How to combat gamification of voting

Simple Summary

This Ideation aims at finding ways to combat gamification of the temperature check voting on the Forum. I kindly ask the DAO members to express their views on how we could solve the problem.

Motivation

There is evidence of gamification attempts in temperature check voting, including in Deploy Euler on XDC Network and the Donation Request for Earthquake Relief Fund in Turkiye, and concerns that bots may target other proposals.

The current problem is characterised by:

  1. Extraordinary high level of participation in comparison to previous proposals and given the total number of active users on the Forum.
  2. Big wave of new users registered right before a particular proposal was published or right after it was published.

There are three types of risk the DAO is facing:

  1. Bad proposals manipulate tempcheck to be put on the vote;

  2. Good proposals are gamified (possibly by competitors) so that they are not put to a vote;

  3. Good proposals are gamified either “for” or “against” so that the DAO has suspicion of the bad intentions of the author of the proposal thus casting a shadow on his/her reputation

Possible solutions

For the time being the community suggested two options:

  1. Make voting on the Forum public so that the DAO could check whether real users with proven track record or bots vote
  2. Give users with lvl 2 or above rights to vote on the Forum

I feel that these two steps are necessary but not enough to iredicate the problem. So any other ideas are more than welcome.

4 Likes

I agree with your solutions, especially with making votes on the forum public. Since anyone is free to make an account, it is easy to be vulnerable to spam.

What makes a user level 2? Do we have a record of what makes users level 1,2, or 3 etc.

Hi @Bobbay_StableLab ! Yeah, u are right Levels issue needs clarification. What is meant is that the Forum assigns levels based on the user’s activity. Levels could be checked in the Badges section of a user profile


Definitely an issue that needs tackled. I think the suggested steps are a good way to start.

There could even be POAP’S for those who hit milestones on the Forum.

This adds complexity obviously and might be a step too far. But it’s something to bear in mind as things progress. I can imagine this area will continue to be gamed.

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I thought there would be specific criteria for becoming level 2 like; time spent on forum, comments made, likes done etc.

It seems like it is just based on time right now?

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That’s a good suggestion @knightsemplar about POAPs, maybe admins could clarify whether it is possible to connect POAPs to the forum
I can imagine this area will continue to be gamed. Definitely, so probably someone could come up with some unusual idea

@Bobbay_StableLab Not just time, there is a good article I found explaining the trust levels Understanding Discourse Trust Levels it includes time spent, comments, likes, etc. Not sure whether it is possible to customise the criteria

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I personally think that time spent, comments and like should be enough to add barrier to vote. Let’s not over engineer solution for this game voting. We could always make the criteria even more difficult later on but there’s always the possibility of discouraging new entrance.

We also have always snapshot to become the last protection against these kind of spamming

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I personally think that time spent, comments and like should be enough to add barrier to vote.

Then we can start with Trust Level 1 and see how the things going. It will prevent one-time users to affect the tempcheck

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Agree with the messages above on adding tiers to forum messages and votes etc & I know thats not about it but kinda falls under same category so gonna mention anyways, imo “abstain” vote as an option is making votes more gameable.

A “No” vote essentially means: “go back, do better and come back if you want to”

Abstain gives ZERO actionable info and just occupies space in the quorum. Not voting would mean “abstaining” and would actually make the quorum functionality to work as intended. People who abstain would kill the proposals by pushing them under quorum.

I think this “abstain” as an option is another place where gov gets gamed and deviates from how its supposed to work.

Hey @AliG , thanks for your comment! Just a little story behind the Abstain voting. It was designed within the governance reform. There were two steps: Active Delegates and Recognised Delegates. Both of them require a certain number of participation rate in order to keep the status of AD or RD. So the Abstain option helped people ,in case of the conflict of interest , to keep the participation rate but at the same time do not influence on the results.

However, the RD programme unfortunately failed. At the same time AD requires 60% participation rate that can be easily preserved (imo, conflicts of interests do not happen very often). In this regard, if the community prefers to go back to yes and no options only, it will not affect active community members. But as u rightly pointed out, it would be the topic for another proposal.

2 Likes

We could’ve renamed abstain into “i don’t know what to do” :joy:

Thank you for this suggestion @Raslambek I agree with you on the need to combat gamification. I think the solutions which you have proposed are steps in the right direction but not the final solution.

Making votes public has its own drawback such as the voting process itself influencing the vote results

is a good option as well, however this method can suffer from centralization. We should investigate solutions like https://passport.gitcoin.co/ for the long run.

Hi @jengajojo ! Gitcoin passport is indeed a valuable tool to prevent sybils. Do u know, whether it is possible to connect passport to the Forum?
At the same time, my concern with GP is that its score is not connected to the ElerDAO. I mean, a user could score above 20 for example, by proving poap holdings, email, gitcoin tokens and something else, but it does not mean that he/she is a responsible EulerDAO member, so anyway could be a one time jumper to shill some proposal

Making votes public has its own drawback such as the voting process itself influencing the vote results Yeah, u have a point here

Yeah you can integrate GP with forum.

This is a controversial point imo, while some proposals are absolute shills others may actually be helpful. What we want to avoid imo is sybil attacks and spams. The former is addresses by solutions like GP, the latter by a forum mod for example. In either case, there are solutions like https://otterspace.xyz/ which can offer soul and time bound tokens to easily implement basic gating.

I tend to agree with @patria comment. Think we should keep the process open and in its current form.

Proposal which showed sign’s of staged votes like the XDC Network proposal were anyway picked out by members here and never made it to a vote. From our point of view soft consensus on these obvious manipulations are sufficient.

In the end, EUL tokens cannot be faked (thanks to blockchain) and hence wisdom of the EUL token holders will triumph in the end, regardless.

P.S.: I think as a dao, our energies would be better spent focusing on bringing in wide participation (which is different to participation from any kind of committee/agency/council/etc).

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Hi @shaishav0x, thanks for your feedback. On the one hand I agree with u on the XDC Network example, on the other hand having 500 EUL they could have put it to the vote. While EUL token holders shall have a final say, too many unneccessary proposals putting to a vote will eventually lead to the voting apathy. In this regard, I believe that discussion on the forum and temp check are vital filters. And I think u agree on this.

Lastly, the temp check is primarily to ensure proposals are well discussed and only valid proposals make it for voting. (Your quote taken from another discussion).

Therefore, tempcheck should not be just a formal process

1 Like