Add Substrate address login to forum

[rich]

@wliyongfeng

I do think this is the most realistic way, and improving user experience is one the our most important jobs. I think we don’t have to just focus on discourse features, while many github features are also very useful like github flavored markdown(already implemented on subsquare), issue mention, checked list, etc.

Please take the following as critical feedback - we all want to make things better, so I’m going to be direct.

Governance is at its highest and most abstract, the process of making decisions as a group.

If you want to optimise for the highest order outcome within communities, it is simple:

Optimise for increasing collective intelligence.

I’ve now been a heavy ‘user’ of many different governance forums - Politiea, Commonwealth, Polkassembly, SubSquare and Discourse.

Alongside this I have spent (like everyone here) an insane amount of time stuck in Discord, Telegram, Element, Whatsapp, Google Hangouts/Docs, Zoom etc etc. The switching costs between these varying platforms, philosophies, identities and UIs is a massive drain on the ability to sustain and scale collective intelligence.

Discord etc are not the right space to begin. They constrain culture into a box we’re trying to escape.

My approach to learning / iterating on-chain governance has been to get involved, be part of the process and to be inside the mechanisms themselves.

Before ‘crypto’ I launched / coordinated / scaled many communities and creative projects on social networks dating back to 2007, so I’m very familiar with recurring patterns, issues and roadblocks faced when it comes to increasing the collective intelligence of diverse social groups.

Or said another way:

@rphmeier

We have to operate on the principle of density - never create new channels until the old ones are bursting at the seams. For that reason alone I don’t think we need a Kusama forum. We like to put things into boxes, but there are hidden overheads to every new channel or topic we add that could take away from the liveliness of the community as a whole.

Lets start by cutting to Polkadot’s primary issue when it comes to driving up collective intelligence of the group.

@tomaka

We already have too much information spread out everywhere. Even though I’ve been working on Polkadot for 6 years, I barely know half of what is done and what exists, because information is impossible to discover. I don’t know what I don’t know, and since information is spread out I can’t even discover what I don’t know.

Philosophy

• Of the governance forums i’ve used, only one has been designed from the start to be a fully unified experience that bridges user experience, technical integrations (read and write to the chain), proposal changes, integration with a ‘contractor management system’, native DEX and that is Decred’s Politiea.

• The issue with building generic governance forums for ‘all chains and tokens’ as Commonwealth tried is you end up doing everything sort of ok. Polkassembly and Subsquare are better version of Commonwealth - I would say Subsquare is likely the best UX/UI of all, but they are still a long long way from being the sort of best in class experience that comes from designing from the ground up for a vertically integrated decision-making engine.

Incentives

• Commonwealth / Polkassembly / Subsquare struggle as well because of the independent nature of token economies that are not economically incentivised to tightly bind their ecosystems within a unified stack/interface since they are selling their own token and systems, hence the increasing complexity with forums / UIs. This is practically speaking unsolvable. I also see this as a primary barrier to the likelihood of killer applications emerging from the unification of ‘independent parachains’ underlying projects like Apillon Web3 development platform as a common good infrastructure - Polkadot Treasury Proposal.

Network effects

• In highly experimental, emergent and exploratory communities. the real test of governance is where do people want to discuss things and what form do they use?

Currently the network effects, and the collective intelligence is here, not anywhere else.

This is where conversations, topics, challenges, opinions, debates and arguments are their most dense.

Where do conversations, and collective intelligence expand and evolve best?

What feels like the most fluid process?

This is I would argue, Polkadot’s most successful app - and yet is has no on-chain elements, no chain integrations, no treasury analytics - it is succeeding by having a potent mix of great user experience, user-base and interesting conversation.

Discourse has optimised and evolved from the ground up to serve communities with tools, processes and structures that enable them to engage in ‘governance’.

The important question to ask is this:

Given network effects, via plugins, can Discourse’s foundation evolve to become a better Polkassembly/Subsquare quicker than they can become a better Discourse?

My approach is very very simple - and it is to stage by stage more tightly integrate the lived experience of governance into a process and tightly integrated open source stack that streamlines the following into a unified UX:

• Discussion
• Debate
• Proposal development
• Chat
• Education
• Multi-Media (Text, Image, Video, Livestreaming, AI assistance)
• Identity
• Reputation
• Fund management
• Collectives
• Funding (across various phases of development)
• Legal & Compliance
• Parachains
• Security

We are building out all of this in sync, mostly using existing tools and services, rather than building new things - adding in talent, and tech as and when we need it.

You and other teams can absolutely demonstrate I’m wrong in my approach - I would happily depart this forum and contribute actively on any other forum including Subsquare, but right now, the collective intelligence is at its densest here.