The 3 dollar per question fee is outrageous.
If you expect at least 10 questions per hour (which is one every 6 minutes - for a size of a uniswap, nearly impossible to achieve so “low” requests), you’d be paying 30 dollars an hour.
Support staff is much cheaper than 30 dollars per hour.
Like I said, if you want this “chat support” function, a much more viable option is to hire someone full time and pay them with uni tokens instead of hiring an external company.
Thank you for answering some of my concerns.
The flat rate charge of 35,000 UNI for a year, will there be a breakdown of how these funds will be distributed? As we saw with the ICO bubble it was a winner take all at the top. I assume you will be receiving a large potion of the 35k as founder of serv.eth, and creator of the future site smart contracts.
Will there be a break down of how much of this 35k UNI is going to your self and how much to your workers?
I.e. 15k founder?
5k per current staff?
I am in support that the distributions should be more favored to equality of payment between workers and founder vs what is seen in current token launching models.
This is the most interesting governance proposal yet!
Your offer sounds reasonable and I fully support it. You already provided tons of value to the uniswap community.
As mentioned chat support in the uniswap app should be the end goal, but this should be figured out with the team.
As a current Community Lead / Manager myself (not of Uniswap) and having worked with top-tier projects for the past few years, I’d like to say I disagree with your pricing:
‘‘My tentative pricing plan was going to be 500 USD (paid in crypto) per month, plus 3 USD per customer helped, plus 0.04 USD per message read’’
Looking at the number of users vs the number of people that’d probably be in your team, you’d be looking at what, like $10k USD in expenses a month? Whereas, one could hire an internal team for $5k / month if not less than that. And, I’m talking 24/7 quality coverage there, not community moderators that copy + paste an FAQ.
On top of that, I’ve recommended the Uniswap team to create a Telegram channel. I’m aware there would be a lot of ‘spam’ in the Telegram channel. To combat this and ease the load of moderators, the following actions could be taken:
The pinned message of the Telegram channel would be the basics of Uniswap + links to the most frequently asked questions. I’d expect hundreds of users asking questions on a daily basis & thousands of messages, most of which would be easily answered through an FAQ.
Look at the big giants, live customer support for a (decentralized) platform of this scale is (almost) impossible. And therefore, things should be ‘automated’. Moderators would refer more difficult technical questions/issues to the Discord and help keep quality in the channels, rather than answer every single basic question.
It would be the most effective use of money. Typically I would always recommend a full 24/7 support team, but I just don’t see it happening here, especially because of anticipated spam & the same questions being asked over and over again. That being said, would recommend setting up a FAQ page on Uniswap with links to dedicated pages answering these questions with examples + screenshots. It would answer 90% of the expected questions. I’d be happy to help the team with this.
Regarding telegram. It is 1 single chat which is way too limiting for the size of Uniswap community. You can’t have more than 3 ongoing discussions in a single chat … even 3 is too much depending on the situation.
O I totally agree with you, which is why I would recommend a mix.
The entry barrier to ask questions on Telegram is lower than on Discord. Therefore, add a FAQ + automate 90% of the support on Telegram.
Other than that, redirect users to Discord for the more advanced questions. See Telegram as a first ‘spam’ filter there, main purpose there is FAQ.
Discord would be the real deal, which is where you can go into in-depth conversations and quality support in the dedicated channels: Support, General, Governance, etc. - The Discord would be much more manageable, but TG should not be underestimated 
Though even on Discord I doubt 24/7 paid support at scale would be the right decision, as there’s a lot of volunteers that help out as well as community members. Speaking of decentralization.
For some context, industry standard for chat support is $2 to $2.50 per customer handled. The level of support you get with that is usually “Tier 1” which means they can answer questions like “How much does product X cost?” and “What are shipping fees?” and “Do you ship to X location?” and “Does it come in Red?”. What Serv.eth Support offers is closer to Tier 3 support, which means our staff understands the systems being used well enough to troubleshoot problems and gather technical support information required for effective escalations.
Something to keep in mind is that running a business often costs more than just the flat hourly rate of employees. Whether $3 is too high or not is certainly a subjective question and the answer is complex. I won’t assert that I am certain the pricing is correct. I will say though that it is not a get rich quick scheme for me at that rate. 
If someone can provide equal/better service for a lower price I definitely encourage them to submit a competing proposal! I created this business because I saw a dire need for basic Ethereum technical support across the ecosystem that was not being filled by anyone else. I would love it if someone filled that void, and it doesn’t have to be me. 
The plan would be to periodically (e.g., once or twice a month) withdraw the dripped UNI and immediately exchange it for USDC, DAI, or ETH and use that to pay employees their agreed upon salary. After that, excess funds go to covering other costs that enable employees to be more productive/happy/comfortable such as equipment needs (e.g., office supplies, workstation, desk, chair, etc.) If there is money leftover it would go toward growing the business, either through acquisition of new clients, hiring of new employees, training, marketing, sales, etc.
To be clear, Serv.eth Support is a private business that isn’t directly affiliated with Uniswap. It is a service provider that I propose Uniswap governance could hire to complete a specific task. The reason for accepting UNI as payment is solely because UNI governance does not have easy access to stable coins at the moment and I didn’t want to complicate the proposal with mechanisms for converting UNI to stable coin.
I generally am pretty open about how I plan to run the business, but there are limits. I won’t share my employee’s salary publicly for example, because that information is private to them and it is their choice whether to share it or not, not mine. I do not plan on taking a salary for myself any time soon, as I’m more interested in growing the business than growing my personal bank account at the moment (I have enough personal runway to go without a salary for a while).
I like this. User support for all
I like your proposal concept.
I think it is a good use for treasury funds.
My opinion though, is that the support should be more direct with the user-Uniswap interface; for example, in the Uniswap app website. (instead of guiding people to Discord, making them create an account, learn what discord is, etc,etc).
Would that be still possible through your service?
This would truly give more value to new DeFi users.
TL;DR: In-app chat support is a good idea, but it comes with a bunch of costs and complications that make it not a great idea right now.
It would certainly be cool to have support integrated more tightly into the UI, perhaps with an in-browser chat pop-up or something. There are a couple problems with this:
Software support stuff in some countries work full time for less than $1000 per month.
Big public companies and services like Google and Youtube don’t have customer support for all users and I’m sure we don’t need one.
1.There are lots of answers already out there.
2.Who doesn’t know how to google
3.These questions are more for the wallet provider than for the exchange.
I’m sure Metamask answers all of them.
We have tremendous growth here that will explode with wrapped BTC in a very short period.
These are urgent questions to be solved:
1.How to use fees in the best interest of all token holders?
2.How will treasury be used in the best interest of all token holders?
3.How to incentivize token holders to not hold UNI on exchanges?
4.How to prevent attacks on Uniswap governance?
@Agusx1211 @BOR4 @TMod_Marco @Naught @chrisblec
Please add your opinion. Thank you
The best group to target with the fee’s would be users who are from countries where a little goes a long way, perhaps we give away first year of fee’s to those who need it most, from area’s that need it most.
Treasury should be used for building on top of Uniswap, and helping developers build out current applications for new capabilities. I think transparency is key, i.e. deliverable A receives UNI payment B.
1 and 2 solves 3. If we have more users, and new functionalities from developers then volume on Uniswap protocol increases. The increase in volumes will help drive those holding on CEX’s to come to Uniswap to partake in liquidity pool’s. Also if you are a new user receiving fee’s then you will be less likely to put tokens on CEX, being introduced to uniswap first that user is less likely to use an inferior product (i.e. CEX’s). Those users may also be unable to retrieve fee’s if its on a custodial account, unless that application builds capabilities to retrieve it easily.
Attacks will be prevented the more the token is distributed. Uni holders would not be aligned to bite the hand that gives fee’s.
I am not against paid uniswap chat support. I feel it fits a criteria of: Deliverable A (chat support), should receive Uni Payment B. On the larger scale chat support as a whole can be seen what is being evaluated, is the job being done well? Are observers in the Uniswap ecosystem seeing the value provided on a daily basis (Uniswap help discord)? I think the job is being done well, do I think it is worth 35k UNI for the year, not sure.
I would say 35k UNI is a good value for UNI holders if going towards 10 employee’s.
I would say 35k UNI is not a good value for UNI holders if going to 2 employee’s.
I state the above as it needs to satisfy point 1 and 4, we need to evaluate distribution and what is good for uniswap users. Is the quality of service good with 2 people or is it better with 10?
Should the 35k be structured into a Uniswap application where users submit quick chat concerns with bounty reward for answering from this 35k UNI (i.e. issue is presented from a user, a responder can then provide guidance, if user is happy with answer then responder receives payment from 35k). How can a chat support be opened up to anyone rather than a few responders (i.e. 10 employees)? Also building an application where this chat support is structured as a micro service cover Point 2, building on top of Uniswap and providing new functionalities (i.e. building a chat support DAPP, rather than using a central service like discord).
I think we need to have a high standard as to what passes with governance, such as :product/code up front, payment approved by UNI holders once value is put on table to evaluate.
My opinion is really not important as I don’t have any UNI delegated to me and I am holding insignificant amount of UNI in general. However you asked for it and I will provide you with it.
I think helping in onboarding new users on Uniswap is very important (this is essentially what first level support does). It ensures continued growth of the protocol and project in general.
Furthermore, I am always in favor of simple solution for simple problems. Over engineering paying support team will take more time and resources than UNI Micah is asking for. What governance needs to decide first is “Do we need first level support team?”. If answer is yes then “Is 35k UNI too much to solve this problem right now?”.
I am not saying 35k UNI is cheapest what you can get. However 35k UNI solves your problem of first level support right now and Micah’s team proved themselves already. If you can save 15k UNI by investing months of development/research … is it really worth it?
@BOR4
Agree on your approach. We should start with those two polls.
“Do we need first level support team?” . If answer is yes then “
Is 35k UNI too much to solve this problem right now? ”.
Perhaps the proposer should start it. @Micah
I would like to add a community-building perspective to the topic.
If we were an HR department of a company that looks to get the most for its resources’ frugal spending, a lot of the logic above would be applicable.
The critical metric would be the number of ‘happy customers’ we ‘buy’ with 1$ spent on chat support service.
In my opinion, there is a bigger picture to consider.
When we reward teams and individuals who bring value to Uniswap, using the most precise market rates might not be the right approach.
Uniswap treasury is far from being short on funds, so I can’t find a good argument to be frugal.
Even when we significantly overpay contributors for their work, it still is likely the best avenue of spending governance treasury in terms of ROI.
The way we reward contributions sends an important signal to future contributors.
Let’s consider two scenarios.
we reward contributors with perfect market rates
we reward contributors with 2x market rates
Imagine we reward 1 million UNI for 1 million UNI worth of work over a year in the first scenario.
In the second scenario, we would reward 10 million UNI for 5 million UNI worth of work.
In my opinion, the second scenario is much more beneficial for the growth of Uniswap.
If we want more people to bring value to Uniswap, the rewarding process needs to be:
a) easy
b) generous.
==
Regarding the proposal at hand, the suggested rates are close enough to market rates that I don’t think there is a need for discussion on lowering them.
Lowering the rates would send an uninviting signal to future Uniswap contributors.
==
Regarding the proposal’s scale, I think it would be better if the second layer of Uniswap governance would decide on and execute it.
The scheme where 40 million UNI tokens need to vote for a 35k grant looks disproportionate to me.
TL;DR: The contract asking price is $50,000 / year. The premium required for paying in UNI is 2x. Serv.eth Support is a support company, not an investment firm, and taking on the risk of high volatility assets is not part of our core business model.
Something I would like to clarify. The asking price for this contract is 50,000 USD per year. If governance had the facilities in place to pay in DAI or USDC, then the contract would be for 50,000 DAI or 50,000 USDC dripped over the course of the year. However, at the moment Uniswap governance does not have the facilities in place to pay with a stable coin, it only has the facilities to pay with UNI.
Serv.eth Support is not in the investment/speculation business and while we are willing to accept UNI as payment in this case, the premium for doing so is pretty high. This is to minimize volatility risk we take on. In just the last two months we have UNI price fluctuate between almost $8 and below $2, which is a 4x range. This may be good for an investment firm that trades in high volatility assets, but it isn’t good for a traditional business venture that has costs to cover.
My commitment is that regardless of whether the price of UNI in USD goes up or down, my company will continue providing support for a year. This means I’m taking on risk of the revenue from a contract with Uniswap becoming worthless (e.g., if UNI drops below a dollar), which is why I am asking for essentially a 2x premium.
It is also worth noting that in the consensus check vote I put up I also mentioned that at any time Uniswap governance could switch the drip over from UNI to DAI/USDC. This means that if Uniswap governance gained the ability to pay in stable coin 6 months from now, a vote could be proposed that stopped the UNI drip and started a DAI/USDC drip without any break in the support services provided. This means that I don’t fully benefit from the upside of UNI, since presumably if UNI does moon there would be significant incentive for governance to “figure out how to switch over to DAI/USDC”, while if UNI tanks then there would be little incentive to stop paying in UNI.
Doesn’t seem right that an ad-hoc team is being formed even if vouched by a few.
When people were shilling the recent UNI dump on the UNI discord and others defended UNI with clear arguments of volume and DEFI nature the Discord UNI moderators chose not to ban people many of whom were clearly using baseless FUD tactics to feed the dump. Some may have had the power to ban these comments but didn’t but now want to set up a team to answer questions to help people? There needs to be support for all languages and such support needs to happen organically and not set up by a central authority of early adopters.
So, in the spirit of other comments to the above proposal I would also be more in favor of a DApp functional button to allow UNI holder to gift UNI to people who they identify are helping the spirit of DEFI. This could obviously be automated, with a ML and data mining classification BOT set-up to Q&A data feed.
In case it wasn’t clear in my original post, this isn’t an ad-hoc team being formed. This is an actual business that I started whose mission is to provide chat support to Ethereum applications such as Uniswap. We are also reaching out to other potential clients at the same time, not only Uniswap.
Again, for clarity, the proposal here is to provide support services, not moderation services. While moderation services are something we can do as an add-on service if desired, it would mostly be for dealing with obvious scams, spam, etc. and not with curating discussion topics.
I happen to be a moderator in the Discord server right now, though that is unrelated to my support business. My policy on moderation is generally to only deal with the obvious bad actors like scams and spam, and any curation that isn’t someone openly breaking a rule I tend to escalate to the server owners to deal with.
My guess that building something like this would likely cost more than this proposal is asking for, likely by a significant amount. If your goal is to save money, this definitely isn’t the path forward. I do think such features would be cool, I’m just not sure they make business sense in this case.
On account of what you say I correct myself “Ad-hoc” seems unfitting Should have wrote near “Ad-hoc” . Ideally it would be a team formed from a more randomly drawn distribution of community UNI “volunteers” weighted across the Discord language channels most widely spoken and in need of DEFI. As you claim publicly you already have your team trained. I contend it would be preferable to raise/train the team organically via interaction in all the discord UNI language channels, not via what seems a more commercial venture.
I would heavily discourage voting or delegating votes to this cause. It is premature and goes against the spirit of organic decentralization and the building-up of community. The 400 tokens airdropped and dump, coincides with the high influx of discord members and questions as did the UNI dump shilling, that was rampant in the discord with some current mods unwilling to take a stand against including baseless FUD against UNI. Personally the building-up of knowledge in more organic and decentralized albeit chaotic way of asking, reading, watching, I think, a small price to pay for the 400 UNI tokens and will be more sustainable in the long run to the DEFI community.