their areas of interest (inspired by @diligitās post)
Filter based on their role
Very possible Iāve missed parts or misinterpreted wording, please donāt hesitate to correct me
Excited to keep jamming on this and figure out the next iteration of Agora for Optimism
Is there any timeline on when this will be fixed for better delegate discovery ?
Both Karma hq and Agora have similar problems and that is probably amplifying how many tokens go to the top delegates. This seems to have gotten out of control with little to no hope for anyone else to gain voting power prior to the Bedrock proposal.
A filter to show the delegates with less than .5% voting power might also be really nice in order to sort delegates for ease of discovery.
That came to my mind last night, and I didnāt want to forget, adding it to the forum here.
A small nit: Should this dropdown say Most delegators rather than Most delegates? I think of Delegate = Person voting, Delegator (or a better word) = Address choosing to delegate their tokens.
If not already, a filter on >0 OP tokens of each delegator may make sense (or some other ādustā threshold).
A lot of our focus this week and next little bit is on site stability and robustness as the Bedrock vote is coming.
In terms of new features, on the docket for next week or two:
New sorting: Most active, sort by number of votes casted in the past
New storing: Random, random given the person has more than X votes or X voting power (weāre still trying to figure out what X is)
Auto save on delegate statements and descriptions (ty @FractalVisions)
Display userās vote in first position (we think especially relevant to anyone whoās not a big delegate/vote block)
Weāre debating if we should do āLast 6mo voting participationā rather than āMost activeā. We also want to make sure weāre not adding so many sorts that itās confusing to people as more is not always clearer.
Afterwards, we plan to look at voting streaks (something we have for Nouns to give a sense of what it would look like). Then we want to investigate filters, weāre starting to work the design of that. One problem weāve seen in the past is that people check all the boxes for āinterestā and ārolesā, so weāll likely want to have some way to force people to rank or pick.
This is a good idea, Iāll DM you ā would need to figure out how to get this data or operationalize it. Some initial thoughts on our end when it comes to implementation would be: who decides what badges? (Maybe Citizens house? Or do we just take from Discourse?). I think would be cool to have something more Optimism native than the standard Discourse badges.
Great idea, kinda like the random sort weāre going to ship soon ā going to add to the list too!
Good morning itās a beautiful day today!
This aspect needs to be as accurate as possible which may get confusing with the discourse badge system.
Another double edge use case that was brought up is that people would farm for the status so this does need some more thought put into it.
Iām going to have to agree here and say on chain data recognition attached to the citizen house members may be more appropriate.
My instinct was general criteria (i.e. assume somebody delegating 0 is not delegated). Not sure if there is a good use case for counting all delegators instead of āactive balanceā delegators." But maybe it could be two fields?
Wanted to add some more thoughts on the importance of being able to change votes following how this voting cycle is going.
The current voting cycle is ending in a couple days, and not a single proposal has reached quorum yet. I donāt believe this is a result of vote apathy or voter inactivitity, as many large delegates have explicitly stated that they are forced to wait until the last moment due to the inability too change votes. This is especially impactful this season because a single vote carries as much as 14 sub-choices . Combine this with the bugs early-on the vote cycle being un-amendable (only some of the choices being tallied) , I believe this lack of flexibility is significantly degrading the voter experience.
Could we have some insight on the technical feasibility of votes being changeable soon? And if technical, when could we expect this feature to roll out, do you all believe it could be ready for the next voting cycle?
Do you think this is also a problem with standard āYes / Noā votes? Why do you think folks are waiting for specifically these props and not āYes / Noā votes? Curious to get peopleās thoughts here.
While it requires some technical work, the question boiled down to more of: āshould editing votes be enabled?ā discussion and there hasnāt been one obvious answer as weāve heard feedback on both sides.
We were chatting about this internally, but I think we could use a bit more insight and feedback from the community. Thank you for bringing this discussion back up @Oxytocin
Iām curious to get your thoughts (and love for others to chime in too here) on two questions we didnāt have great clarity on:
If āediting your votesā is enabled, how does that change intended behavior of delegates? Will folks vote once and then last min change votes, but for what reason?
If weāre enabling āediting your votesā for these types of Mission proposals, should they also be enabled for regular āFor / Againstā votes? Which was never the case in the first place.
The current setup is consistent with all on-chain voting in general (Uniswap, Nouns, ENS, etc). Once the vote has been casted on-chain, it cannot be changed, edited, or revoked. So we would be breaking a bit of social precedent here with Optimism, but I think the bigger question is likely: āDoes enabling vote editing create net positive behavior for the OP community?ā
From a decision perspective: I would also encourage that we should leave the ātechnical feasibilityā out of the question for now, Iām sure weāll figure out a way or work with all the smart folks in this community to a solution
Uniswap & ENS both use Snapshot too which does allow you to change your vote after it is cast, and the onchain voting, at least for ENS, is mostly for ratification of the snapshot vote. This is also the case for Gitcoin and Arbitrum (where I am also a delegate). Also old AragonOS DAOs can be set so you can change your vote as well if that matters.
If agora was the second vote and only used for ratification of a snapshot vote, I think it would make sense to limit vote editing, but in its current usage, I think it would be a lot better to enable vote editing.
If enabled it would allow people to vote partially in complex votes (like the ones that are up now) and comeback and finish voting as time permits. Also some times new information is presented to the voter such that they may want to change their vote near the end
But if you canāt change your vote, then the delegate is incentivized to wait till the very end to vote, this creates a lot of stress for the delegate and the people that are impacted by the results of the vote.
Snapshot is by far the dominant voting interface in DAOs and it enables vote editing. Vote editing is also just more human and forgiving, which is where DAO governance should make an effort to become. UX is so bad in crypto in general, giving people the freedom to fix a mistake and change their vote is one small step towards improving it.
āDoes enabling vote editing create net positive behavior for the OP community?ā
Yes, absolutely. itās a key QoL improvement considering the number of people whoāve made mistakes. Until the UX design is bombproof, locking votes shouldnāt even be an option.
Charlie here from team Agora.
)
but weāll get there in a couple of months!
results in blank page error.
receive any sort of delegation based on these efforts.
on Agora for other delegatesā¦.!
top of our mind too, added. Right now itās āexactā match only. Weāre starting to investigate fuzzy search or partial search for the next iteration.
itās a beautiful day today!
