Always Rejects neuron FAQ

What is the “Always Rejects” neuron?

“Always Rejects” is the first non foundation neuron that will vote on every proposal independently except exchange rate proposals.

Warning: Do NOT follow this neuron on non-governance proposals if you have a large amount of voting power behind your neuron. Following on governance is safe as it does not affect the protocol and a non reject vote could be socially nullified. I will make a named neuron proposal soon. Please refrain from voting on any proposals with the name “Always Rejects” that doesn’t have my neuron ID. I will also post social proof my twitter account @alwaysvotes_xyz and the forum post. If you can’t wait for the named neuron proposal you can follow neuron 12890113924500239096 since voting according to this policy is taking place already.

Note that there might be proposals where “Always Rejects” has voted already but the neuron you are currently following hasn’t. To make sure you don’t miss any of those juicy voting rewards when making the switch make sure to vote manually on proposals where you haven’t voted yet.

Why did you create this neuron?

Make the signal that the NNS provides less noisy by filtering out people with a lot of voter apathy. With a neuron that always rejects a bigger percentage who voted accept truly meant it or trusted their named neuron.

Making the signal that the NNS provides less noisy

I think it is pretty clear that there is a huge amount of voter apathy at the moment. In Arthur Fall’s article about the sunsetting of cycle_dao he mentioned the following:

”I (Arthur Falls) am unilaterally controlling the neuron but have pointed it at the ICPMN named neuron. The cycle_dao neuron will continue to vote on all proposals as this is the primary concern indicated by followers.”

as well as:

“As a result, they were generally not interested in how we were voting. Only that we were voting on all proposals - giving them the maximum voting reward. This became the only really stable policy of cycle_dao - vote on everything.”

This large amount of voting power is now following Synapse and presented as a valid signal of the communities wishes, while in actuality a lot of them are seed investors who felt mistreated and mostly care about the staking rewards. I think there is a need for a neuron like Always Rejects where these motivations can be separated. I think there are lots of other voters as well where their small stake results in a tragedy of the commons situation. Researching who to follow is already too much effort compared to the gained benefit. There also simply might not be someone to follow who aligns with your values or who you trust at the moment but there is no other option. I think the long term incentives where the design of the NNS is based on does not match reality.

I want people to be rewarded for participating in governance not mindlessly voting along with a bot.

Yes I’d like that as well, but sadly people get rewarded for voting, not voting thoughtfully. If Arthur’s article and my personal experience are any indication people are already following purely based on voting rewards. We really need to get the noise out since a vote that wins with barely a percent or even less than a percent is apparently accepted as a true community mandate by the foundation.

How does the neuron work?

I created two neurons, the base neuron which is the one you should follow as well as a proxy neuron, which is followed by the base neuron and does the actual voting on non exchange proposals. The proxy neuron was created from a seed phrase which is injected into an AWS lambda function that runs regularly.

The base neuron is created with an Internet Identity with multiple secure backups. If my AWS ever gets compromised I can point the base neuron somewhere else.

Warning: Do NOT follow the proxy neuron

Why do you follow the foundation on exchange rate proposals?

I got errors saying that my neuron had already voted on these. It seems like exchange rate proposals are not saved as ballots on your neuron, probably to save memory in the NNS canister.

I can’t know whether I still have to vote on these without keeping track of historic votes myself. To minimise risk of not voting I saved myself the effort and followed the foundation on this topic because exchange rate proposals are going away soon anyways.

Where can I see a record of your voting?

https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/neuron/12890113924500239096 as you can see it voted no on all non exchange rate proposals. When this neuron becomes a named neuron a longer voting history will be saved.

I don’t like that your anonymous, what if you want to mess up a vote after gaining a large following?

The great thing about such a simple voting policy of always rejecting is that you can hold me to my promise purely by looking at the voting behaviour. Even if you did know me and didn’t like me it would not affect the votes of this neuron at all. Even If I get hacked the outcome of motion proposals don’t affect the protocol at all, it is purely a social thing. It’s easy to socially nullify a yes vote from “Always Reject” as everybody knows that was not what people intended to vote. Getting a meaningful following that could halt the network on non-motion proposals is just an absurd scenario that won’t ever happen. The foundation gets 100% of the voting power there at the moment.

The few most contested and active motion proposals get about 25% total participation if the foundation doesn’t vote. All the big investors that have huge amounts of money in a neuron are really not going to risk their money following me there.

Don’t you think this neuron will detract from how serious people take the NNS?

I actually think it will improve the signal from the NNS by redirecting some of the apathetic or disillusioned voters voting power. I also have have presented the clearest voting policy of anyone so far. You know exactly what you are getting

I have some feedback or questions where can I reach you?

You can respond to the named neuron forum post or tag me on twitter @alwaysvotes_xyz. If you choose to follow me I’d love to hear why.