Hello and thank you, I will share something below as a "human feedback" on the process of proposals.

When meeting with the HIVE people in real life in Berlin 2023 I pitched several proposals there to a witness.

I did not even propose them yet because I was told it would be too hard to get a proposal voted for.

I received explanations that re-funding an "existing proposal" was "easy" and that it depended on connections but that funding a new proposal was not. That it needed to see it like a senator campaign, to go to all IRL events, that there were groups (some not liking the other), that it will be exhausting and cost a lot of efforts. I was repeatedly told to NOT DO IT.

I understand that of course a different witness may have shared a different opinion, but that was a cold shower.

I had a few proposals ideas, including (1) a hive cross-game plugin to broadcast game news across several games (2) an independent radio that we could feature in our games too, and (3) a third party that evaluates ethics and tokenomics in games and also thinking about (4) a different block explorer with some added services which I thought could be nice, as a game developer myself. I had developer a database management system that could handle the scale at a cheap cost.

I am also the EXODE developer at https://exode.io and meeting other game devs made me think that we could feature such elements but it needed some important extra effort to make it happen. And of course should be free for all users.

I was disappointed because I thought the systems in place would make it seen & voted if found interesting.

But if that needs to do a lot more in PR than the actual cost of the work there may be an issue. Same if existing connections for votes are more important than the technical or the proposal itself.

Now, I only send this as feedback!
Obviously you have more knowledge about the process than I do, and can confirm or not if it is a PR process or a proposal process.

What would be your feeling about this situation?
Am I making a mistake in my reading this situation?

Now unless I am mistaken, I do feel that if in addition to that there is also a threshold making it harder, I really don't understand how that could work for new, nice ideas that would not focus on PR. I see the worth of the Refund Proposal but I am afraid of the hardships for new proposals as the PR-need was already sounding huge.

I understand the will to refine the process but I think any adjustment should give the impression that new proposals (if with proper relatively cheap costs) "are made easier to notice" and not even harder to get voted for even when they are possibly noticed.