Polkadot Open Governance

@1PGiULXMfgmC9DwV7rMUseNa3SxDwae26ZWZmMtXkVSCznp

Hey Imdio,

Our requested budget is to cover the infrastructure, maintenance and team costs. The proposal is to cover our annual budget(significantly reduced compared to previous year) and includes both maintenance and new developments. The proposal also includes a list of things that we are working on but are not charging to the treasury.
This feels like an overstatement. We have consistently remained one of the most used product in the ecosystem with over 80% comments till date on Polkassembly and over 50% of total identities set done through Polkassembly.
— This does not eliminate the fact that in the previous year, because we were focussed on doing too many things for the ecosystem, the quality of product has been impacted. This is why for this year, we have reduced the breadth of our contributions to the ecosystem to focus solely on improving the quality of product and leading the development of an ever-evolving opengov.
— Our team has always been available round the clock to assist users and solve there issues. Loads of issues have been fixed and the platform is undergoing a complete revamp of codebase and product(under testing on Westend)
Can you point us to the source of this data? It might be incorrectly mentioned somewhere.
Our detailed budget is available in the proposal document. We are sharing a summary below from the proposal—
Polkassembly has over 150k monthly and about 45k weekly visitors(cloudfare) across the platform. Monthly acitve users ~ 98k(Google Analytics). Average session time is around 6.5 mins.

We have been leading the development of multiple features across the product including multiple versions and iterations to identity setup, proposal creator, access control, and many more things that the community constantly kept requesting. The fast pace of shipping and our focus on platform gamification, badges and some other experiments(which was done to try and figure ways to move away from treasury funding), introduced some performance issues in the product and for this year our focus is primarily to build core functionalities, improve UX and experiment less.

Hope this addresses your concerns. For ay other questions feel free to reach out to us directly or share them here.

Thankyou, and looking forward to your support!

Feb 14

Hi there. Polkassembly with the Subsquare are 2 major products of governance tool on Polkadot. Which is great. However, I voted NAY on this proposal because:

The requested amount is unbelievably big.
The request for $1,000,000 for a product that is hardly working after 2 years of development. It has constant annoying bugs, such as content not loading, loss of RPC, loss of connection with wallet, content shifting, and slow loading.

I should admit that in the last year, I personally submitted more than +25 bugs to the Polkassembly team (which is not great). However, some of the bugs were fixed very quickly.

I would suggest Polkassembly to:

Fix already knows bugs
Improve user workability
Lower the amount.

An additional questions to Polkassembly:

1. If the infrastructure cost req 92K\months, which means 92K*12=1,104,000$ only Infra cost, how can you request a lower amount?
2, Can you please share: statistical data of polkassembly: daily, weekly, monthly visitors, average session in min?

Thank you.

CrisOpenGuildFeb 14

I believe Polkassembly is one of the most dedicated team in Polkadot ecosystem. Their customer support is top-notch, always make community members feel safe with quick response, including me.

The app is also probably the most used in the eco right now so this sounds a no-brainer funding.

PolkassemblyFeb 13

Polkassembly

We will be using this comment thread to share details and clarifications from our discussions with delegates and AAG! 🧵

— For the year 2024, Polkassembly's proposal payout was significantly higher than we proposed

Polkassembly's wallet can be tracked here.
When the proposal payout was received, while the dollar amount of received DOT was higher, Polkassembly decided not to sell their entire DOT holdings to avoid dumping.
We have progressively sold the tokens to fulfil our operational requirements as per the requested budget. The token transfers can be tracked on our wallet, and anyone can verify that the total amount that we received was slightly less than what we had proposed, due to extreme price volatility in DOT's price.
This situation has been a learning in our fund management strategy and is also the reason why we have decided to make our proposal in USDt for year 2025.

— Why was Polkassembly's budget greater than Subsquare?

Polkassembly is a dedicated team of 16 people who focus primarily on development of products and tools for Polkadot ecosystem.
We have always been at the forefront of product development, leading innovation for social timeline, batch voting, creating and maintaing the primary Delegation dashboard, identity registration and management, proposal creation, spam prevention, social timeline and points gamification to increase governance activity and much more.
We actively contribute to new projects by helping them understand proposal creation process and often providing hands on support for the same, guiding them through their journey within Polkadot ecosystem and to boost our efforts, we were also provided the opportunity to be a DV-Delegate in Cohort 2 and the team has actively voted on proposals till date.
To lead such active efforts and development, Polkassembly team spends heavily on R&D and hiring the best people in roles beyond core tech development. The team focusses on research of governance, UI/UX product interviews and understanding the real pain-points of our users.

But having realized the increasing burden on the Polkadot treasury from multiple teams including us, who rely on the Treasury for their primary source of funding, we have taken 2 major steps —

We have reduced our budget by ~18% YoY, through internal cost optimizations and streamlining our focus and operations
We are also working on actively researching and developing alternate funding mechanisms for the ecosystem, with a goal to transit 20-30% of Polkassembly's annual budget to these new funding paradigms.

A reduced budget does not mean less focus on R&D or product. It just means sharper focus for us as a team to work on things that matter the most to the community and our users.

@Polkassembly

New features included within the same scope —

— Add support for Mimir, Signet and Polkagate Snap

— Add multilingual support for comments and proposal description.

BrownBear02Feb 13

[Deleted]

ryandinh88Feb 6

Been working with Polkassembly team since early days and always impressive by their work and what they have contributed to the ecosystem. Looking forward to their new updates in the 2025 roadmap!

PolkassemblyFeb 6

Over the past few weeks, we actively sought community feedback to refine our roadmap for 2025. Based on this valuable input, we have adjusted our approach to focus more on usability, stability, and core feature development while ensuring a seamless governance experience for all Polkadot and Kusama users.

Key Focus Areas for 2025

✅ Enhancing platform usability and stability with AI-powered moderation, better comment flagging, onboarding walkthroughs, and bug tracking.

✅ Improving governance accessibility with features like proxy explorer, anywhere navigation, and real-time progress tracking for treasury-funded initiatives.

✅ Streamlined funding applications—a unified dashboard for all Polkadot-related funding opportunities, including treasury proposals, bounties, and external grants.

✅ Cross-chain governance improvements—better integrations with AssetHub, People Chain, and additional Polkadot parachains to improve proposal visibility and participation.

✅ Technical improvements—upgraded caching, bot detection, and infrastructure enhancements for better site performance and security.

This roadmap shift ensures that our efforts remain impactful and directly benefit governance participants. Some experimental features from our original proposal—such as extended JAM integrations and hybrid governance frameworks—will still be actively explored and developed, but will not be prioritized.

The cost of these will be borne by the Polkassembly team, ensuring treasury funding is allocated to the most urgent and widely requested improvements.

The new discussion document have been updated here and on the original discussion post.

The contextual information on the post is kept the same for complete transparency and will be updated at the time of creating on-chain proposal.

PolkassemblyFeb 6

saxemberg

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

@saxemberg Agreed.

Most of the updates discussed and proposed including the technical revamp are implemented. Over the past 4 years we have actively worked with the community to address each and every issue that is reported to us. While there is no denying that we have struggled with some major reliability issues on the product, over the past few months, except a few bugs, most of them have be resolved and the remaining ones would be addressed with our ongoing technical overhaul.

The feedback to focus more on reliability, easing platform oboarding for new users and making UX further better has been implemented into the proposal. The updated discussion post can be viewed above and we are also sharing those changes here —

— We have added a few more product features that help improve the UX, including working with an external agency to get professional inputs.

— Since those additional tasks increased the budget, we have removed the cost for experimentative features that were initially part of the proposal. While these features have been deprioritized, they will actively be worked on after the important tasks for this year, but the treasury will not be billed for the same.

Over the past year, the Polkassembly team has been deeply involved in advancing Polkadot’s fast-moving governance, often going beyond pure product development to support new builders and active users. We recognize that this broader scope occasionally pulled our attention away from product fixes and performance enhancements. However, our commitment to maintaining a stable, reliable platform has never wavered. Polkassembly remains one of the ecosystem’s most widely adopted products—a responsibility we take seriously as we work to keep the platform bug-free and uphold the high standards expected within the Polkadot community going forward!

saxembergFeb 5

saxemberg

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

@Polkassembly

The best approach for us will be to wait until Polkassembly shows all the UX/UI improvements first as they were meant to be covered by the maintenance fees for 2024 and reassess the 2025 proposal separately after it, adding such costs for 2025 doesn’t provide a good sense for the Polkassembly premium. As it was discussed, it's not just a matter of fixing a few bugs pre-referendum, it's the fact that these have remained there for so long that and only addressed during the pre-referendum phase that make us rethink this yearly funding significantly.

In the meantime, we’ll remain watching this referendum when it launches so hopefully other parties can also weigh in in the discussion.

saxembergFeb 5

saxemberg

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

@MarioSchraepen

We have to echo this comment too. The erroneous requests quantities are older than 2 days. We are sure to have found that error in 2024 numerous times.

PolkassemblyFeb 3

saxemberg

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

@MarioSchraepen Hey Mario,

As shared in DMs on Telegram, this issue arose yesterday after a new code was pushed, and had impact primarily on old proposals. Before the issue was highlighted here, a fix was already in works which was pushed live.

We've had to let go of our Senior QA recently and are already doing 5+ interviews/week to hire a new one. We apolgize for the inconvenience and will work harder to provide a seamless experience to you and all our users!

MarioSchraepenFeb 3

saxemberg

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

@saxemberg

I have to agree with Saxemberg on this—just as I pointed out during AAG of January 30. Here’s the link

https://www.youtube.com/live/QmnXnQzi1JE

Jump to minute 35:00, where I directly ask about bug fixing.

I used to rely solely on PolkAssembly, but recently, I switched to another tool that’s faster, more accurate, and simply works better. And honestly? That says a lot.

This is a screenshot of a serious issue that kill trust:

The "No" side suddenly showing 100 BILLION DOT—how does that even happen?

Or this proposal supposedly asking for 9.2 DOT, but in reality, it’s 92K USDT. Basic functionality still not fixed—how are we expected to trust this tool?

In previous referendum 483 you requested $1,198,102.03

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483

I think Quality Assurance needs to be the biggest priority now. You’ve made governance more accessible—now make sure the platform is solid and reliable. Fix the basics.

Because if the basics aren’t right, nothing else matters...

PolkassemblyFeb 3

saxemberg

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

@saxemberg thankyou for taking out time to drop a detailed feedback on our proposal.

We would like to acknowledge and address some issues —

For UI, during the previous proposal, a couple of issues were highlighted to us —
- Sidebar. The sidebar has undergone 2 iterations post that consistently taking user feedback to improve the experience
- BountyDashboard — We learnt that discovering bounties in the ecosystem was hard, hence we created a new Bounty Overview to increase discovery, enhance traceability for child bounties, and developed a curator dashboard for curators to manage bounty requests and payouts.
- Delegation — While delegation dashboard had loads of tech improvements made, we added search and filters to improve UX of the dashboard.
- Social feed — A new social feed was developed to imrpove discoverability of latest proposals and highlight proposals closer to end of their voting period.
- Proposal listing view has undergone multiple user-feedback iterations to improve the UX. A new version with more optimized listing view is in works.
Our design and product team has conducted over 20 interviews last year to take direct feedback from power users and improve the UI/UX of the product. We actively invite more feedback from you and other users to help us improve the experience for them.
AI summary is undergoing a change using multiple models and a custom model that we have trained to provide more insightful information. We are also adding a nudge to introduce direct user feedback for both proposal and comment summary.
AI Agent integration is in partnership with on-finality. The primary goal is to improve UX of new users making it easier to navigate and also to showcase the strength of our ecosystem products, since Polkassembly's platform has one of the highest visitors in the ecosystem and this gives us an opportunity to help grow ecosystem products.
Regarding spam, we actively remove spam posts created everyday on the forum(30+ in January itself). The spam through comment was an isolated issue(thankyou for highlighting, it has been deleted now) and we are adding AI-based checks on all comments and discussions to flag if anything is potentially a spam(Currently any comment or post which gets marked spam by 5 people is immediately highlighted as spam)
Regarding Identities, we had intermediate issues regarding our identity service a couple of months ago and those were actively fixed. To keep the most up-to-date information, we actively fetch and display the latest identity data which sometimes leads to loading issues due to network abnormalities. We are already working on a periodic identity update service internally to decrease load times and reduce latency.
We already show edit history of referanda/discussion and are working on adding edit history to comments as well.
- If there is anything else you would like to see in versioning, please let us know so we can evaluate and add the same.
The anti-scraping issue is well noted and we will have a fix within the next 2 days. It primarily seems to be arising due to our Quote feature that we added on comments and discussions and this issue was not highlighted by any user and also missed by our internal QA team.
For Analytics, we added some basic data and charts based on user requests. Our current proposal focusses on doing 2 things —
- Improving data and visualzations for these dashboards and adding more relvant data points from existing dashboards such as the Dune DV dashboard, Delegation dashboard and a Bounty data analysis dashboard.
- Aggregate data to create unified views for better understanding and to allow for user customizations, so that dashboards can be personalized based on the interests of the user.
Regarding the Budget, Subsquare's annual budget for 2024 was ~$750k and while our budget for 2024 was significantly higher, we have highlighted in the discussion and our comment above on where the budget was used and how resources were allocated to R&D and pro-active feature development leading the development of tools that the ecosystem and our users requested. Compared to previous year, we have also done some cost optimizations and enhanced our focus to reduce our budget by ~18%
For this year, under maintenance, a major part of our resources and budget are allocated towards improving the tech, increase speed, reduce latency and make the platform UX simpler. The new features and roadmap have been added to address the needs highlighted to us by upcoming teams building new dApps on Polkadot. A part of our budget is also focussed on building new funding mechanisms so that ecosystem teams, inluding Polkassembly, need to rely less on the treasury and are funded by the community.
'Report an issue' button will be replaced next month, with a deeper integration for reporting and tracking issues through public-tickets, that would be visible to the entire community, helping us improve the product on an accelerated pace and enforcing more active public-transparency and accountability.

Hope this addresses your concerns.

We look forward to getting more feedback from you and the community!

saxembergFeb 1

As power users of the public governance tools and forums this will come as a surprise but we would like for Polkassembly to refocus on usability and UI than implementing new tools left and right, so unless UI becomes a central point of this referendum we won’t be supporting it.

First: the UI concern. This concern was raised during the previous proposal by many users and we have been reached by newcomers as well as “old DOT holders” trying to get their hands wet on Polkadot governance to find complaints about the UI on Polkassembly which still remains the most used forum on OpenGov. We believe that not enough work on the previous requests have been done and the UI is at this moment a great barrier for new users, current users and visitors to use OpenGov. If this UI refocus doesn’t happen at this moment all new features will be lost in a myriad of items which are hard to organize.

A second focus is the fact that Polkassembly will receive double the payment from its alternative, Subsquare, each with different unique functionalities but the result of these novel functions in Polkassembly is what makes us doubt that the extra premium is worth it. Subsquare 469.85KUSDT per year. Polkassembly who will require US$ 977532.82 according to this referendum text. Some of these new features were cool on paper but it seems like they are not the best, like the AI summaries, which are quite low quality. Agents is one of the new offers of the new referendum which work on a similar technology so we are not to certain about their quality. AI tools is one of the items that added the premium on the previous referendum and will be a premium for the future referendum. Another current premium concern are the analytics. We already have some analytics and tables on the dashboard on Polkassembly that really don’t tell a story.

A better use of said resources should be versioning, something that all forums lack at this moment and would make a great tracking tool to see what changes were made to the referenda, Connections to OGTracker results for past referenda could also be a great addition instead. In short, the price hike doesn’t seem to have been worth and many of the new proposed items seem disconnected from some more needed things. This Item was already highlighted by ChaosDAO for the 2024 referendum and now we would like to echo it based on the results of 2024. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/483#hoVG9lslrNJkHEU12Y2Y

Third, anti-scrapping measures implemented this year have created significant issues with the day-to-day use of the forum. The copy – paste functionality is broken (comments are pasted at the end), comments don’t get saved and we suspect it is the responsible for caching issues which don’t allow the full information to be displayed at times. In this case, the information about the identity of DVs. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/delegation

Sorting threads is also we find extremely concerning as it points out to another issue which is the spam. Moderation is a concept that is included in the payment but it seems to be reactive to reports as spam comments can be tracked by the sorting and left there for days.

An example:

The new comments on old threads are spam

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/1836#jOlh7psK4CRhrtnlvrFQ

Basic wallet and address functionality should be streamlined in a better manner. The display of IDs breaks on Polkassembly, which causes a false “unverified identity”. Alternatively, the addresses do not display the correct verified identity and they require to register through Polkassembly in order to display any verified identity.

Many of these concerns appeared during the previous proposal in some way or another and we would like to see them properly addressed first before getting the next batch of funding. Surely other power and not so power users will have similar requests so we invite all token holders to discuss the required changes that Polkassembly needs to make. Unfortunately, the report issue button is not cutting it right now so a more streamlined way to improve issues should be made.

PMEIFeb 1

Big fan of these new ideas moving into the new phase of Polkassembly's growth— particularly interested in the decentralized funding mechanisms. Really appreciated the updates the team put together this year. Looking forward to these updates.

PolkassemblyFeb 1

We will be using this comment thread to share details and clarifications from our discussions with delegates and AAG! 🧵

— For the year 2024, Polkassembly's proposal payout was significantly higher than we proposed

Polkassembly's wallet can be tracked here.
When the proposal payout was received, while the dollar amount of received DOT was higher, Polkassembly decided not to sell their entire DOT holdings to avoid dumping.
We have progressively sold the tokens to fulfil our operational requirements as per the requested budget. The token transfers can be tracked on our wallet, and anyone can verify that the total amount that we received was slightly less than what we had proposed, due to extreme price volatility in DOT's price.
This situation has been a learning in our fund management strategy and is also the reason why we have decided to make our proposal in USDt for year 2025.

— Why was Polkassembly's budget greater than Subsquare?

Polkassembly is a dedicated team of 16 people who focus primarily on development of products and tools for Polkadot ecosystem.
We have always been at the forefront of product development, leading innovation for social timeline, batch voting, creating and maintaing the primary Delegation dashboard, identity registration and management, proposal creation, spam prevention, social timeline and points gamification to increase governance activity and much more.
We actively contribute to new projects by helping them understand proposal creation process and often providing hands on support for the same, guiding them through their journey within Polkadot ecosystem and to boost our efforts, we were also provided the opportunity to be a DV-Delegate in Cohort 2 and the team has actively voted on proposals till date.
To lead such active efforts and development, Polkassembly team spends heavily on R&D and hiring the best people in roles beyond core tech development. The team focusses on research of governance, UI/UX product interviews and understanding the real pain-points of our users.

But having realized the increasing burden on the Polkadot treasury from multiple teams including us, who rely on the Treasury for their primary source of funding, we have taken 2 major steps —

We have reduced our budget by ~18% YoY, through internal cost optimizations and streamlining our focus and operations
We are also working on actively researching and developing alternate funding mechanisms for the ecosystem, with a goal to transit 20-30% of Polkassembly's annual budget to these new funding paradigms.

A reduced budget does not mean less focus on R&D or product. It just means sharper focus for us as a team to work on things that matter the most to the community and our users.

WoodyJan 30

Really liking the direction Polkassembly is taking with OpenGov, especially around bounties and delegation. The improved curator dashboard and structured funding for bounties has made it easier to track and manage contributions, which is huge for accountability. Also, the upgrades around progress reports have been something new. Its exciting to see partnerships increasing at Polkassembly. Excited to see the proposed features in 2025!

MatjazJan 30

It goes without saying that Polkadot—especially OpenGov—wouldn’t be what it is today without the Polkassembly team. Their work has been crucial in making governance more accessible and transparent. Looking forward to seeing them continue to innovate and strengthen the ecosystem!

pixiepmJan 30

Expand governance infrastructure by introducing JAM-based governance middleware, multichain support, and extended off-chain participation tools.

Really excited to see Polkassembly pushing OpenGov forward! The focus on JAM-based governance, multichain support, and better off-chain participation tools is exactly what’s needed to make governance more accessible and efficient. Giving the community more ways to engage—without relying so much on the treasury—is a huge win. Looking forward to seeing these improvements in action!

Polka_MaxiJan 30

Supercool roadmap. JAM is the next big thing for Polkadot.

#1434 · Polkassembly Social Contract 2025

#1434 · Polkassembly Social Contract 2025