Proposal: Revert the Delegate Incentive Program (DIP) to Version 1.5

[paulofonseca]

@JoJo

Second, DIP 1.5 was quite good to bootstrap the delegates’ activity but had a huge collateral effect: a lot of noise and very less signal. For people that were in here, most of points were accrued for simply stating your own opinion, despite if it was provided in the first few days of discussion of the votes or later, and despite if others already provided the same opinion or not.
That had the byproduct effect of having a series of delegates creating a pletora of messages which, by a big amount, were just repetition of others.

@JoJo

We then moved to 1.6 which introduced two main changes:

• opinion provided has to be timely, has to be valuable, has to be new and fresh and not a repetition

This is blatantly incorrect @JoJo

The version 1.6 didn’t address the noise in the forum by introducing a timing or relevance criteria. Those were criteria that was kept from the original 1.5 version, until today.

What the 1.6 did was merge both the Communication Rationale (CR) criteria (which was 10 points) and the Delegate Feedback (DF) criteria (which was 30 points) into 1 single criteria worth (40 points) therefore increasing the proportion of subjective judgment of the delegates’ activity by the PMs, quite significantly.

The consequence of this change is that a lot of delegates (especially the big ones) stopped leaving vote rationales in proposals altogether, and just voting without any justification for their vote, which I think we would all agree is not a good outcome for the DAO.

The timing and relevance criteria in the subjective scoring of the comments in the forum, has been present in DIP since the 1.5 version. The issue, in my opinion, is that most delegates assumed incorrectly that they had to comment on all proposals to get more points and therefore more noise was generated, but that wasn’t a consequence of the formula of the DIP, it was maybe just poor communication from the PMs on how the score worked, and mostly a lack of understanding of some delegates on how the score was calculated.

You can check all changes that the 1.6 version introduced here:

[DIP v1.60] Updates Thread

Introducing v1.6 February 12th, 2025 Communication Rationale and Delegates’ Feedback Merge Abstract We are merging the Communication Rationale parameter into the Delegates’ Feedback (DF) category. As a result, the new maximum score for DF will increase to 40 points. Motivation and Rationale While Communication Rationale (CR) is often considered a fundamental task for any delegate, in practice, it only provides value when it includes meaningful (non-repetitive) feedback and, most importantly, w…