Idea: Large stakeholders could let "the crowd" determine their DAO proposal votes?
It seems that there is some renewed interest in the DAO proposal system lately (eg @jondoe's recent post). Ideas about using the DAO funds usually run into a roadblock of whether powerful actors on the chain would be on board with the idea.
The voting system for Steem's DAO / proposal system was poorly designed. It basically re-used the witness voting system, which has some big drawbacks. For example, your vote is binary: either you vote in support of something or you don't vote for it, you can't vote at some percentage of your power. As another example, there's no way to vote against a proposal, you can only vote in favor of a different proposal that you like better (such as a "return proposal" that feeds the money back into the @steem.dao account).
During the chaos with the previous witnesses and the Hive split, Steemit Inc. wisely decided to protect the integrity of the chain by supporting the return proposal with their large stake. This made sure that no one would be getting DAO funds to potentially use for malicious purposes. When people say that the DAO is "locked" this is what they mean, that a large stakeholder is voting for a return proposal and is likely to continue to do that and not vote for anything else. Nothing has been done to prevent the system from operating, it would just be extremely difficult for any project to actually get enough support to get past the return proposal. While I don't know for sure, my guess is that Steemit isn't opposed to all projects, they just want to make sure that no malicious projects get funds.
For ethical, PR, and logistical reasons Steemit probably doesn't want to be in a position to pick and choose which individual projects get funded. They likely don't want to be a sole or major decision-maker about who gets funds from the DAO, that could open them to accusations that they are using the resources of the chain as their own slush fund. Furthermore, they are busy with their own stuff and probably don't want to have to research whether projects are worthy of support or not, and monitor them to make sure they stay worthy.
An idea that I've been pondering is that if they had a bot make their decision algorithmically then they could hypothetically issue vote transactions on the chain while credibly saying they aren't making the voting decisions, thus working around the limitations of the DAO voting system. For example, if they really only wanted to vote for the return proposal with 50% of their stake (or some other threshold), they could have a bot scan the currently active proposals and if a proposal had enough support from other voters to get past that level then they could add their own vote, which would likely push that proposal past the return proposal and it would get funds.
So what do other people think? Would this be a way to potentially make the DAO useful? Are there problems with the idea, from either a technical or practical POV?
(header image from Pixabay)