[RFC] - Wonderland Moderator Compensation

Governance Archive [RFC] Request for Comment
1

[RFC] - Wonderland Moderator Compensation

Summary:
The proposal was drafted at the request of Daniele and the community at large to compensate and retain the services of the most active members of the volunteer moderation team. The team is available 24/7 to provide support, education, engagement and member management. A direct line of communication with the core team is requested, along with increased authorization to make changes to the server, including post announcements and relay information. This will improve communication flow to members in the future.

Link to previous [DAO Discussion]:
[DAO Discussion] - Wonderland Moderator Compensation

The initial proposal garnered around 6 800 views and close to 250 comments. Many comments are supportive of the proposal, some are asking for more transparency on selected people, and some are concerned about compensation. This RFC should be read in conjunction with the original discussion.

Staff Selection Clarification:

Here is clarification on moderator activity since Wonderland started in September:

  • Alice: 10.6k

  • Bamchicka: 36.1k

  • Gin’n’Sonic: 27.4k

  • Nal X: 10.4k

  • Ruian: 13.4k

  • Wilson: 10.3k

  • Smilbur: 9.9k

  • Yaksha: 8.9k

  • Total: 127,000

These data include behind the scenes channels. The bulk of stated activity is October onward when the server grew quickly. This does not include countless DMs with one on one support or forum moderation. Any member ranked Cheshire Cat or above can verify these numbers including Daniele.

Behind the scenes channel activity includes things such as:

  • Internal communications with core team when possible
  • Coordination including troubleshooting complex issues or information sharing
  • Strategizing and configuring anti-scam bots to protect against the hordes of scam accounts and bots that attack a cryptocurrency server of our size frequently
  • Managing the forum of one of the largest and most active DAOs
  • Gathering feedback from moderators, volunteers and core team members

Compensation Clarification:

There was some confusion about the total compensation each person is receiving. The proposal included a lump sum of 25,000 MIM monthly for the entire team of eight, not per individual. The Senior Moderator is expected to earn more than the rest of the team and will also pay for server bots.

Feedback from stage one of the proposal indicated members would be more comfortable with partial payment in wMEMO to be more directly incentivized by the protocol’s future success. The pay scale is updated to reflect that as follows.

Monthly total for the entire team:
12,500 MIM
0.5 wMEMO (currently valued at 10 650$ as of this RFC)
*Note that allocation should be reviewed if the price of wMEMO were to be too high.

The Senior Moderator will distribute funds monthly, and it is at her discretion on how to allocate them. The team has the utmost faith in her fairness. Performance from the team is expected to remain consistent.

New Responsibilities Clarification:

This proposal will allow the moderation team to implement changes to the existing platforms based on suggestions and feedback from the community members. Something it currently does not have the authority to do. Communication, forum structure and overall member experience will be top priority for the moderation team in order to let the core team focus on other priorities.

We believe in the potential of Wonderland and would like to help it prosper. Hiring a team to help the project establish a solid foundation and become more organized to maximize its potential is key for the future of the protocol.

  • YES - Implement the proposed compensation and authority.
  • NO - Don’t implement the proposed compensation and authority.
0 voters
7 Likes
4

On the fence about this personally. It is only fair to compensate those who consistently contribute a significant part of their day/week to Wonderland. However, looking strictly at the rfc text, $275k/year seems a high price-tag to get: collection of feedback + implementation of changes to discord/forum.

  • Can you elaborate on what the differences will be between the current situation and a future with the proposed moderation budget?

  • Has the structure of compensation been evaluated from a legal standpoint, i.e. what, if any, are the consequences for the DAO of paying obfuscated salaries?

  • Does the DAO and/or community have any recourse with respect to the mod-team and/or spending of the proposed budget, aside from drafting a future proposal?

20 Likes
5

I think that the proposal was better with the compesation in MIM. It’s pointless been pay in wMemo and change the amount if wMemo goes up. We, as Dao, have the liquidity to fully pay our moderators, we don’t need to pay them in share

7 Likes
6

@LarryFisherman I added a line to say the RFC should be read with the initial discussion, since it does not have all the information. I’ll make sure that the WIP is a “full fledged” document in itself.

  • Currently mods have no authority to make any decisions other than muting/banning people. We can create some content to help the community, but don’t have any official way to promote it so it normally gets lost in the mix. However, the current aims at allowing the mods to do more.

    The most important part is an established line of communication with the core team. With that in place, mods would be able to prepare a proper communication packages to cover things that are on going or when something is being shipped (like today’s release of the new website). This extra level of communication would reduce the amount of confusion with current members, but also be helpful for potential future investors.

    The rest comes with the additional authority granted to the mod team. As mentioned above, if something other than muting or banning is required we would need to ask permissions. For example, we are not able to do announcements without having permission from the Core Team. As you know, proposals on the forum sometimes have a problem getting traction. Being able to make an announcement for important proposals could help with the engagement on the forum. This combined with regular communication related to the process could increase our efficiency as a DAO.

    The additional authority also comes with the power to make smaller, but also important changes like hodler only chat (which is being requested on the regular), FAQ, documentation, etc. to help reduce the FUD, but also improve the overall community experience.

  • There was a paid moderation team pre-Sifugate and a lot of other projects have paid community manager or something of the sort. While we would be paid, we would not be part of the Core Team like the dev and founders. I am not aware of any legal issues that would come directly from this, but we can surely ensure it has been taken into consideration.

  • The proposed budget is to cover mod salaries and potential expenses from the mod teams. Depending on what the DAO is requesting, it could come from that budget, but another proposal may be required. However, the more structure communication with the mod team should be able to help determine that.

@AliasMB Thanks for the input. It was requested quite a bit here and on Discord, but we’ll see what to do for the WIP. We figured we could include the wMEMO based on the price action these last few days and it would reduce the overall amount we would be making, but now we the price potentially pumping again, we might have to reevaluate. One of the main concern we had with having wMEMO is the amount of money we would get if the price was to trade at a premium again.

4 Likes
7

I have just voted yes. It’s easy to see that Dani has drifted away to his own “wonderland world” by himself again. ALL of the discussions, debates, whatever from RQ completion date until now has basically gone down the drain. Many2 beautiful ideas but I’m sure none of them will go anywhere.

Wonderland is centralized. Wonderland is Dani. That’s the fact. You guys can dream about being in a frog community with power and voices to change the “system” but no. It’s not gonna happen. So with this fact, we need the moderators to be the bridge between us and the wondering Dani. To report on what’s Dani is working on and once a while put up ideas so that Dani can or might steal it. Great if he did.

We are not a DAO but a CNAO (Centralized-Non-Autonomous-Organization). We are at the mercy of Dani and I just hope with quite a lot of hopium injected that Dani will not screw us. To think DAO is community driven, haha wow I was so mistakenly optimistic.

9 Likes
8

After some chats with @NalX, I support this proposal. I believe it will be helpful for our community.

Communication today could be better, and certainly the team will help at this.

And now, kinda off topic: I would love to freelance to you when/if you need, guys. Lol

Love y’all, let’s make wonderland bigger

4 Likes
9

Absolutely support this. Having half in wmemo incentivizes the staff to do their best! Yes from me!

2 Likes
10

why do you count wmemo in your example as 20k and not as backing of 40k? seems like easy manipulation to try and get even more money than before, despite a lot of us here saying that 25k is already too much. seems shady tbh.

4 Likes
11

agreed. i had no issues with this proposal until now. the mods can always use their MIM to purchase wMEMO at the time of payout if they wanted. The current price is so volatile (and beneath backing) that it doesn’t make sense to use the current market price as the baseline. Backing price? Maybe. Current market price? No.

3 Likes
12

We don’t need 8 mods making $34k/ea per year. Change this proposal to be based in dollars and reduce the number of mods to 4, increase the salary to 40k per year and allow holders to vote for the mods.

8 Likes
13

Even I support the idea I have voted NO. As before - maybe I am to critical - it is a not transparent proces. Hard work as usual should be good compensated - BUT - how do we measure the quality of work? I would love to take the role e.g. as well. How do I get the opportunity to do so?
Actual there is no 24/7 support realised, because and maybe it is my fault I always was a step behind due to my location in Europe.
Beside that I agree with Mr_Madness that 8 are pobably to much moderator when all at the same time working … there should be a better spread on the wonderlands global timescheme ;)…

@Bamchicka being the senior, as I am presuming this announcement will go thru positively … how can we jlin the club?

1 Like
14

I’m agreement with a few others here. I do believe compensation for the team is reasonable to expect. However, I wonder if it should be also be performance based. The community is currently reeling from the recent damage to the protocol post RQ and this has the impression of being another way that investors are seeing more money being drained from the pool. Funding 8 moderators when we don’t have a treasury manager feels like it is perhaps poorly timed. I’d like to see a greater portion of the earnings for the moderators in the native tokens for WL (rather than MIM). It would help to solidify that the moderators are at the mercy of the markets as much as the investors and hopefully serve to encourage them to continue to build ties with other communities and strengthen marketing to help everyone prosper.

It may even be best to have a quarterly vote on this to adjust the awards based on past performance of the mod team (I’d like to see some proposed KPIs for the work they have been and will do) and for the protocol as a whole. If the team is meeting their expectations and the protocol is doing well we may want to increase the funds, otherwise, if poorly or not meeting targets the incentives can be adjusted accordingly. At the moment this proposal feels a little open ended, meaning once it is passed there isn’t the accountability and it puts a capital drain on the system that is already bleeding out.

2 Likes
15

just as a side note: video games with over 20 million registered users have less mods than wonderland. and thats including different language mods… just to put this into perspective. >20 million vs <100k

2 Likes
16

Could we please make a statement. When we have votes like this, and it’s not an official vote yet, can vi please have the options:

  • yes do this, as it is.

  • yes do this, but with modifications.

  • No. Don’t do this.

In the other way. If people disagree. We would have to make a whole new proposal discussion. And start over.

If enough holders are for this proposal, but just want small modifications. There’s no reason why we should start all over.

With that said.
I’m in for this vote. Pay the moderators some salery.
But omg a salery. It’s as much as I earn a month for a good full time job in Europe.
I would like to propose to start much lower with the salery. And let’s see how it goes. And then we can vote to raise their salery if they do their job well. And if the whole project is going well.
And it’s wrong to point out its only like no percentage of treasury. It’s not at all about that.

So from me. YES to hire them officially and give salery. But let’s discuss how much for a start. After all, we don’t know if it’s gonna make a difference.

And. A huge part of holders doesn’t even have 3k$ left, after this insane downtrend.

4 Likes
17

Thank you for your input. We were originally going for total 25k stable for all but after collecting comments and suggestions from the DAO in proposal section, majority of investors feel that compensations should be in wMEMO, we do however consider that if the price of wMEMO skyrocket it will not make sense to keep the 0.5 wMEMO as payment and have to reduce it to match the total sum, thus that’s the reason why half is in stable and half in wMEMO and at the time of writing this reply the price is at 25.4k per wMEMO and (It was originally 19k when we put up the proposal) that means it’s over 25k total sum now, we will adjust accordingly before putting up the snapshot to make it fair compensations for both parties.

18

We should compensate moderation, but we should vote on how much budget to allocate to that, perhaps schedule quarterly votes to increase budget if the community is growing again.

I’m up to compensate them for their previous work done but paying 300k/y to moderate a possibly dead discord seems wasteful to me as an investor.

4 Likes
19

thats nice n all but you should always use the backing price as min price for calculations cos everything else looks like you are only in to milk the project but arent believing in it.

20

Despite having so much negative feedback this moved to an RFC…!!!
I guess the DAO is for only dani’s blackmagic where he hides at the back.
Will sell all of my wMEMO. No need to feed the moderators while I’m HODLing down 93%. There are a lot of good projects out there.

2 Likes
21

Thank you for your in put, we moved this RFC from proposal on forum and made changes from previous discussion https://dao.wonderland.money/t/dao-discussion-wonderland-moderator-compensation/16914/247 Modifications have been made according to investors comments.

The routine has become a full time job for most of us in the past few months and if this proposal passes it will become full time job for all of us as we dedicate 8-12 hours each day on here almost 7 days a week and with compensation comes more responsibilities to ensure investors get the best experience from this project and team. While I agree with you on the sum but moderators are all across time zones; Europe, Asia, America, North America, while dollars value seem high to some, it’s minimum wages with no other benefits such as health/dental insurance, OT, no promise of raise nor bonus, it will be a fixed amount until the community decide otherwise.

1 Like
22

Actually that’s a good suggestion, will inform the team and get more input on this change.

1 Like