"Retail" Nominators: The Foundation of DOT Demand Until Polkadot's Next Chapter

[kianenigma]

@Motif

While the solution may seem simple, it has two drawbacks:

1. Political. When moving to a pool, the owner loses their voting rights in the system. This isn’t quite appropriate.
2. Economic. By transferring to a pool, we remove an educated user from the system, one who has even brought token on-chain and staked it. Overall, the system potentially benefits more from solo-nominators than from pool participants.

Therefore, in my opinion, before relocating a user, it’s essential to first re-engage them and inquire about their actions.

While I think it is good to take such actions with care, I disagree with both points:

1. Pools will eventually (read: soon) support governance participation: [NPoS] Nomination pools: Allow funds to be used for democracy · Issue #454 · paritytech/polkadot-sdk · GitHub
2. Opinion: the future is pool members, not direct nominators. NPoS will never be able to handle millions of direct nominators. A direct nominator role should only be for those who have a unique opinion which is not represented by any other pool. The current disparity between pool members and direction nomination is mostly an implementation imperfection. If given the opportunity again, I would rewrite the entire staking code such that everything is a pool. One who wishes to never change their nomination would join what we call a “Robot Pool”, which is fixed. Others join pools that are controlled by an operator and subscribe to the opinion of that operator.

@Motif

• Proposed solutions are great! But they require raw data/aggregates and a clear dashboard that allows at least basic information to be accessible (to make/check/improve). There’s no problem in distributing bounties to the best nominators of this era; you can send out engaging data newsletters. But there’s no source for this data…

I have not read your exact proposal yet, but my high level understanding is that it is a new tool that is focused around gathering data about nominators and represent it to them.

I am not against such a tool, but I wanted to emphasize that if the communication issues are not solved as a part of your proposal, the tool itself will not be useful. I am worried that it will be yet another tool out there that is not used, and the level of activity remains super low. Consequently, the issues you pointed out such as lack of support also remain.

I suggest taking a bold claim here: The successful outcome of your tool is to quantitatively increase nominator activity across the board. I argue that this is the end goal, and it should be stated as the main goal of the proposal. If this proposal is rephrased in a way that this is the main OKR, I would highly support it.

This reminds me of the mindset explained in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0n_8odYquU (shoutout to @agyle), that a proposal should be objective-based.

…What surprised me even more was that there’s some resistance “against” rather than collaborative support.

I understand the feeling, but the intention behind having discourse before committing to a funding is purely positive and hopefully will lead to better outcomes for everyone.