Decentralized governance is a utopian dream that promises everything: personal freedom, open collaboration, simple participation, zero bureaucracy, speed, security, and even smarter decision-making. Imagine an incorruptible web of collaboration responding to you at the touch of a button. There are no bureaucrats, managers, or politicians; everyone is a bureaucrat, a manager, and a politician. That dream (or nightmare?) is still far off, but new technology is for the first time making concrete plans for decentralization possible. DAOstack, Aragon, Holochain, and others are creating full attempts at decentralized organizing platforms.

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) are unproven, but they are happening. Lots of people believe that we have the technology and human capacity to make truly decentralized organizations, and they’re building them right now. “The DAO,” a famous early group, generated huge enthusiasm, but in its crisis, also hinted at some of decentralization’s biggest challenges.

I want to propose a structure for future DAOs that borrows from the structures the internet has already allowed to flourish. There are two structural qualities to draw attention to: 1) votes without consensus, and what I’ll call 2) “consciousness.” These two qualities are characteristic of social networks, the collective intelligences dominating today’s web.

Votes Without Consensus

First, let’s look at consensus in DAOs. Nearly every DAO structure I’ve read about plans to depend on consensus, a general agreement between members, for decision making. For many of us living in election-holding societies, consensus is deeply tied to one of the ideals of democracy: government by the people. Decision-making by consensus, though, isn’t the only way of expressing the people’s will, and consensus, as anyone familiar with their local city council can tell you, is so painfully slow. I write “painfully slow” because when big decisions must be made, slowness itself can cause pain. There are ways to make it faster, by only requiring a relative majority consensus, but even a small handful of stubborn people can take forever to agree.

Once agreement is reached, consensus still only produces one answer from one question. A group can only reach one consensus, and this stinks of the tyranny of the majority. One side wins; the other loses. And there’s another downside: given an unsolved problem, trial and error is often the best strategy. Trialing just one idea at a time won’t get you anywhere fast. That’s score two for the consensus-is-slow argument.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When The DAO was “hacked,” the Ethereum community was fractured by it’s need for a consensus reaction. Those on the minority side, instead of suffering the majority’s rule, were allowed to split off into their own faction, creating two ethereums: two answers to one question.

Popular web platforms present overwhelming evidence that votes work without consensus. When a post hits the front page of reddit, reddit’s users have not reached a traditional consensus on it being there. Yet that post making the front page means that a huge number of users support it. Reddit’s /r/all represents millions of user votes and produces clear cat — ehrm, patterns of what reddit users collectively prefer. There is always a top post that inarguably represents the largest current majority sans traditional consensus, but there is also a full ranking of posts with precise support numbers on each. This votes-without-consensus process produces a single “best” answer and many other viable answers at the same time, without any lengthy debate.

Reddit uses upvotes; Youtube uses views and subscribers; Twitter, favorites and retweets; even Google’s PageRank uses votes without consensus: links.¹ How many popular platforms use majority-wins voting systems? I’ve found none.

The parallel is not perfect. Decentralized organizations need to take more concrete action than reddit or Youtube, and that introduces restrictions on time and funding at the minimum. Also, sometimes a decision must be final and singular, and so traditional consensus is attractive, like when Ethereum considers a hard fork in its blockchain. Still, the success, productiveness, and dominance of votes-without-consensus strategies on the internet is impressive, and a result this one sided probably shouldn’t be dismissed.

Consciousness

Most DAOs today seem to be planning on a simple proposal → vote → execution structure, which may make them prone to poor planning. I see two deep pitfalls in this approach. First, it’s inefficient and it fails hard. If a proposal fails to pass, the process must begin again from the beginning. If a proposal passes but falls short of the target goal in execution, then again, the entire process restarts. Second, proposal-vote-execution is either corruptible or unreadable. If proposals are short enough to be read by most DAO members, they will be prone to misinterpretation in the transition to a full plan; if they are detailed enough not to be monkey’s pawed, they likely ask an unreasonable amount of reading time from voters.

The social media platforms conquering the internet are “conscious” in a way that could help. Content on Youtube evolves so fast that it’s apt to compare Youtube videos to thoughts — relative to the size of the whole machine, the Youtube platform or the brain, videos and thoughts are tiny. If you consider the Youtube community a big decentralized organization whose goal is to accumulate more viewer watch time, the small cost of each video means Youtube tries and optimizes ideas faster than it’s centralized, slow-feedback competitors. The system is efficient, it loses almost nothing in failure, and it resists corruption since Youtube videos are finished products, rather than short outlines for full-length features.² I’m calling this quality “consciousness,” because like Youtube videos, thoughts are low cost. They let your brain test, detail, abandon, and redevelop ideas virtually without risking energy on executing them.

There is a flaw here: social networks like Youtube don’t have an execution step — their process is their product — and the proposal-to-execution transition is what opens the system to corruption. Still, consciousness can help. If DAOs add a few “thought” layers between idea generation and execution, where ideas can be fleshed out, reevaluated, revised, and scrapped before the great risk of execution, they become less prone to time-wasting failure and more resistant to corruption, since there is less interpretational distance between the stages of an idea.³

One Solution: Social Network Stacks

To include votes-without-consensus and thought layers in a DAO, you might use a stack of social network structures. On each layer of the stack is a social network-esque platform, featuring idea-posts of increasing maximum length that are organized via some form of upvote. The core concept is for ideas to be proposed in very short form on the first layer, which qualifies them for the middle “thought” layers, where narrower versions of the ideas are created and ordered by their odds of success. Ideas in the “thought” layers can move on to a final layer for finished, executable proposals, each with all the information needed to fully realize an idea. Proposals on this final layer can be executed by anyone willing to put in the work (with some important restrictions), and anyone who worked on the idea’s development pipeline is rewarded according to their success and the amount of work done.

Before going through a more detailed outline, here are a few ground rules for such a system:

Anyone in the DAO can write and upvote ideas on any part of any layer. Except on the first layer, ideas must be branches off of root ideas in the previous layer. Each layer allows longer and more complex posts than the previous one. The total number of layers should be proportional to the population of the DAO.

Layer 1: Proposals (“Urges”)

Posts are tweet-length ideas.

All DAO members may upvote a limited number of ideas, but each upvote also requires them to stake the amount of currency they’d be willing to spend on the idea.⁴

Each idea has a currency total that represents the amount the community is willing to spend on it; however —

Ideas are ranked by upvote, so ideas popular with the largest number of people get the most attention.

Layers 2→n: Planning (“Thoughts”)

Ideas are longer, more in depth, and more so on each planning layer.

Ideas are organized first by their root idea from the previous layer, second via upvotes or possibly even better: prediction market a la futarchy.

A predicted funding value is created for each idea by dividing the original proposal’s currency total in layer 1 among its descendents in the current layer proportionally to their support.

Layer n+1: Executables

Posts are full length executable plans, complete with code to be added, smart contracts to be executed, job descriptions to be hired for, etc.

All posts may be executed, with a few hard restrictions on what can be changed (eg. you can create a new program but not change the mission statement).

Once the idea is executed, those who worked on it in layers 2→n+1 and in execution are paid out of the original proposal’s currency total in proportion with the amount and impact of the work they did.⁵

A crappy, low-res diagram of a social network stack

Wider Context for the Stack

Social network stacks might be a way to learn from the internet’s most successful decentralized structures and provide DAOs with:

Smarter proposal creation and revision (the consciousness effect)

(the consciousness effect) Better, faster proposal ranking (votes without consensus)

Matan Field of DAOstack has presented a central problem of governance as the tension between resilience, how good the system is at doing its job, and scale, how much total work the system can do. These qualities are natural enemies, and as he writes, “any resolution of this tension will allow minority decisions … that are guaranteed to be in strong correlation with the majority ‘truth’.”

Social network stacks offer a novel solution to this problem. First, the stack scales by mostly avoiding traditional consensus (and quorum), by making the first layer as easy and fast as possible to use, and by embracing radically open participation in later layers. It correlates decisions with majority demand by aligning incentives: DAO members have good reason to develop and execute ideas they sincerely think will meet high demand on the first layer, since that leads to the greatest rewards.

Social network stacks also have a whole range of potentially useful compatibilities. The skeleton they share with today’s popular internet communities should help adoption and integration with today’s infrastructure. Their similarity to markets might make it easy to implement some form of futarchy, as mentioned earlier. The progression from general to specific ideas resembles values-oriented governance, like all constitutional systems.

I’ll bow out with some questions:

Is the social network stack a useful idea for decentralized development?

Are there ways to take advantage of votes-without-consensus and “conscious” systems in DAOs?

Where have I gone wrong? Where should these ideas go next?