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#hive

I'm Not Against the DHF. I'm Against Who We Keep Giving It To

Beggars@beggars (71)51d

Every time I criticise a DHF proposal, someone assumes I want the fund shut down. That I'm one of those people who thinks the return proposal should sit at the top forever and nothing should ever get funded again.

That's not my position. It has never been my position.

I think the DHF is one of the best things Hive has. A decentralised treasury that any stakeholder can direct is rare in this space. Most chains don't have it. The ones that do usually have it captured by a foundation.

So no, I'm not against spending the money. I'm against spending it the way we've been spending it.

We've been funding the same things for years

Look at what actually gets through. Frontends. Browser extensions. Another sidechain. Another EVM layer nobody asked for. Another X for Y app. Proposals that have been renewing since before the last bull run.

Do we need some of these things? Are some of them technology impressive? Yes. But our dwindling active user numbers don't need more frontends or cross-chain swap mechanisms. We're building like we're a top 10 market cap chain, big Hollywood budgets for an indie film audience.

Now look at where Hive is compared to three years ago. User numbers, price, developer activity, external awareness. Pick any metric you like.

We're not ahead. In a lot of ways we've gone backwards.

If you spent millions of HBD over multiple years and the outcome is a smaller ecosystem than the one you started with, the honest conclusion is that the spending didn't work. It's not a market conditions problem. Plenty of chains grew during the same period.

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The recipients haven't changed

Here's the thing that bothers me most. The names on the proposals are the same names from years ago.

Same accounts. Same projects. Same annual renewal cycle where the proposal expires, gets reposted with an updated header image, and the same whales vote it back in without reading it.

It has only been the past 6 months or so that we've seen heavy hitters in the community starting to push back against the flagrant spending and waste, asking questions and refusing to support established proposals. So much so, we've seen many proposals "voluntarily" reduce their daily ask to get support.

Despite all of the perceived austerity measures, proposals that shouldn't have been supported got supported anyway. We've seen people shamelessly ask for DHF funding knowing all too well there would be outcry and how bad it looks, but do it anyway because money seems to trump morals for some. Some of the same people claiming they care about the future of Hive.

It's not corruption. I don't think most of these people are acting in bad faith. It's just inertia. The votes are pretty much autopilot, the proposals renew, and nobody stops to ask whether this thing is still worth funding or whether it ever was.

Meanwhile, if you're new here and you want funding, good luck. You have no voting relationships. You have no history with the whales. You're asking a community that has been burned by big proposals before, and that scepticism lands hardest on the people who haven't had a chance to burn anyone yet.

So the fund calcifies. Old projects keep getting paid, new ones can't get in, and the treasury slowly turns into a pension scheme.

What I actually want

Fresh blood. New faces. People who haven't been on the payroll since 2020.

I want to see proposals from developers who are building things that don't exist on Hive yet. Not the eleventh frontend. Not another token layer. Not a casino with a different logo.

Fund the boring stuff that matters. Onboarding that doesn't require explaining private keys to a normal person. Tooling that makes it faster to build on Hive than to build anywhere else. Documentation that isn't five years out of date. Infrastructure that makes the developer experience good enough that someone would choose Hive on merit rather than loyalty.

Fund experiments. Small amounts, short timeframes, clear deliverables. If ten small proposals get funded and eight fail, that's fine. Two working experiments is a better outcome than one large renewal that produces a quarterly report and nothing else.

This is why I actually built HiveBounty (shameless plug, I know...). Instead of just blindly funding stuff, a project can be created, a single task, the funds are escrowed and once the work is done, the person and/or people get paid. Which is how it should be instead of a black box piggybank that just pays people out and everyone hopes that project hits it big enough to no longer need the DHF (which hasn't happened yet).

Fund people with something to prove. Someone who has never been funded before has more incentive to deliver than someone who has been drawing from the fund for four years and knows the votes will hold regardless.

I know for a fact there are heaps of makers in this community. We could easily take $10k, give it to 10 people and probably end up with a better result than some of the projects that have been taking hundreds of thousands for years and just cruise controlling because they don't have to worry.

How I'd change the process

Cap the renewals. If you've been funded for the same project for more than two years, you should have to justify continuation against a new applicant, not against the return proposal.

Milestones, not daily drip. Fund phase one. Check that phase one shipped. Then fund phase two. The current model pays people every single day whether they ship or not.

Make outcomes public. Every funded proposal should have to post a results update on a fixed schedule, with numbers. Not a wall of text about how excited the team is. Actual numbers.

Reserve part of the fund for newcomers. Set aside a portion of the daily budget for first-time proposals under a certain size. Give people a way in that doesn't require already being an insider.

The part that gets me

We keep talking about how Hive needs growth, needs users, needs developers, needs attention. And then we spend the treasury on the same set of projects that have demonstrably not delivered any of those things.

Then when someone points that out, the response is that critics never propose anything themselves, or that they just want to defund everyone.

I don't want to defund everyone. I want the fund to actually be a fund, not an allowance.

Spend it. Spend more of it. Spend it faster. Just spend it on people who might do something we haven't seen before, instead of paying for the same result we've been getting for years and pretending the next renewal is going to be different.

If you're new, building something genuinely different, and you've been told the DHF isn't for people like you, put the proposal up anyway. I'll read it. Plenty of others will too.

Worst case you get told no. That's still better than the current system, where a lot of people get told yes and nothing happens either way.

Comments · 8

  • @sagarkothari88(78)· 50d

    I have no hopes any more

  • @jacuzzi(75)· 50d

    I'm not voting on any more high funds either until the auto-done votes are removed from people.

    These accounts are auto-downvoting people for no reason, not even moderated anymore. Driving me and others away from even wanting to engage with Hive or promote it. And this is what some of the biggest underlying issues of our community is.

    @meritocracy @spaminator @freebornsociety

    Rich accounts get more money, others get auto downvoted with no moderation. I wish we passed a better ordinance law removing the downvotes, as that's the single biggest thing that has destroyed our platform.

  • @thedd(54)· 50d

    I think what deters most devs (me at least) is the almost certain rejection from the DHF for the reasons you outlined. And no that is not the worst part. The worst is that I have to pay for the proposal.

    So if I don't get funding I'm not simply a "Not Winner", I'm actively burning money.

    So no, I won't put up capital to be visible if the chances of getting funds are so tiny.

  • @spacecop(51)· 50d

    Where he's right:

    The incumbency-by-inertia diagnosis is real. Stake-weighted approval voting with a "return proposal" floor genuinely does reward renewal over scrutiny, and autopilot whale votes are a well-known failure mode. The milestone-vs-drip point is his strongest structural argument - paying daily regardless of shipping is a weak incentive design, and escrow/bounty models do align better for discrete deliverables. Public numeric reporting and the newcomer cold-start problem (scepticism lands hardest on people who haven't yet had a chance to burn anyone) are both fair.

    Where the thinking has holes:

    The biggest is causal. "We spent millions and the ecosystem is smaller, therefore the spending didn't work" ignores the counterfactual. Nobody knows the state of Hive without that spending; it could plausibly be worse. And "plenty of chains grew during the same period" is survivorship bias - the chains that grew mostly did it on VC injection, token emissions, and speculation cycles Hive structurally doesn't have. He picks the comparison that flatters the argument.

    Second, he conflates categories he finds boring with waste. "Another frontend" is dismissed, but frontends are the actual surface users touch, and redundancy there is a censorship-resistance feature, not fat. More pointedly, the "boring stuff that matters" he wants funded (onboarding that hides private keys, tooling, current docs) is largely built by exactly those frontend and infra teams he's criticizing. His preferred spending and his disfavored recipients overlap heavily.

    Third, there's an internal tension between his novelty bias and his own solution. He wants new, unproven people funded because they "have something to prove," but the escrow tool he built exists precisely because new people can't be trusted on reputation. Unknown builders taking small grants and vanishing is the classic grift vector, and small proposals are harder to police than large ones, not easier. His "8 of 10 fail is fine" model has no accountability mechanism for the 8.

    Fourth, the anti-renewal stance contradicts the infrastructure argument. Load-bearing infrastructure (RPC nodes, core dev, security, the docs and tooling he wants) is exactly the kind of thing that needs stable, perpetual, renewing funding. A hard two-year cap would threaten the maintainers of the unglamorous stuff he claims to prize.

    Fifth, and most practically: his reforms have no enforcement mechanism. The DHF is just stake-weighted approval voting. There's no allocator who can "reserve a portion for newcomers" or "cap renewals." Every fix he proposes would require the same whales whose autopilot voting he's criticizing to voluntarily constrain their own discretion, or a consensus protocol change. He diagnoses the mechanism correctly and then proposes solutions the mechanism can't implement.

    Net: he's directionally right about the governance pathology and wrong, or at least overconfident, about the conclusion that spending "failed" and that novelty and newcomers are the fix. It reads more as a well-argued provocation than a costed reform plan.

  • @lordbutterfly(80)· 50d

    Meanwhile, if you're new here and you want funding, good luck. You have no voting relationships. You have no history with the whales.

    I dont see how Hivebounty solves that. It just kind of makes it harder to get funding, how i see it. Instead of allocating money with your vote, you spend money from your pocket. You just switched where intent comes from. Theres still no money until someone puts it up. Thats many times a bigger obstacle for getting funding. Its kind of why the DHF exists to replace systems like this. You can always make a tiny DHF proposal.

    You still need relationships with people with money and because they would have to give you money from their pockets its even harder for new people to get funded then it would be convincing anyone to give you their vote. Im not arguing on the merits on how funding should work or not, just in terms of what you seem to want to solve, i dont see how this would solve it, what you built.

    This might be useful for small tasks you want someone to do. With Ai being so cheap Im not even sure what tasks those would be. Its kind of a Fiverr type thing and AI literally killed Fiverr. Its cool you made a tool for Hive but I would temper my expectations.

  • @urun(69)· 51d

    Name me 1 project out of DAO that was not a waste or had no other way to finance it over the time we have DAO on hive.

    There is only waste and no accountability. 2 front ends get cash, no mobile.

    Or the new one another round of free claude? Why people are not able to pay for their own sub or use alternative models ( that are sometimes better).

    And it would be wasteful too at 50 cent hive, thats why we might never reach 50 cent again btw.

  • @jza(68)· 51d

    I'm against both, at one point in would agree with you. Maybe 3 years ago. But now it got to a point that the DHF has overwhelming higher cost for the community and destroyed the tokenomics. Spending 5 million hive tokens a day week or month affect the economics of hive regardless of who we give that money to. Right now we need to recover those Hives. Massively burn those funds and try to get value from the market.

  • @buttcoins(75)· 51d

    A lot of solid points here. and it’s not negative. Kinda just sounds like common sense. Hope peeps see it.