BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

More proposals. I’ve been using it a lot.

Yes, had noticed it encouraging optimistic, throwaway proposals on the grounds that there’s no reason not to use all your slots, that you can always self-kill a bad idea when you have a better one. I’m not sure anyone else has been using it.

It came in as part of some “touchups” from Card, but with no explanation that I could see. Did I miss something?

Admittedly, I’ve been routinely self-killing my proposals when the vote momentum has been bad for them, for the sake of getting slots back sooner. (Because I propose a looooot lol)

(as in, before that rule existed. For a very long time now.)

I added it in to remove admin advantage. Since admins control when proposals become passed or failed they can immediately fail proposals that they have made and self-killed, if it was at the top of the queue or in a row of proposals that are able to be passed or failed, in order to free up proposal slots for themselves; the non-admins have to wait for the admins to pass proposals and it’s not even guaranteed that they’ll pass everything in the queue that could be passed/failed when they do get around to it.

I’d be fine if there were more restrictions on it or if someone can convince me this advantage doesn’t matter.

Ah, got it.

I don’t think there’s really a meaningful admin advantage here, on the grounds that I can’t remember it being critical to any gameplay in the past, or being abused. There’s sometimes an admin self-kill to keep the queue moving on general principles, but I hadn’t noticed admins using that power selfishly to get a slot back. Admins have a small edge generally in being able to use a proposal slot as soon as it’s freed, but it’s not much of an edge (as proposals still have to stand for twelve hours before they can do anything) and it’s good for the game if admins have a bit of an incentive to keep the queue clear.

But to mimic that advantage, this rule should really be that a self-kill can free up a slot if the queue is completely processable below it. This rule instead takes self-killing much further than even some of the old “fail self-kills immediately” mechanics, and brings up the same issues we’ve hit before. Making proposals cheaper reduces the pressure to write them well in the first place, and lowers the consequences of your loopholes being spotted - if I write a page-long proposal and the second voter points out a flaw or a scam, it makes perfect sense for me to self-kill it and immediately repropose (and again if I don’t quite get it right that time either). It becomes a bit spammy, and any discussion ends up split over three proposals - a player checking in to find three similar versions of a proposal written overnight is going to have to read and contextualise three sets of probably-overlapping comments to get up to speed.

People also get trigger happy, when there’s a reward for doing so, instead of discussing their ideas. Cuddlebeam has been self-killing proposals the moment they start to tank (eg. Secret Stash after only two votes against), but with discussion proposals can sometimes turn around (eg. Surge Pricing), which went from 0-4 to 5-0 after 24 hours). I’m not sure incentivising people to give up on their ideas is a great idea.