Snorlax.tez, the fact that you would justify centralization instead of encouraging decentralization through this decision is disgraceful and serves as a stark reminder of why you are a poor steward of governance. Where a good Steward of Governance would see this as an opportunity to foster community contributions and decentralization, you’re instead leaning on a prior DAO vote as an excuse to claim this is a “small matter” and bypass the community entirely, more concerned with backing up @Martin, and not the DAO.
Who decides this is a small matter? I’m telling you this is a big deal—big enough that I wrote a detailed proposal on it to address it properly. You act as if my choices are as arbitrary as the ones Martin is making now, but I’m telling you they’re not. The fact that Martin disengages from community discussion to justify and push his flawed design is exactly why he fails to understand the nuance and strategy behind the original proposal.
By letting Martin hijack this situation and dismissing the importance of this issue, you’re not just undermining the DAO—you’re actively working against decentralization. Instead of standing up for governance and supporting meaningful contributions, you’re protecting centralized overreach and doubling down on arbitrary, uninformed decisions. This is a betrayal of the DAO’s principles and the community it’s meant to serve.
1. This Proposal is the Source of the Change:
Let’s be absolutely clear—this initiative wouldn’t exist without the original proposal. What @martin is doing is commandeering the proposal and using it as an excuse to push his own arbitrary idea for a slider, despite it completely undermining the intent of the original design. The DAO exists to ensure changes like this are decided collectively, not to allow individuals to hijack proposals and turn them into their personal projects.
2. @Martin’s Lack of UX Understanding is Driving This:
The original proposal was nuanced and strategic, rooted in framing effects and behavioral economics to encourage longer registrations. @Martin’s insistence on using a slider demonstrates a clear lack of understanding of UX principles. A slider is inappropriate here: it fails to leverage framing effects, hides key options, adds unnecessary friction, and undermines the precise tactics outlined in the original proposal.
3. The Slider Defeats the Purpose of the Original Goal:
The original proposal was specifically designed to encourage longer registrations by leveraging framing effects—pre-defined options in reverse order (e.g., 10 years, 5 years, 1 year)—to guide users toward longer durations. The slider doesn’t just undermine the solutions presented in the proposal; it completely defeats the purpose of the goal itself. Instead of encouraging longer registrations, it introduces ambiguity, makes decision-making harder, and removes the strategic nudges that the original design provided. The slider is actively counterproductive to the intended outcome.
4. Misleading Justifications About 100-Year Registrations:
@Martin’s justification for the slider, claiming it’s necessary for 100-year registrations, is entirely unfounded. The original proposal already allowed for custom durations like 100 years while being more effective for the majority of users. This justification feels like an excuse to push through a flawed and arbitrary design.
5. Psychology-Based Design is Ethical, Transparent, and Essential:
This is industry standard in any e-commerce. ALL design is rooted in psychology—understanding how users think, decide, and interact with interfaces. The original proposal used proven psychological principles like anchoring and framing effects to encourage longer registrations in a transparent and user-friendly way. These techniques are widely accepted in UX design to reduce friction and guide users toward beneficial outcomes for both themselves and the platform.
The fact that @Martin dismisses these principles and insists on a flawed slider design demonstrates a lack of understanding of user experience fundamentals. It’s clear he doesn’t come from a UX background, or he’d recognize that good design is always psychology-based. Instead of embracing thoughtful and effective design, @Martin has chosen an approach that adds friction and actively undermines the proposal’s goals.
6. This Exemplifies Why the DAO Exists:
The reason why the DAO exists is precisely to avoid bad design choices like this—and to ensure that decisions are optimized for a goal-driven agenda, not the whims of a single individual. Martin’s actions demonstrate exactly why community governance is critical. His unilateral decision to force through this poorly thought-out slider has resulted in a design that neither optimizes outcomes nor aligns with the original proposal’s goals.
7. Hijacking and Silencing the Community:
Martin has not only bypassed the DAO process, but he’s rushed his flawed slider implementation to testnet to make it harder for the community to challenge. By having this proposal canceled, Martin has ensured that the DAO is bypassed entirely, silencing the community and replacing a well-thought-out plan with his arbitrary design.
8. Subverting Governance Undermines Trust:
The DAO is the cornerstone of community-driven governance, ensuring that the direction of the project is decided collectively. By canceling this proposal and sidelining the DAO, Martin has undermined the very principles that make Tezos Domains a community-driven platform. If we allow this to happen, what’s stopping similar actions in the future?
This is not just a bad design decision—it’s a blatant overreach and an insult to the DAO’s purpose. The community must demand that this proposal be reinstated and properly voted on, and that Martin’s slider implementation is halted immediately. For some reason, there appears to be a behind-the-scenes team with the power to override the DAO—an arrangement that contradicts how governance is supposed to work. This ‘team’ and its license-assuming members should be subservient to the DAO—not the other way around—with the ultimate goal of increasing decentralization, not decreasing it. Actions like these undermine that vision entirely and must be addressed immediately.
I call on the ‘team’—which, for some reason, exists as a self-anointed group that believes it has the inherent right to supersede, dismiss, and minimize the DAO’s authority whenever it’s convenient for them—to stop backing up what @Martin wants without challenge, to recognize why this is so horrendous, to reverse this course of action, respect the DAO, and ensure that community-driven governance is upheld. This kind of behavior directly undermines the principles of decentralization and the trust of the community, and it cannot be allowed to continue.