Proposal—Decentralized Wire Service

đź“ś Proposal Discussion
#1

The new thinking for the DAO Stories aspect is to make it akin to a decentralized news wire, where stories that get approved can be cross-published to multiple sites and partners that want to run it.

In order to make the DAO more overtly not just a Decrypt thing, we aim to agree on a new name and to publish the first story to come out of the DAO on both Decrypt, The Defiant, and ideally other sites as well if we add partners.

For subsequent stories it will be up to the DAO media partners to pick and choose what they want to run.

Actionable tasks for us in the short-term are:

  • [ x ] agree on a new name we all like (naming proposal here)
  • [ ] come up with standard disclaimer text that we’d all use with published DAO stories (something like: This content comes from the Deme DAO, a media DAO with members across the crypto space whose members vote to approve stories that can then be cross-posted to multiple outlets. )
  • [ ] we need to scale public DAO channel/DAO Rep program to source stories and contributors (proposal for first public channel to do this)
  • [ ] and once we do those two things, we aim to hit the gas on fielding/sourcing/publishing stories from the DAO. (Internally at Decrypt, we also need to discuss and decide how these stories will look visually on our site.)

For now, we keep it a community feature without a token, but with a token it might look something like this:

Screen Shot 2021-09-29 at 11.10.56 AM
Screen Shot 2021-09-29 at 11.10.56 AM1700Ă—644 104 KB

Set of possible publishers to the wire includes:

  • Crypto native publications, like GCR, Forefront, FWB News, Bankless
  • Research shops and platforms like Messari, Delphi Digital, Nansen. Dune Analytics, Kaiko, Chainalysis

Clarification points:

  • Editors are DAO members who may not be journalists whom we tap as DAO editors, bootstrapped by editors at publications
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#2

This looks really good. Two things:

  • Audience role. Would be good to close the loop all the way between supply <> demand by adding this role. Audience Action is to signal interest in stories by voting on Contributor (or Editor?) proposals. They earn the Token by creating successful Contributor Bounties that pass a vote as well as doing _______ (?what else earns tokens, engaging w branded content + calls to action??)

  • Vote weights. Do we want to weight or count the votes differently by role, similar to how Gitcoin uses quadratic voting/delegation? Another example: The Graph has 3 roles, each w different duties and vote weights - https://twitter.com/JosephALChami/status/1442977419955249152

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#3

I would add, the set of possible publishers to the wire includes:

  • crypto native publications, like GCR, Forefront, FWB News, Bankless
  • research shops and platforms like Messari, Delphi Digital, Nansen. Dune Analytics, Kaiko, Chainalysis
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#4

Thinking story pitches will be high volume/low SNR so it’ll be hard to get high voter turn out.

I like the bounty idea for stories, to entice contributors or show support for the responsible contributor. There will be scenarios where editors know it’s a bad lede—tether fud and the whole “where is their office, really?” is an example of this, so editors will still reject some v popular pitches.

Could also have a delegation model for editors or contributors? Editors/contributors have a charter, and audience delegates against that charter, which in turn gives reputation, or mandate, or potentially even more voting power/other on-chain powers, but i’d be reluctant to bake that in from the start. Gitcoin and their work on sybil resistance would pair nicely with this to address all the obvious immediate issues.

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#5

Vote weights. Do we want to weight or count the votes differently by role, similar to how Gitcoin uses quadratic voting/delegation? Another example: The Graph has 3 roles, each w different duties and vote weights - https://twitter.com/JosephALChami/status/1442977419955249152

I like the idea of separate duties/types of votes, to create a system of checks and balances. I’m also biased towards starting as simple as possible and layering in these modifications as we learn more. Did The Graph start with that system, or evolve it over time?

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#6

So if crypto native publications such as GCR, Forefront, FWB News, Bankless want to be publishers on the wire, and we have reporters from, say Decrypt covering the space, we might see a situation wherein Decrypt writes a story about a Bankless TK, and Bankless writes about it, too. Not saying that’s bad–in fact, it’s good. But interesting to consider the ramifications nonetheless.

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#7

Yes, agree re: checks and balances. The Graph did indeed start slowly and layer in each new role over a relatively long period of time as they were bootstrapping the network. They started with Indexers (who operate nodes) and Delegators (who delegate their tokens to Indexers), and then added the Curators and Developers roles quite some time later.

I do think its important to think thru the ecosystem roadmap ahead of time (to some degree) so we leave ourselves enough hooks in the permanent on-chain code to make sure things are workable as we move thru the roadmap.

#8

Really like the idea of Audience delegating tokens to Editors and/or Contributors for voting power.

Agree that Editors should always have veto power on stories/ pitches.

We should probably not assume that any of the mechanics of this are permanent and view each of these as experiments that will need tweaking as we gain more experience and map the space of opportunities as well as exploits.

#9

Would there be any case where the editors are over ruled? It becomes very centralized if they have veto rights…no?

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#10

That could get interesting… Like if there is some kind of “supermajority” of votes in favor of a story, the Editors’ veto could be overruled? :popcorn:

#11

I just don’t see how the community wouldn’t cry foul if it was ruled by a centralized authority. I dealt with this when we initially launched AdToken and the community took on such a personality of its own. They certainly wouldn’t have been controlled by a ruling class. How do we mitigate that I think is one of the questions. There are ways to do it and perhaps offering an override if the majority rules is one way? Then of course there is the question of avoiding bandwagoning…

Yay human behavior :slight_smile:

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#12

Agree, the most challenging piece is going to be balancing community voice and top-down editorial authority, as is the case with most social media platforms already, i.e. community standards, censorship, etc. Is this why the US “founding fathers” created the third branch of gov’t – Judicial?

#13

The need for arbitration is a human need. We are always getting ourselves into trouble :slight_smile: . The judicial branch is certainly that thing in the US.