GOVERNANCE AND REWARDING SYSTEMS

Social networking is a sensitive domain that involves very complex legal and ethical issues. While MetaLife believes in freedom of speech, we also believe that freedom can only exist with responsibility and accountability. We stand-by decentralization but believe that decentralization and governance can co-exist. With this conviction, we truly believe that certain consensuses must put in place to uphold the balance of freedom and proper governance in the MetaLife social network; such responsibility of governance is not to be withheld by a single corporate but by the community. In addition, to maintain a high quality decentralized social network that can provide wide area coverage and disseminate information to all corners of the globe, there must be incentive to attract quality service providers that are committed to operate the MetaLife platform.

Subjective Governance via DAO Election

DAO election is the main channel for subjective governance. MetaLife will adopt the “bubbling” and “resurrection” survival rules to select members for the independent regional community (the Planet). Roles of the elected committee members include

1. vote to determine whether the proposed governance should be implemented,

2. supervise the implementation process,

3. evaluate the implementation results,

4. rewards and punishments.

“Bubbling” process selects representatives with strong jungle power and influence, while “resurrection” process selects representatives with strong resistance to pressure and collaboration to ensure independence, justice, and harmony in the governance process.

Assuming there are 13 DAO committee members to be voted in, 11 members are selected by “bubbling” and 2 members are selected by “resurrection” process.

Specific steps are as follows:

1. In the first election (applicable to Planet with less than 200 members), everyone participates in a video conference (ZOOM) and randomly form groups of 4 to 6 people, and each group is to select a representative from its member. Once everyone in the group is in place, they can start discussions and negotiation to determine who is best to represent their group. Once the person is identified, others will vote. A representative must acquire at least three votes to represent a group.

2. After first round of elections, representatives from each group will conduct subsequent rounds of random elections in the same manner until the 11 top-ranked representatives are elected as the initial members of the DAO committee.

3. Elect the remaining 2 committee members using resurrection law. The process is to randomly select 2 candidates from the non-elected members in the 2nd last round and form a group together with the initial committee members. The candidates will undergo challenges or interview evaluation by the group members either in a one-to-one or one-to-many manner. The group will conduct voting to try to elect the remaining 2 representatives; during the voting, candidates may vote for abstentions but not veto while the initial members have veto power. The rule is to obtain approval from over 50% of the group, if so the candidate will be resurrected to join the committee, otherwise another candidate will be randomly selected and go through the same process again.

4. Committee members selected through the above-mentioned processes will govern content of proposal subjectively on behalf of Planet.

Planets with more than 200 members will be handled using the High-Tech Political Playoffs solution as described in MoreEqualAnimals, where cryptographic techniques are used to create a provably honest random number. Once the random number has been selected, it is used as a seed to a deterministic shuffling algorithm that puts people in groups of respective number. Chat rooms with video conferencing option will be automatically created for all groups. The group could be given a period of time (hours to months) to reach consensus in an asynchronous manner. The group members would then cast their vote for the representative (which they could change multiple times). Once 2/3+ of the group members agree a representative is chosen. The process then repeats with the representatives. Everyone is allowed to see any discussion their representatives are engaged in at higher levels. Each person has an opportunity to rate their representatives based upon how faithfully they performed. This information is then accessible in subsequent years when a new group of members is deciding whether to nominate a prior representative.

Objective Governance via Smart Contract

Smart contract governance is an objective governance that uses blockchain technology to achieve logical centralization in the form of decentralization. In the initial stage, governance contracts may include on-chain data, social behaviour incentives, reputation scores, etc. In addition, objective governance will also cover business-level smart contracts and DAO management contracts for various social applications that are built on the MetaLife chain. These contracts will include filtering functions for keywords and blacklist records and can modify and renew contract leveraging the Ricardo contract upgrade format.

Governance via MetaLife Platform

The MetaLife platform serves as an auxiliary channel to provide feeds to subjective and objective governance. The platform will be the place to receive complaints and reports and will transfer relevant disputes and violations to the corresponding subjective or objective governance process according to region but will not participate in the governance process itself.

Content Curation Governance

Preliminarily the following types of information are subjected to content curation:

1. Harassment, fake news and spam – This includes harassing posts and fake news reported by members and spam messages published for the purpose of gaining token rewards, affecting other users’ freedom to normal access to public information.

2. Malicious disclosure of privacy and infringing content – This includes disclosure of personal private data without consensus for purpose of retaliation, and plagiarize content of other’s works to gain incentives, affecting freedom to human rights and infringes on others’ interests.

3. Malicious content of personal attack – Malicious comments on certain published content for the purpose of unethical competition or attack, as well as personal attacks on the content creator, affecting freedom in expressing opinions.

4. Regional political opinion – Geographical restrictions on offensive political speech and discriminatory content are required to prevent speeches of different ethnic leanings from affecting the global deployment of social platforms.

For the above questionable contents that are reported by users, members from the DAO will jointly reviews and remedy the control on these contents:

1. Unfollow and notify related nodes to block content – Upon confirming violation of regulation, DAO can privately notify all following nodes to unfollow the bad actor and also block spreading of such malicious content.

2. Remove reputation score and blacklist on the entire chain – Publishers who gain posting reward from plagiarism will have their reputation score remove through objective governance. Offenders with three offences will be blacklisted such that any future articles published by these members will not entitle to any rewards.

3. Consensus to delete, edit and hide related content – For offensive content that involves privacy and has a bad impact on the parties, upon consensus through voting, DAO committee will notify the creator to delete, edit or hide the offensive content (for contents that are stored on-chain). While such requests are not enforceable, combination of punishment in the form of reduction in reputation store and incentive for followers to remove such content could help mitigate the situation.

4. Transmission area restriction – The prevention of political speech and geographical discrimination content mainly adopts IP restriction and Pub access control. Limit the number of invitation codes and geographically limit the IP that enters the pub to prevent people with hostile ethnic tendencies from attacking each other and affecting other members' demands for normal social interaction.

According to the above control mechanism, some of the new operation functions of pub are as follows:

Establish Pub DAO and set the criteria for reviewing proposals

· Accept pub members to report illegal content, or regular inspections by Pub DAO

· Add the IP audit function, pub DAO recommends the operator to choose whether to open this function according to the area (IP blocking)

· Interact with the reputation scoring contract (blacklist) and submit data for chain operations

· Notify operations such as connection blocking, content blocking, and consensus deletion (associated with super nodes for decentralized incentives)

Platform Governance

All community DAOs participating in MetaLife discuss the consensus of the MetaLife chain, and select MetaLife block producers from the conventional consensus mechanisms (such as POW, POS) and extended proof mechanisms (such as: POM, POC, POG, etc.) Block generation mechanism, and vote to finalize the consensus of the MetaLife chain, which will be developed by the platform.

Incentive Issuance Governance

Except for airdrop incentives in the initial stage of the platform to encourage user engagement, social applications in the ecosystem can entrust DAO committee to monitor and verify the authenticity of incentive program to ensure that the interaction is true and not fraud. At the same time, DAO will also ensure that users who contributed will receive respective incentives (decentralized on-chain or off-chain incentives).

Application Development Governance

Beside some applications (e.g. VISwap) that are essential to development of the platform, third-party applications are require to go through the application and review processes. DAO committees at the regional level will vote on whether the application can be deployed in the local Planet based on local folk customs, believes, laws and policies (for example, gambling games are not allowed in mainland China, but are allowed in Macau, China). The governance is aiming to strike a balance as much as possible between the interests of social users and territorial policies.

Platform Development Governance

This governance aims to leverage on aggregated community wisdom and drive development based on users’ choice of technology and social functions. New features and functions for the MetaLife platform such as introducing VR/AR technology into metaverse will be fully depending on the community’s decision. Planet DAO will vote and determine all future development direction, technical route and device deployment etc.

User Reputation

While the traditional token economy where higher staking leads to higher reward and voting rights is one important mechanism in aligning stakeholders’ commitment with staking and general goods for the community, MetaLife takes into account users’ Reputation as a 2nd factor to mitigate influence from trolls and whales in the system, especially during voting processes. The Reputation is part of a user identity stored in a programmable NFT. Reputation is credential that can’t be bought and is non-transferable, instead it can only be earned through social interaction, activities, and contributions recognized by other peers on the platform. While it can’t be exchange for monetary value, it is used as a multiplier to any pool sharing and attributes to proportional voting power in the system and DAO governance. In addition, a user with 0 or negative Reputation will not allow to vote in the whole ecosystem, regardless of how much token he/she may owned or staked. Hence a bad behavior (vetted by community) in any DApp in the ecosystem could cost the user’s Reputation and may flag him a distrustful user in other DApps.

In MetaLife, anyone can report a malicious public content, which will be accessed by the pub DAO (consensus decision). After review and verification by the community, the creator’s reputation will be updated according to severity of offence and recorded on-chain. Different punishments, including blocking of post, blocking of community engagement (following, like, dislike, comments etc) will be imposed depending on the updated Reputation. Most importantly, such malicious content confirmed and verified by the DAO will immediately be blocked from further propagation, and duplicated copies will be removed.