We are running into this “delegate discovery” problem across the governance ecosystem. A few delegate sorting (ish) ideas we’ve been thinking about at Tally:
- Filter for delegates that are “actively seeking delegations”. This could be something the Collective requires active delegates to select, or it could be pulled from activity on recent votes (similar to @polynya’s idea of mixing delegate activity into the sorting mechanism).
- Create an “Emerging delegates” view. Prioritize delegates outside of the current top 50 by voting power (for example) who have recently received delegation. Another way this could be done is to prioritize delegates who have recently received new delegation by the percentage of their current total voting power that the new delegation represents. This would favor delegates who currently have lower voting power but are actively receiving delegation.
- Run a delegate competition specifically for smaller delegates. The Collective would select from a new potential crop of aspiring larger delegates based on an application process, narrowing down to perhaps ten. Then, those ten delegates would campaign for 1-2 weeks in the Collective trying to attract re-delegated votes, followed by a 1 week re-delegation period.
I think it would be interesting to run a test of one or more of these ideas, analyze the results, and share with the Collective. We would love to have the opportunity to run such a test on Tally, but are happy to support regardless.
One side note: I think it’s important to retain the delegate view that sorts by voting power as an option for users to select, even if it is not the default. I think there will always be a desire to know who the biggest delegates are and how much voting power they have.
Excited to contribute to this discussion!