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1. Statements <140 characters
Most conceptual features of DePolis mirror those of the original Polis, including a character limit for participants’ statements. To understand this limitation, it’s important to highlight the key differences between governance forums and DePolis (“Gathering Arbitrum users’ opinions usecase”):
Purpose:
- forum: a decision-making hub - platform for in-depth discussions among skilled participants. Topics are debated in a sophisticated and often technical manner, with the goal of producing proposals, resolving disputes, and shaping policy.
- DePolis: a signal-gathering tool - platform for wide-scale participation, allowing anyone to express their opinion quickly and easily. Contributions are simplified, typically through short statements or by agreeing/disagreeing with others (upvoting/downvoting).
Irl-comparison:
- forum: parliament or council where elected representatives deliberate and negotiate policies.
- DePolis: “smart” non-binding (advisory) referendum, where the general population can vote or express opinions directly on key topics.
Accessibility
- forum: naturally exclusive due to the knowledge and skills required to participate effectively - primarily accessible to skilled participants, such as delegates, service providers, and large stakeholders with specialized knowledge.
- DePolis: radically inclusive by design, inviting participation from anyone regardless of expertise - open to everyone, including ordinary users.
The character limit in DePolis ensures that the platform remains accessible and manageable for broad participation. In other words, nobody is likely to vote on 100+ statements if each is over 500 characters long. This limit encourages concise, focused statements and avoids the complexity of long, forum-style debates. However, the exact character limit is flexible and can be adjusted based on user feedback.
You can also explore the vTaiwan governance framework, where Polis is used alongside other deliberation platforms like Discourse (forum).
2. The issue of manipulation
The most obvious manipulation scenario is a sybil attack. For example, a malicious actor might try to manipulate grant-related DePolis conversations to push a specific grant policy. The naive solution to this issue would be: “we must prevent sybils from participating”. In the original Polis use cases, sybil attacks weren’t a major concern. Some mitigation measures included using Facebook and Twitter authentication in combination with moderation policies. However, in a “highly-sybilled web3 environment” these approaches won’t work.
The core idea here is that preventing sybils from participating essentially boils down to properly defining the list of conversation participants. This depends on the topic of the conversation. Our approach is to define these participant lists ad hoc based on onchain data, minimizing the risk of sybil attacks. For example:
- in GameFi-related conversations, participants could be accounts that have interacted with a predefined list of smart contracts deployed by GameFi projects;
- in DeFi-related conversations, participants might include the top-500 users of the top-10 Arbitrum DeFi protocols;
- in general conversations, participants could be active users of the Arbitrum chain (e.g., those with 100+ monthly transactions and holding >10 ARB).
- and so on.
These ad hoc approaches can also be combined with other techniques, such as excluding accounts flagged as sybils or applying general conditions like “holding >0.01 ETH during the month”.
3. Incentives
As stated in the proposal, an intuitive solution seems to be incentivizing two categories of statement authors:
- those whose statements received the highest number of upvotes (participants who helped identify points of consensus);
- those whose statements received the most upvotes within their opinion groups (participants who helped identify points of disagreement).
Hence, posting low-value comments will not result in any rewards.
Whether people would want to participate in conversations by upvoting/downvoting without incentivization is a more complex question. In real-life Polis conversations, people engage because the discussed topic is important to them for some reason (e.g., it could be related to Airbnb or Uber city policies, climate change issues, etc. — you can find more case studies here. If we adopt the much-loved analogy of “blockchains = states”, we can assume that people will be willing to participate in discussions simply because the topics matter to them. However, whether significant participation in conversations can be achieved without any incentivization (but with minimal informational support from Arbitrum DAO voices) can only be determined in practice.
Other questions:
- overlapping with DIP: as mentioned above, the forum and DePolis have quite different natures and purposes.
- securing more funds for incentives: if the Arbitrum community finds DePolis and its outputs valuable for governance processes, it will likely be inclined to approve incentives for new conversations.