Hey everyone, I wanted to share some thoughts, especially around the proposed changes to Delegate Feedback (DF) and how the scoring math shakes out for smaller delegates.
DF Thresholds in Practice
@Hawheik already did the math in a previous comment, but it really hit me. If you’ve got around 50k voting power, a perfect voting record, and show up to every call (getting that 5% bonus), you’d still need to score at least 14.6 points in Delegate Feedback to qualify for Tier 3.
Now, on paper that might seem doable. But in reality? Only about 12% of delegates managed to pull that off in the last round. That’s 8 out of 66 people. And now the proposal suggests grading DF even more stringently, narrowing the pool of comments that count, and only giving credit to stuff that has some kind of external validation or clear “impact.”
I get where that’s coming from (we want quality over quantity) but if we’re already at just 12% of people passing that DF bar, making it even stricter is just going to filter out more small but active delegates. That’s not the direction we should be heading in.
DIP is the last open door
Here’s the bigger picture. With OpCo becoming more involved and AAE’s managing most of the DAO stuff, things are naturally getting more centralized. That’s not necessarily evil, sometimes you need structure. But it also means that fewer and fewer people are in charge of more and more of what happens.
And that’s where DIP comes in. The DIP program is honestly one of the last open spaces in the DAO where new, small, or independent delegates can actually participate, get recognized, and be rewarded. If we now make DF harder to earn and gate everything behind a Voting Power multiplier that’s applied to the eligibility formula, we’re basically slamming the door shut on everyone who doesn’t already have big bags or institutional backing.
A few suggestions
If we want to keep things fair and avoid concentration, here’s what I’d propose:
- Don’t tighten DF scoring further. If the proposal volume is going down, then there’s no real reason to be stricter with feedback grading. If anything, it could stay as-is or become more inclusive.
- Normalize DF scores every month. Take the highest DF score, scale it to 40, and adjust everyone else proportionally. That way, you’re not grading against some “perfect delegate” ideal, just against the best performer in any given month.
- Move the Voting Power multiplier to the payouts, not eligibility. VP should impact how much you earn, not whether you qualify at all. Right now it’s acting like a gatekeeper.
- If none of that works, at least lower the threshold (e.g. Tier 3 from 65 to 60) or let the call bonus go higher than 5%.
- Finally, I’d love to see some decentralization metrics tracked over time: like how many <100k VP delegates qualify each month, or how much influence small feedback actually has on proposals. Give us something to measure progress (or regression).
At the end of the day, I do see where SEED is coming from: the rewards need trimming, and the system needs to be fairer. But we shouldn’t fix one problem by creating another, especially if that problem is pushing out the exact kind of people we need more of.
Let’s not forget what made this DAO strong in the first place: people showing up, giving feedback, asking dumb questions (guilty), and building legitimacy from the ground up.