Hi Yaniv, good to see you.
I think your problem statement for Curation is interesting and worthwhile. (Organize the world’s public knowledge and information and, based on previous conversations with you I would add something like - to create a trustworthy source of information upon which we can build institutions for the internet age.) I earnestly await concrete proposals for what kinds of mechanisms we can use to tackle this problem with incentives and ad-hoc coordination.
I think before we can even consider this problem we need a reliable foundation that gives developers easy access to blockchain data. The good news is that with Horizon’s modular design, we will not only have a reliable foundation to build access to blockchain data but we will also have a springboard allowing us to deploy and test mechanisms to address Curation as a means to organize data. You won’t need to have community consensus or council approval to try your ideas. Questions like whether such a mechanism is or is not a part of “The Graph” will become irrelevant semantics. The only thing that will really matter is whether it is useful to enough people to gain traction.
Now I have to be a jerk and correct some nits with your post.
The current protocol design is not ideal for this use case.
The current design is not suitable, much less ideal, for any use case.
we haven’t proven whether or not our economic design is the right one to incentivize this behavior
“proven” is doing a lot of work in this sentence. Because The Graph is an open system (one which interacts with the outside world, as compared to a closed system like Chess) it’s very difficult to prove anything about it. But, we can still do science. Before the network launched, hypotheses were presented which theorized curation being broken. Those hypothesis were accompanied by predictions, like that bots would use sandwich attacks to leech GRT from participants. The data is consistent with the predictions which increases our confidence that indeed the mechanisms of curation as implemented in The Graph today are not the right design to incentivize the behaviors you have in mind to achieve curated data. If curators have left, it is because they were not incentivized to engage in the intended behavior. That’s as close to proof as we are going to get.
I wish that we would have responded to these incidents sooner. But, I feel that a straightforward reading of your language may unintentionally cast doubt on how much is known about the mechanisms of The Graph and thereby also lead people toward inaction rather than responding to the continued crisis that is unfolding in the protocol. It seems you are saying that we don’t know for sure whether “our economic design” (the protocol as implemented) “incentivize[s] this behavior” (rewards people for) “organiz[ing] the world’s public knowledge and information.” But, we actually know quite a bit about what the protocol does and does not incentivize.
I understand from talking to you out of band that your comment was not meant to be in response to the specific mechanisms of curation as implemented in The Graph. Your idea of what curation should be is a mechanism to surface valuable information. We both agree that a protocol that incentivizes behavior which would surface valuable information would be useful. We also both agree that the protocol does not do that today.
But, without a specific mechanism design your idea of curation is still just a goal. We must not conflate a goal you want to achieve with a specific mechanism that exists today in the context of this discussion. The goal you want to achieve is a cause worth championing, but curation as implemented is doing significant harm. Curation is SO bad The Graph would be better off simply deleting it even without offering a replacement like Indexing Fees.