Reduce Rewards for Regular Paid Contributors

[enti]

I’m overall in favor of this, however I certainly agree with some of the comments, particularly @Tamara’s - IMO it’s a matter of definition, data and possibly an advantage (or disadvantage) inherent to the praise system.

@divine_comedian

The majority of the rewards from the reward-system are going to contributors that are already getting paid.

We’ve got to think about how unlike other reward systems, praise is really culture intensive and so that must be taken into account where making any changes. Depending on where you stand this is nothing but expected from a system that’s based on gratitude, can’t you be grateful for someone’s contributions even if they’re being paid for?

Couldn’t tweaking the system to make up for some contributor’s compensation have a negative effect on the positive nature of praising?

Is there something that could be done at the cultural level to improve whatever this proposal is looking for? (Maybe trying to somehow make people acknowledge more contributions from smaller folks will bring their praise up, thus leveling to some extent with paid and bigger contributors without having to rely on a “regular paid contributor” metric which is likely to be somewhat arbitrary and subjective)

Now, putting that aside, this aims to solve a issue that may not exist at all(? I remember someone saying that the amount shouldn’t be significant, but fixing the distribution implies that it is, so something here isn’t making that much sense.

It is, again, a matter of definition.

What’s the expected outcome of the reward system?

I’ll finish saiying that we all seem to like reward systems, but we can’t really prove their effectiveness (see MakerDAO’s detailed report on SourceCred), I’ll ask to defend Praise’s cultural benefit at any cost, I believe it holds more power than we may even realize and trying to fix something we aren’t sure is an issue may have undesired effects. This at least until we come to an agreement on the definition and scope.

[vegayp]

@divine_comedian

We want to attract newcomers and grow our community, this presents a great manner to kick a lil’ sumthin’ extra to new people who show up and put work into the TEC. I don’t think anyone would disagree that we need some new faces around here to takes this commons to new heights!

I agree on this.

@vegayp If you think the reduction is too steep it can always be heightened, do you not agree with the method in principle or in the amount reduced?

I think that this would work on an ideal scenario of high engagement - not bear market situation. I think that in the current context (without a focus point or a clear service) taking away incentives from the current contributors that have stayed with us, seems counterintuitive.

Also Mitch, don’t you think this kind of conversations, would be nice to have them at TEC Labs?

[liviade]

@divine_comedian

We want to attract newcomers and grow our community, this presents a great manner to kick a lil’ sumthin’ extra to new people who show up and put work into the TEC. I don’t think anyone would disagree that we need some new faces around here to takes this commons to new heights!

This is making an assumption that we don’t have many new people engaging because our financial incentive isn’t attractive, and that adding a few tokens would be enough to attract and retain new folks.

I agree we need a wider spread of engagement but I don’t see the deduction being effective for it. I’m afraid it would have more unintended consequences like lowering the motivation of committed contributors. No one is making a lot of money in the TEC, the salaries the DAO can provide are already low for the amount of work and dedication people put in. To have the reward system as a bonus in the end of the month is a welcoming thank you in my opinion.

Once our common pool is more abundant and proposals are flowing we will lose this feeling of “only a few people are contributing” and the reward system will balance out as well, there will be more “real” opportunities for engagement.

[ddan]

If we do anything to reduce rewards for regular paid contributors, then we should at the same time figure out how to pay them more.

I agree its worthwhile to examine if our rewards systems are acting as intended, and it could be useful to distribute more rewards to people who aren’t currently as involved, but I am quite concerned about doing so at the expense of our most valuable contributing members.

Since we are in cryptocurrency, I would lean more towards creating a fungible token with no monetary value, but can add use-cases for later.

Then those tokens can be widely distributed as an incentive and to draw people in.

This way, we can reward more participants without negatively impacting our most active contributors.

That is just an example, but what I really mean is that the problem should be addressed more wholistically so as to not tie our need for increased engagement with taking away from the people who are giving most.

I see it from the other side. Thinking of it in analogy of investing, better to invest more in a sure thing than to “diversify” which is a method of hedging your bets against eachother.

I’d rather see more going to the people who give the most energy, which would encourage others who are interested in participating that their time would be valued.

Instead, I fear you are spreading that energy too thin for the desired result.

For example,

another solution is to give a new token (non-monetary high supply\fungible) for praise, and don’t give TEC for praise, at all… instead take that from the praise fund and give it to our paid contributors.

this is a dynamic I see in sucessful projects. There is a lower supply store of value token + high supply rewards token. This way its easy to be generous without debasing your currency or dilluting your stakeholders.

[Griff]

What happened with this proposal? Did it die? I think it is important that the people who are volunteering get a sort of multiplier for their contributions. The people who are paid are doing their job, and doing it well, they deserve something for sure! The people that just show up and contribute tho, they are heroes, they deserve even more!

Multiply their rewards!

[divine_comedian]

There was a lot of pushback on this idea and not a lot of enthusiasm - but I think since @rex published some data to back it up - A Report on the distributive impact of Praise. Part 1 - I think there is more appetite for a solution akin.

I will try to think of something clever over the course of the next few weeks.

[gideonro]

As part of what we agreed to in the coordination team proposal, we’re now working through project management processes for helping to sync and coordinate work across the commons in a networky, non-bureaucratic way. Praise came up a bunch in feedback on the proposal. Not everything can or should be done by the coordination team, and we need good ways to recognize work that falls outside of the TEC’s budgeted wages.

Tuning Praise to focus on that seems like the right path. In my view, it’s critical to ensuring voluntary contributions to the work of the commons – which is how we scale impact without having everyone on wages.

I definitely have some thoughts here and I know that @Maxwe11 and @bear100 are interested in helping think this through, @divine_comedian. Maybe we grab some time to jam on this this week or next?

[divine_comedian]

Well I took another stab at my proposed spec and improved it a bit more.

So in this iteration similar to the original one I posted we would decide a contributor factor which would reduce the amount of praise rewards for contributors that we indicate on a list. (i.e a factor of 65% would multiply their praise rewards by 0.65)

the subtracted rewards are then distributed to non-contributors taking into account their share of the praise rewards that was assigned to non-contributors

we then take this new amount and add it with any reward board and/or quantifier rewards to get their final total of rewards to receive for a given round.

For example you can see how this plays out using rewards data back from round 11(?)

contributor factor simulation

If you look in the spreadsheet let’s look at how this plays out for chuygarcia and griff as examples

chuy at the time was leading comms so he is on the contributors list - a separate sheet we import and use for reference - his praise rewards are multiplied by 0.65 - going from 175 → 114 in praise rewards - we add in his rewardboard payment of 14.07, unmodified, for a total of 128 total rewards

griff was not a paid contributor but got a lot of praise! his estimated praise rewards was 143 and we know the total amount of extra rewards subtracted from paid contributors for this round is 554.63

the total amount of praise rewards for non-contributors is 1792 - compared against griff’s 143 we derive his share % as 8.03% - apply this to the extra rewards pool of 554.63 we assign him an extra ~44 reward tokens, bringing his new total to 188 tokens.

I think this provides a great ‘weighted’ solution so non-contributors heavily praised get rewarded proportionally to non-contributors who were barely praised at all.

A further way to refine things would be if we wanted to create tiered contributors - being that do we want to provide the same reduction factor for someone who works 40 hours a week vs someone who works 5? Another decision to make but I think this modification is a great MVP to dynamically reduce praise rewards for paid contributors, while not actually reducing the total amount of rewards we distribute per round.

Please fork and play with your own copy of the spreadsheet I shared.

[Maxwe11]

I think this is a great start. One thing I’m unsure about is reducing rewards for contributors who’s paid work does not overlap with Praise. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the original idea was based on the situation where folks were getting Praised for the same things that they were getting some sort of stable pay for. However, for example for the core team, a potentially significant portion of that paid work may not result in Praise, however those same folks may be contributing in other ways that would lead to them being praised for things they are not getting paid for. Does this disincentivize that type of contribution?

Another approach may be to identify ways to Praise contributions that aren’t being adequately captured in the current Praise approach. This would overall increase the Praise pool, ideally more accurately capture the engagement of the community, and further broaden the reach of Praise. This could also be done in conjunction with the approach above.

[divine_comedian]

From what we’ve seen is that there is a consistently high correlation of praise rewards given to paid contributors - this is the broader issue that the case you just mentioned plays a part.

These suggestions seem sort of non-tangible and don’t, at least to me, show any clear approach. In my experience chasing after a community to change the way it’s been organically doing things requires a lot of manual effort and essentially boils down to policing behaviour.

We should ask ourselves -

Do we change the culture of praise to fit into the system or change the system of praise to fit into the culture?

[divine_comedian]

based on feedback from @Griff I reworked the method of how we deal with contributors vs. non-contributors.

So now in this other iteration we don’t subtract rewards from contributors by a factor but rather give bonus rewards to non-contributors by applying a factor to their praise rewards (a factor greater than 1)

We then take the sum of all praise rewards with the bonuses and normalize it to fit inside of the specified amount of rewards to distribute -

check it out

contributor factor simulation

basically the main effect of this change is more about optics - rather than reducing rewards for paid contributors we instead just apply a bonus non-contributors and then make it all fit into the amount we have to distribute.

[divine_comedian]

I’d like to leave the next couple weeks open for testing but I would propose we come up with a solution to implement for quant 24 - which quantification would end for december 26th.

[Maxwe11]

I like the change to optics. For future rounds, this could be done at the scoring step vs calculating rewards twice, right? So once the round is scored, the bonus score is allocated to non-contributors (which doesn’t change the instances of praise) and then the total rewards are still calculated with that instances of praise number.

We had also discussed a scale for contributors, since not everyone is a contributor at the same level. Was there a resolution on that? I don’t want to overcomplicate or delay, so we could re-visit a scaled contributor factor at some future date with some additional date from the initial implementation.

[divine_comedian]

Well since this alternative method is providing a flat bonus to non-contributors there is no effective reduction to contributors.

In order to have a scaled reduction for contributors we would have to revert to the first method

[Maxwe11]

That was the original discussion, but a scale could be on the bonus as well, so in this model for example a full time contributor would get no bonus, a part time something like 125% and non-contributors the 155%. (or whatever we land on). Like I said, I don’t want to overcomplicate it, and it seems like it would only make sense if there were wildly different levels of contribution (which I don’t think is an issue right now).

[divine_comedian]

I made some changes anyway to reflect a “contributor scale” using the 1st model

contributor factor simulation

we identify three tiers of contribution

• 1 = full time
• 2 = part time
• 3 = casual

we lookup the contributor name in master sheet and find their contribution tier number, then we apply a different factor based on that number.

this can be very easily adapted for the “bonus only” model as well

[gideonro]

I’m glad you’re making this distinction as it makes it more fair for those who aren’t working many hours.

I’d recommend being specific about the hours to leave less room for misunderstanding. Something like:

• 20+ hours per week (no one is full time these days)
• 5-19 hours per week
• less than 5 hours per week

[divine_comedian]

yeah the hours are actually more specific inside the spreadsheet itself if you open it up…

[rex]

Hey all, we just had the Quant Call earlier today, in which we discussed Mitch’s implementation on this matter as well as my own. Just giving an idea here on the difference - my idea was to extract outgoings from TEC multisigs in the last three months via a Dune query, and join that to the Praise data to set a sliding-scale bonus on those not being actively funded by the TEC.

Approach

I used data from rounds 1 - 16, extracted 3 months ago - and established two parameters: 1. the maximum rate of taxation; and 2. the percentage of multisig $xdai outgoings at which that threshold would be hit, explained by this chart -

Links

Here’s a resulting spreadsheet with the output:

Google Tabellen wird geladen

Here’s the process I took to extract said data:

tec-data-analysis/reward_vs_payouts at main · m-r-g-t/tec-data-analysis

Outcome

We all agreed Mitch’s approach is best for us, because an approach as above would take a bit of coding and finance overhead. Given the low number of paid contributors, the fact there is no concrete standard standards on how people get paid at the TEC, and that

• some are getting paid via third party wallets, making these funds less clear;
• multiple individuals use separate wallets for Praise and financial assets;

it would be more troublesome to implement a smooth line than an approach with graded steps.

[divine_comedian]

This is the final spec we rallied around:

contributor factor simulation

Implementing 4 tiers of contribution (based on weekly hours worked) and applied variable bonuses to them (with full time contributors receiving no bonus). After we apply the bonuses we normalize it to fit inside of the assigned amount of rewards we have to distribute

There are a few parameters left to decide within the system:

• what should be the contracted hours worked per week for each tier?
• what bonus should each tier receive?

Please feel free to fork and play and propose some numbers that make sense. We will implement for calculating rewards for Quant 24, deadline is thus December 23rd!