Snapshot Feedback

Hi everyone! This is the place where any comments, feedback, or suggestions for Snapshot should be brought forward. We’ve been delighted to see the creative usage of digital governance systems in Bancor’s community, and now we want your opinion. What can we improve? You can either reply to this thread with a quick suggestion or create a new thread in this category to talk about a more significant issue or recommendation.

We are looking forward to hearing your ideas!

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During the Bancor community call on September 19, a few ideas were brought forward:

  • An option to abstain that helps pass the quorum without disturbing the Yes/No balance.
  • Visual markers that indicate how a proposal is doing - for example, the progress bar on the right should be green if the proposal is on track to pass and red if it isn’t.
  • Further decentralizing Snapshot’s system

If any of these topics are of interest to you, feel free to write down why below!

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  • Adjust current vote counting from # of vBNT to quadratic voting based on vBNT

  • Have snapshot voter rolls count only:

    1. voters participating in prior votes over the past 60 days
    2. new voters since last voting period

If these features were possible on Snapshot, Bancor could propose to use them and improve equality and value of voter participation.

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I have been asking for an Abstain option that only counts to Quorum without affecting YES/NO. I believe @tfns had a simple pseudo-code example that would add Abstain to quorum but leave Super-Majority unchanged. This is crucial to allow Whales to help meet quorum without “taking sides” on controversial votes (e.g. Eden, lately). I would say this is #1 Priority to help encourage voting. This would also provide real data on “Active Abstain” voters vs “Passive/Lazy Voters” that forget to vote. Without first having an active Abstain option we cannot implement a voter decay, penalty on “inactive” voters as we do not truly know who is “inactive”.

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I would also like to see a Workflow added during Staking that requires a Delegation. It should be clear that Active Voters can override the Delegated vote on topics that they feel strongly about. Otherwise Delegator (e.g. VotingAutomation) vote will handle the bulk of voting. Override option should include Abstain as well

Hi Dave! Thanks for the feedback.

The first proposal is something you need to bring up with your community. It’s absolutely doable, you just need to change the strategy you’re using in Bancor’s space settings. We offer a quadratic voting option.

The second recommendation is interesting, probably something that can be coded in as a new strategy.

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Hi sylentz, thanks for your feedback!
This has been discussed during the call, definitely something we will try to implement. We’re in contact with @tfns to work on this. The override option on vote delegation is very interesting, we’ll take a look at what we can do with that! Thanks a lot, sylentz!

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Hi! Could you explain more this part, I’m not sure i get it

This is crucial to allow Whales to help meet quorum without “taking sides” on controversial votes (e.g. Eden, lately).

On others voting interfaces the abstain are counted on the results %, if it’s not counted there how would it be shown on the UI?

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It would count toward $Quorum (must reach 35%, etc.)
But not count toward $FOR; not count toward $AGAINST
$FOR > 66.7% == PASS

edit: @tfns proposed something like: $votesFor / ($votesTotal - $votesAbstain)

edit2: @mbr : For example:
Alice votes FOR with 150 votes,
Bob votes AGAINST with 50 votes,
Charlie ABSTAINS with 1,000,000,000,000,000 votes.

We want the majority counter to show 75% FOR, and 25% AGAINST.

It should be possible. At the time the next snapshot is taken, it should be possible to collect all addresses that voted in the past 60 days + any new ones since the prior snapshot and use that figure as the total (the denominator) for supermajority and for quorum. If this approach is taken, it negates the dead weight that is not participating.

Taking this approach will not require stale voters to do anything (which is their de facto behavior anyway). However, it does bring a couple of new considerations if a stale user does choose to become active in the current snapshot:

  1. do we allow the total count (denominator) to adjust upward? Given that the goal is to exclude stale voters that are staked, this approach could allow them to participate again, while avoiding negative impact if remaining uninvolved.
  2. do we seek an expiration mechanism for non-participaants, where the current snapshot is inelligible for voting, but there is a way to use the signing feature to mark them present for future voting? This would effectively reset the 60-day inactivity timer.

I mean what is the rational for this change, why you would not want to see the abstain percentage, I feel its some relevant information that users want to see.

Abstain would be a visible metric. I’m not sure where you are getting that it would be hidden?
Quorum bar goes UP when Abstain is Voted. FOR/AGAINST do not move.
In order for most votes to pass within BancorDAO a Super-majority must be met (66.7% FOR) as well as Quorum (35%).

How would you see Abstain counted? If the Yes and No % doesnt count for Abstain, the % of Abstain will be counted against what numbers? You would show 60% Yes, 40% No, and X% Abstain? How you calculate this %.

Abstain is just another variable (vote option). It could be visible in the Snapshot UI directly or could just be inferred by $Quorum - ($for + $against) .

VoteIncrement(*quorum, *for, *against) {
quorum += $abstain+($for + $against)
$for += $for
$against += $against
}
$Majority = $for / $against

I think the ability to actively place an Abstain vote is more important than displaying who/how much vote has been abstained. This could be determined after the vote using site analytics, no? Or just inference ?

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Hi @NathanVDH ,

Thanks for starting this thread and for fielding our suggestions. I brought up the abstain option during the call and I think it would be a great addition as @sylentz and others have stated here. This would be similar to the options that one has when voting on proposals as a share holder IRL:

note that with the single choice voting strategy, we can’t just add an “abstain” option on our end because any voter that selects that option will have their vote counted towards quorum and supermajority. The “abstain” option that we want would only count towards the quorum and not supermajority requirements:

Here is an example of how things get calculated:

FOR: Number of votes casted
FOR Percentage: (FOR / (FOR + AGAINST))
AGAINST: Number of votes casted
AGAINST Percentage: (AGAINST / (FOR + AGAINST))

Note that neither FOR or AGAINST option is taking into account the ABSTAIN option. We as a DAO can use these to know whether a vote has supermajority requirements (66% or greater)

ABSTAIN: Number of votes casted
ABSTAIN Percentage: (ABSTAIN/ (FOR + AGAINST + ABSTAIN))

QUORUM: (FOR + AGAINST + ABSTAIN) / TOTAL STAKED vBNT
QUORUM Percentage: (FOR + AGAINST + ABSTAIN) / TOTAL STAKED vBNT (actually calculate %)

and with real numbers, this would look like the following:

2,000,000M FOR 80%
500,000K AGAINST 20%
4,000,000M ABSTAIN 61%

I think this might clear things up.

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On a similar note, I also want to mention that it would be great if the ranked choice voting strategy lets you modify the minimum percentage required for a choice to be considered the winning choice. This currently defaults to > 50% but our DAO has adopted supermajority rules and ideally a choice should only win if it has 66.7% or more of support.

You can read my full post about this here:

Lastly, I will also summarize some of the proposals that people in our community have raised via the feature request system:

https://features.snapshot.org/feature-requests/p/allow-abstain-option
https://features.snapshot.org/feature-requests/p/allow-voting-majority-to-be-set-for-ranked-choice-voting
https://features.snapshot.org/feature-requests/p/show-votes-on-landing-page
https://features.snapshot.org/feature-requests/p/voting-from-landing-page
https://features.snapshot.org/feature-requests/p/ballot-page
https://features.snapshot.org/feature-requests/p/allow-to-submit-feedback-as-part-of-casting-a-vote

Thanks!

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@sylentz explained it well. And the above is also my understanding, great writeup @glenn. So essentially, the FOR and AGAINST votes fall into a participating NON-ABSTAIN group.

As soon as the feature is implemented, we can create a proposal for the ABSTAIN option to go live.

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