Do Pre-proposals Matter in Splinterlands?

There's a DAO proposal up right now to change tournaments to something many people feel is a bit more balanced than giving out thousands and thousands of $SPS weekly to people with cards that are no longer available to buy or rent.

In the pre-proposal this got 46 million votes with a 99.76% approval. Now that its live, it's getting destroyed. All the people who've used these tournaments to build up a massive war chest of the governance token have just put them all up against this proposal.

This might be the most successful pre-proposal ever that's about to turn into the least successful proposal ever. That begs the question, what is even the point in the pre-proposal system if it can miss this badly?

It's no secret that the SPS DAO is breaking new ground. This whole thing is an experiment we've never seen done at this scale before. The options for how it will work are all being tested and weighed and no one knows what its going to look like in its final form. However, it's becoming clear that the pre-proposal means just about nothing if most don't use it to vote.

On top of that, the pre-proposal system isn't even about passing the popular vote. It's just about getting enough votes to move forward. I don't think there's actually been a pre-proposal yet that didn't collect enough votes to move forward.

So what is the value of the pre-proposal system? It's two things. First, it acts as a gatekeeper against people submitting proposals for every thought that crosses their mind due to the $100 submission fee. But that could be added to the actual proposal phase and we could just skip the pre-proposal. The real benefit of the pre-proposal is the discussion period it allows. It opens up the floor for more community members to chime in and shape the proposal before it goes live.

Does this matter? Not really. When I put up my proposal to burn cards for RiftWatchers packs, I had in depth discussions with many community members. However, when it went live, I found that almost no one knew it was out there. I edited the proposal to align with the conversations I was having with the community during the pre-proposal and those edits completely confused everyone when it went live because they we're part of the discussion that caused the edits. To them, the proposal had come out of nowhere even though it was being heavily discussed on youtube, in the townhall, and in discord for a week.

And if we look at proposals like this one reworking tournaments, you'll see that this was discussed and shaped by Clayboyn for months with the community before going up for vote. Still, when it went live as an actual proposal, it was dead in minutes as the whales who hadn't paid attention during the months of discussion or the week of pre-proposal finally decided to make their voices heard. It seems they could have saved everyone a lot of trouble much earlier had we known how they were going to vote.

It's time to find a new system that brings the loudest voices into the conversation earlier. The current system is just wasting everyone's time and attention and it adds nothing positive tot he process.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha