In February, shit Tap on fans the usual way: An old tweet pops up again. Brantly Millegan, chief operations officer of Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a web3 business, wrote the following in May 2016: “Homosexual behavior is evil. Transgenderism doesn’t exist. Abortion is murder. Contraception is wrong. The same goes for masturbation and pornography.” After Millegan confirmed that this was still his belief, the debate in the crypto and ENS communities exploded. One side argues that Millegan’s personal beliefs have nothing to do with his role at ENS, and on the other hand that culling a culture is a web2 thing, not web3. The other side made the point of “Well why should we support and work with an asshole”.
This kind of situation is all too familiar on a platform like Twitter, where the power to censor online communities has become a matter of constitutional importance. But being a mod is not that difficult. In the early days of the Internet, I said, the specificity and scale of social platforms make it easier to tell which content doesn’t, and the closer relationships make assessing intent an impossible task. perform. Pushing someone out of the conversation also has less serious consequences than deciding whether to remove the president of the United States. The question of whether a social networking site like Twitter has the power to silence the bad guys has ended with the new administration, and web3 technologies seem to offer a tantalizing alternative.
The Millegan debate could go on for days with no results — except the ENS community has the power to address the issue directly. Those who purchased ENS, a type of domain name based on Ethereum, were given $ENS, which is known as a governance token that allows holders to vote in the public management ENS DAO (decentralized autonomous organization). company. In theory, governance tokens are used to decentralize power in web3 businesses; In practice, however, holders will often delegate their votes. Most $ENS holders have delegated a large portion of their voting rights to Millegan.
But after his position became clear, $ENS holders quickly organized to begin casting their votes away from Millegan. By the end of the night, Millegan had gone from carrying a majority vote to having less than 1% of the voting power. “We are notified several hours in advance and have no centralized permission, no board meetings, global, no censorship, on a neutral, autonomous, non-authoritative computing platform our government. vote for this guy,” Written @dystopiabreaker, one of the main organizers, on Twitter. “Remind me again how would you do that at your C-Corp?”
At first glance, Governance tokens are a utopian, thrilling idea, because right now the internet is terrible. I will list the ways? Cheap and divisive content, algorithms classify users into consumer categories while confusing creators and who they want to see and interact with, collect data, etc. having a minutiae control would also feel very good in the current model. The point is, a splinter might be all you get, if that.
The problem with governance tokens, like many other things, has to do with distribution. While the ENS situation may sound like a case of direct democracy, with one person equaling one vote, that almost never happens.
