As we slowly drift towards Season 2, I thought I’d make a suggestion for a method of tracking social earnestness. I believe that we should try to track earnest behaviour both on-chain and off, and while I leave the specifics of on-chain earnestness up to the team, I think I have an idea on how to better implement social earnestness while avoiding spammy/bad interactions in the discord.
First, I’d like to recap some common criticisms leveled against the earnest mechanics of Season 1, to add context on some of the choices in this concept. I’d describe the primary complaints as follows:
- No transparency as to how ‘earnest’ social behaviour was calculated.
- Perceived inequality of awarded tokens (“I posted all day and got nothing while X influencer gets awarded for one thread”)
- No rewards for the “quietly earnest” population.
- Big push at the end to ‘tally everything up’ felt manual & sloppy, ‘No cloud left behind’ program tacitly reinforced that assumption as a seeming admission from the team at their own imperfection.
To counter, I’d like to propose a solution that solves all of these issues without disrupting our core principles, that being to provide more allocation towards users aligned with the protocol, not just large users.
First, I propose we split the earnest allocation into a “community drop” and a “protocol drop”. The “community drop” rewards users who actively participate in threads, proposals, discussion, etc. or are otherwise seen as pillars of our community who can be relied on to help organise us. The “protocol drop” is an on-chain analysis of holding activity of both $CLOUD and our LSTs, Primarily this is to sort out mercenary capital from loyal capital, and reward loyal capital more heavily. Personally I’d also recommend using the Sanctum Profile system to ban sybils upfront and then use a tiered system, as they bring much higher social goodwill from average participants vs a linear drop.
Second, I’d like to focus in on the “community drop”, as I believe I have a system that fixes all the existing complaints. The system is to create a hierarchy of Roles in the discord that are public. as an example, something like:
- Cloud Newcomer
- Cloud Apprentice
- Cloud Member
- Cloud Acolyte
- Cloud Master
The naming can be changed to be cloud themed, sanctum themed, etc. The main idea is that we create a clear system of ranking which indicated how aligned you’ve been to the community.
As Season 2 progresses, we allow staff, cloud masters, and the highest-ranked cloud role to award ‘points’ to people in the discord who have done something worthy, such as a thoughtful post/discussion, new ideas for the protocol, dashboards, or other aligned activity. These points are easily made and tracked using a variety of discord bots. Higher ranks should take more points to achieve, creating a clear tiered system for how much different communitiy members have contributed.
The advantages of this system are as follows:
For the community:
- Transparent and verifiable rankings based on public activity, creating trust between members.
- Hierarchy helps dissipate questions from being only directed at the team, instead newbies can view the roles and ask high ranked community members simple questions, opening up more bandwidth for mods.
- No ‘bad surprises’. Since everyone can see their ranking as the season progresses, everyone knows roughly where they are. This invalidates a lot of common complaints about some people not getting what they expected.
- Any perceived inequality doesn’t all swell up at the end. Since these results happen in real time, any complaint over something not being rewarding is a small issue that can be addressed there and then, preventing a large buildup/outcry.
- Community members get immediate positive feedback for good ideas/contributions, making more contributions more likely. Many folks I think burnt out as they had no signal for whether their actions mattered at all.
For the team:
- A system that creates more trusted members allows the team to focus on product and messaging, while aligned users are given the public clout to help manage newcomers and trolls.
- The ‘points’ system allows tallying in real-time, so contributions don’t get lost in the flood of messages, and tallying isn’t some massive crunch that leaves the community impatiently waiting.
- Creating a public alignment system actually lowers the spam/troll rate, as poor behaviour can easily be reprimanded with real-time loss of points. This ought to stop most low-quality contributions, as they quickly see better contributions getting rewarded while they aren’t, encouraging them to either create meaningful work or spam elsewhere.
In conclusion, I think a public alignment system better rewards and encourages good behaviour, while reducing bad surprises and increasing communal trust.
For an example of a mature system, I’d like to mentation TempleDAO, who has a much more complex but very organized community, within which everyone feels they have a role, and a ladder up should they choose to contribute more.
See more here: Roles | Temple Rituals
Id also like to shoutout the Pathfinders community on creating roles to increase public trust. While less hierarchical, many newcomers seem to immediately catch on to the fact that members with impressive-sounding roles can be trusted for FAQs and other info when mods are offline or otherwise occupied. There also seems to be a lot of inherent respect paid to these members, and their words are taken with more clout than the beginner roles (which again encourages order over chaos).
Let me know what you all think!
The Earnest Shall Build Our New World