0xe3ff24a9…149dsent to0x6f3e6272…223d·#22,246,934·view on Etherscan
I think Rocketman is a fantastic builder and exploring governance like this is very much worthy of funding, but I agree with both sides here and am just unsure if we can justify putting this much of the treasury behind Flows in its current state.
If this prop ends up failing please submit another one because I definitely don't want to see Flows die
+1
> I think its definitely +EV for Nouns to continue to support this experiment in some way. Flows is one of those products that attempt to course-correct Nouns and thats exactly the type of energy and operators we want. So ultimately I think we should give rocketman and team more rope here, im just unsure about the specifics, hence abstaining this time.
+1
> I believe in the potential of Flows, but right now it feels unfocused and difficult to rally around.
>
> Many grants either fund things people were already doing or they lack clear follow-through (not to mention the rugs). I’ve tried coordinating with grantees, and even getting the bare minimum of engagement has been challenging.
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> What is the goal of Flows? What are we actually working toward? We need clear, centralized goals that leverage decentralized tools to coordinate decentralized communities. All in service of building the Nouns brand.
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> I want a smaller budget version of this proposal. Less funding per month to grantees and more focused goals from the Flows team.
+1
> the forever problem of governance is that high quality governance is hard and painful (a lot of effort, skill, and brain damage involved) and as a result is in short supply.
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> companies solve this by allowing concentration of ownership and financial outcomes (large shareholders are motivated to elect the right management and go through the brain damage of corporate governance b/c they get the bulk of the financial outcome).
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> this doesn't quite work for nouns b/c culturally we reject the idea of a single person (or a few people) controlling the nouns treasury spending decision unilaterally and their motivation overwhelmingly being driven by personal financial profit.
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> that's reasonable imo. we would reject such a thing for our local city governance as well (nouns is more like a city than a company imo). but for city governance there's a degree of civic duty and lock in. when governance devolves too much (SF recently where I live), living conditions becomes unbearable and while many ppl leave (many tech ppl went to miami etc) at some point ppl like garry tan (who grew up on SF) that are never going to leave b/c it's their home and where their livelihood is built just start taking ownership b/c there's no other choice. city revenue is also raised through taxes. dues are collected from everyone and spent for everyone (though applied progressively) and it's forced.
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> i don't quite know how nouns governance is supposed to work long term. governance is hard and painful. you can't take over enough control of the governance to substantially privatize the financial gain b/c that would nuke the project. ppl aren't locked in and revenue isn't forced. i get why nouns could be a city ppl might love to live in. but would anyone pay to be involved in governance (something that is inherently hard and painful)?
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> i don't know the answer to this question. but what i do know is that any answer involves creating more leverage to ppl providing the scarce good governance. maybe they like nerding out about nouns. maybe they spent enough years and benefitted from nouns in one way or another and feel a sense of civic duty. maybe they are a nouns business and have some aligned financial incentive even if not a controlling amount. we need to take that which is given to us and SOMEHOW leverage that to govern the whole system effectively. prop house (token voting, gardeners, farcaster likes) attempted that but wasn't enough of an answer on its own. AI seems to be the only plausible new frontier to create leverage. if somehow we can determine who's providing the scarce good governance and train AI models to act on those inputs with infinite patience and attention, then maybe we have a chance. this seems to be where vitalik's thinking is going with regards to open source (public goods) funding as well.
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> another frontier is to reintroduce market mechanisms to aid portions of the governance decisions ("futarchy" is a buzz word ppl talk about which allows you to buy and sell each prop / governance decision). TCRs? revnets? to be honest i'm generally a bit more skeptical about this direction b/c i don't know if market mechanisms are really well suited for public funding decisions (so many pitfalls) but i do think it's a genuine additional frontier that we admittedly haven't explored much
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> this ended up being a super long rant but all of this is to say, i don't know the ins and outs of what's going on here but directionally i think it's exploring a super important meta problem of governance for nouns and given there aren't any projects more promising in this realm (and we're lucky to have someone as talented and earnest as rocketman leading it) i just think we need to let him cook
+1
> I appreciate the vision and contributions that Rocketman has made to the ecosystem — Flows is one of the most ambitious attempts to reimagine bottom-up funding in crypto. However, I will be voting NO on this proposal for the following reasons:
>
> 1. DAO Has No Long-Term Stake in $FLOWs Token.
> Flows is moving toward a tokenized revnet system, and yet Nouns DAO — the only funding source to date — is not explicitly included in the token design.
> Without equity, protocol fees, or token allocations for Nouns, there is no structural mechanism for the DAO to benefit from Flows’ upside.
> We’ve seen this before with other projects that launched tokens after being incubated by the DAO, only to exclude Nouns from the long-term value loop. **I do not want Flows to become another Agora.**
>
> 2. Funding Scale Requires VC Validation.
> Flows already received significant early-stage support from the DAO, well beyond what traditional incubators would commit.
> A follow-on ask of $575k should ideally be de-risked through outside validation.
> If the team can secure venture support — and I’m happy to help introduce them — I would feel more comfortable backing the next round of DAO support. VC validation would show that the tokenomics are sound and that Flows is building a market-aligned, sustainable product.
+1
> We’re big fans of the Flows mechanism, vision and concept, but there are too many flaws in its current form. The net is cast far too wide, diluting the impact. System is too easily gamed, allowing low-effort props to secure funding without sufficient vetting. Until these issues are solved we cant support, sorry.