Awesome writeup! I do think that hype for quadratic funding vastly exceeds its practicality, so really appreciate you calling out QF’s problems here. Notably Gitcoin, the poster child for QF, has also moved on more to provide funding infrastructure rather than emphasize the goodness of QF allocations.
We did end up implementing quadratic funding for Manifold’s first round of charitable distribution around June 2022 (link). We didn’t continue with it because it didn’t seem to be that useful for our goal of encouraging people to donate more, nor to allocate money to charities particularly well. We did also beta-test a mana-based mechanism just to make quadratic funding possible; it didn’t get much adoption, and we ended up removing the feature.
I do think there’s still something missing in the space of “letting lots of people agree on how to allocate resources together”; I’m especially interested in ones that let different voters have different weights (such as capitalism or liquid democracy). At present, if some funder is thinking about a fancy funding mechanism, I’d suggest they take a look at impact certs or the s-process.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience, Austin! I’ve added a link to your comment in the post. I’m not surprised that it didn’t do great for getting more donations to the charities (as the post suggests), but I’m intrigued by your impression that it didn’t do well in allocating money to different charities. What was your expectation regarding how allocations would be made, and how were they actually made instead?
And it’s really interesting to know that Gitcoin is also de-emphasizing quadratic funding. Their website still mentions quadratic funding quite a lot; do you know if they have written this down somewhere?
As for fancy funding methods, I agree that the s-process looks interesting on the face of it. But I don’t think my opinion here is more valuable than anyone else’s, and I don’t know how it compares to other mechanisms in this space. It would be great if someone thought through the theoretical considerations in that case, and try to get a sense for how participants/funders feel about it (like this testimony). This feels relevant given how much money the SFF has moved to date.
Awesome writeup! I do think that hype for quadratic funding vastly exceeds its practicality, so really appreciate you calling out QF’s problems here. Notably Gitcoin, the poster child for QF, has also moved on more to provide funding infrastructure rather than emphasize the goodness of QF allocations.
We did end up implementing quadratic funding for Manifold’s first round of charitable distribution around June 2022 (link). We didn’t continue with it because it didn’t seem to be that useful for our goal of encouraging people to donate more, nor to allocate money to charities particularly well. We did also beta-test a mana-based mechanism just to make quadratic funding possible; it didn’t get much adoption, and we ended up removing the feature.
I do think there’s still something missing in the space of “letting lots of people agree on how to allocate resources together”; I’m especially interested in ones that let different voters have different weights (such as capitalism or liquid democracy). At present, if some funder is thinking about a fancy funding mechanism, I’d suggest they take a look at impact certs or the s-process.
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience, Austin! I’ve added a link to your comment in the post. I’m not surprised that it didn’t do great for getting more donations to the charities (as the post suggests), but I’m intrigued by your impression that it didn’t do well in allocating money to different charities. What was your expectation regarding how allocations would be made, and how were they actually made instead?
And it’s really interesting to know that Gitcoin is also de-emphasizing quadratic funding. Their website still mentions quadratic funding quite a lot; do you know if they have written this down somewhere?
As for fancy funding methods, I agree that the s-process looks interesting on the face of it. But I don’t think my opinion here is more valuable than anyone else’s, and I don’t know how it compares to other mechanisms in this space. It would be great if someone thought through the theoretical considerations in that case, and try to get a sense for how participants/funders feel about it (like this testimony). This feels relevant given how much money the SFF has moved to date.
Re Gitcoin: I’m mostly reading between the lines on announcements like https://www.gitcoin.co/blog/announcing-the-decentralized-future-of-gitcoin-grants, which heavily de-emphasize the quadratic funding mechanism.