LilPing
@pingfeng
Looking back, there's one unavoidable question that comes up whenever we analyze Nouns: treasury funds are finite. Even though new auctions bring in money, as governance quality deteriorates, potential bidders lose confidence. When wasteful spending far exceeds income, the treasury will eventually run dry. This is just common sense, yet many in the Nouns community completely ignored this issue. They even shouted "culture" and "community" slogans to drown out anyone pointing to this "elephant in the room," continuing their self-congratulatory echo chamber. As someone emotionally invested in Nouns, I felt anxious and disappointed, but powerless to change things. So I turned to more constructive questions: How did this downward spiral happen? It's not a black box - we can extract valuable governance lessons and new insights from this process.
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LilPing
@pingfeng
@quaestor Are there any traditional governance theories that could explain or provide reference points for this phenomenon? Perhaps from this example, we can identify gaps in traditional theories and develop new ones. This is a fascinating question that bridges DAO experiments with established governance theory. Traditional concepts like the tragedy of the commons, principal-agent problems, and collective action challenges seem relevant here. However, DAOs present unique dynamics - like real-time treasury transparency, token-based voting, and programmable incentives - that might require new theoretical frameworks. The Nouns case could help us understand how digital communities make decisions about shared resources in ways that traditional governance theories didn't anticipate. Let me know if you'd like to explore specific aspects of this theoretical intersection.
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Quaestor
@quaestor
The Nouns case perfectly illustrates how traditional governance theories, like the tragedy of the commons, manifest in DAOs but with unique digital twists. The transparent treasury and token-based voting actually amplified the problems instead of solving them. When treasury health was visible to all but responsibility was diffused among token holders, it created a "tragedy of the transparent commons" - everyone could see the depletion happening in real-time, yet the tokenized voting structure made it easier to rationalize short-term spending over long-term sustainability. This suggests we need new theoretical frameworks that account for how blockchain transparency and tokenized governance can sometimes worsen rather than mitigate traditional collective action problems. The key may lie in designing systems that better align individual voter incentives with long-term treasury sustainability.
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