Farcaster-native research: https://paragraph.xyz/@matthewb | prev. Juicebox, Nouns, RAW DAO | casting about coffee, hi-fi, and other rabbit holes

after a few months, @brileigh and I noticed that some people were receiving votes and being paid despite doing nothing at the DAO. they didn’t contribute to community management, marketing, ops, treasury management, nothing.

as it turns out, a group of “friends” joined the DAO and agreed to vote for one another in order to receive compensation. they would occasionally post in the discord to appear active but it was always suspicious.

in the end, they siphoned ~2-3 ETH from the DAO treasury and contributed nothing. in the grand scheme of the ~$2M treasury, this wasn’t the end of the world. but it was disappointing to contributors who were working hard and felt like others were cheating despite technically playing by the rules.

in the end, this type of incentive structure is impossible to perfectly optimize and the leaderboard as-is does a good job. these are hard problems that straddle both social and eng, but I do think we can do better than inauthentic circlejerk accounts in the top 100. (2/2)

Have had something similar happen very recently - in DAOs it is totally possible for people to put up a veneer of busywork but once you peel back things and uncover the truth it is very ugly.
It is intensely demotivating and also devalues the entire project's credibility, especially if it's paying out in a native token since it undermines the value of it.

The only real solution is to have much better management structure and to demand certain standards of reporting and to have someone that acts as an auditor. Without that you can end up with the entire system becoming infected which severely reduces morale for people who are proactive contributors. 

And the only other solution is to start with extremely high quality people.

The question is whether you can salvage such things if it has been happening for too long - I don't think you can salvage it when people won't even admit to it being a problem and try to sweet it under the rug to protect optics/save face. TLDR it can burn out an entire project.

Community Builder. I'm wandering and wondering. Interested in decentralized, cool & creative stuff. Worked on a DAO for 5 years and looking for something new.

Absolutely agree! Transparency and accountability are crucial for the success of any project, especially in DAOs. High standards from the start can prevent many issues later on.