Prove me wrong. But first, let me reiterate. The title was just a little bit clickbaity, sorry about that. The DAO itself is a great tool and it works as intended but how we distribute funds is utterly retarded. Let me demonstrate. We are currently paying 30k USD for glorified secretary work someone would have done for a thousand bucks but we can't seem to get the necessary votes to distribute 4kish USD for an app that would cost millions to develop in the real world.
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What the actual fuck is going on here?
Don't get me wrong though. I have nothing personally against @justineh.
She is a cool crypto chick who has been with us for a long time and has done a lot of work in the background to help get this place to where it is today.
The only two things I mind about her proposal are its outrageously high price-tag justified by the value of exchange listings (most of which we would get for free anyway) and how she single-handedly took all the creds for something she did not do on her own. As @lordbutterfly pointed out, thousands of us talking and screaming about Hive and the Steem hostile takeover on Twitter added fuel to the fire and greatly aided in assuring those listings take place as exchanges noticed how large and die-hard our community is, there is no denying that. Anyone who tries to deny this is either delusional or doesn't understand how big of an influence Twitter has in the crypto sphere.
I'm not going to go around saying that she should give out some of the money to everyone that posted about Hive on Twitter but I wonder if she is going to split some of that cash with the devs she mentioned helped her out. No mentions were made about this in her post so I'll conclude that she won't, unless she jumps in to say otherwise.
Anyway, after just a week after her initial post, Justine's proposal got over the funding threshold and started receiving daily payouts. The DAO is currently bleeding 500$ a day for this proposal for the next 58 days while @dapplr's proposal has been out in the wild for close to a month yet we are still 9 million HP in votes shy of getting it over the funding limit.
This is deeply disturbing.
I wonder....
...how do you justify funding something to the tune of 30k for 1000 USD worth of work while simultaneously not funding something else with 4kish USD worth millions of dollars?
Do you really think Justine's work deserves such a fat paycheck?
This is 4 years worth of average salary in my country. We could have easily gotten someone to do her work for 30 times less than what she is receiving.
Are you seriously telling me that no one else would have done it for free or at least much less? I beg to differ.
Are you blind to the value a top-notch mobile interface of the Hive blockchain would bring to this place?
Should we maybe find a real-world company to bill us a few million for the same exact product? Maybe then you will want to vote for the proposal, ye?
Is the amount bothering you?
Could it be that @dapplr is asking way too little making you suspicious?
Maybe they should as for 100k then.
I'd surely vote for them because they definitely deserve it. Hundreds of hours of front and back end development are worth much more than the measly amount they are currently asking for yet we still can't vote their proposal over the threshold.
If we don't do something about this, we will never attract any devs from outside of our tiny bubble which was one of the main purposes of implementing the DAO and sacrificing a portion of author rewards in the first place. If we keep funding community members with such outrageous amounts for basic work as communicating with exchange reps the crypto sphere and CT especially will see our DAO as a fucking value-draining joke. They will think of it as just another way to siphon value out of the chain while providing fairly little in return. If we continue in such a manner, expect CT to light this place on fire as soon as they pick up on it, which thankfully they still haven't.
Enough about the problems, let's talk solutions.
I see two issues at play.
Whales and the rest of the community.
Whales have too much power which is evidently presented in the fact that if they joined forces, just a few of them can pretty much vote any proposal in if they wanted to and a concerningly large percentage of the community is still dormant with the latter mostly not even aware of the DAO's existence let alone actually voting for proposals. Moving forward whales will only become more powerful as they increase their stake by curating/investing so that part of the problem is only going to intensify as we progress into the future. This is something we can't do much about other than increasing our personal stake. Users with higher stake have more influence which they fully deserve. What we can work on is educating the rest of the community about the DAO and urging them to vote on noteworthy proposals such as dapplr's.
I'm not sure how much HP not voting for any proposal there currently is out there, but I would bet my last dollar that it's at least 10 mil, probably much more than that and possibly enough to get over the funding threshold of circa 22 mil.
If we could get a large portion of that unused HP to actually vote for proposals, this would greatly alleviate the problems at play.
Educate, educate, educate and educate.
This is the first step we should take. Get as many people voting as possible.
The only other solution I have in mind is to increase our own stake to acquire greater influence.
If a thousand people got a thousand extra $hive that would be a million more tokens in the hands of the people. If we manage to do this a dozen times over the course of a year or two, the community might actually be able to outweigh the whales, who knows.
Awareness and token distribution are key.
If we consistently work on this, in a few year's time we might even get a fair fund allocation going on.
Until then, overvalued proposals and those which don't even deserve the funding in the first place will have a chance of receiving it.
Your thoughts?
I'd love to hear your solutions if you have any.
We are all in this together and only by having an open discussion can we achieve something.
Heck, instead of simply replying in the form of a comment you can even write a full post about it to let your followers know about the problems our DAO is facing.
Link them here and I'll review/curate them.