To DAO or not to DAO

Good morning/evening.
 
So if you have read my ramblings about Helium back in the old days, you may have read about me calling it a 'dictator DAO' but what is a DAO and what is it supposed to do? I am in another project that is currently asking for the community to contribute to its DAO which is why I am writing this now, but as of yet I have not joined or voted on any proposals.
 

 
What is a DAO
A DAO is essentially a community governed organization powered by smart contracts. No managers, no middlemen, just code and community. Members vote on proposals, control a treasury, and decide the future of the organization collectively.
 
It is supposed to be decentralized decision making for a project and the way in which it moves forward but more often you end up with something quite different.
 

• Low voter turnout.Voter apathy is rampant. In many DAOs, fewer than 5% of token holders ever vote.
• Whale domination. In "decentralized" voting, the richest participants often steer decisions, sound familiar?
• Opaque operations. Despite promises of transparency, many DAOs operate with the same backchannel politics as the traditional ones
• Decision fatigue. Members get overwhelmed. No one wants to vote on every tiny expense or branding decision.

And let’s not even talk about governance forums with complex 3,000 word proposals no one reads and sometimes it is because they are so complicated to understand! Helium did that a lot and I am sure some of it was on purpose!
 
 
What is a DAO supposed to do/have
 
 
 
 
I harp back to Helium as it was the first DAO I was really in, that I really believed in and I really was green enough back then to be a believer, that the little people really had a say, but after watching how, despite huge numbers of miners voting and that making no difference, It did not take long to learn that In my opinion there was just no point as the top 10 wallets had enough to pass a vote anyway. The votes never went in favour of us the miners, If these votes had worked by the number of actual votes as opposed to how many tokens you had in your wallet, things could be different to how they are today, but we will never know.
 
This article sort of sums up the Helium DAO 
https://alphasigmacapitalresearch
 
HIP 138 required approval through three separate votes: one at the main HNT DAO level and one each within the IoT and MOBILE subDAOs. While the HNT and IoT votes passed without significant opposition, the MOBILE vote took an unexpected turn. In the final hours of the voting period, a whale entity staked $2.4 million worth of MOBILE tokens and voted against the proposal, tipping the scales and causing the MOBILE vote to fail.
This decision had immediate and far-reaching consequences. Without the MOBILE vote passing, the planned HNT allocation to the MOBILE treasury was blocked, leaving the MOBILE token with reduced intrinsic value and a lower price floor. This outcome blindsided the community and raised concerns about the motivations and understanding of the whale voter.
In an update following the vote, it was revealed that the whale entity had voted no due to a misinterpretation of the proposal.
 
Here’s the hard truth: most DAOs aren’t decentralized, they’re progressively decentralized (which is marketing speak for centralized but getting there! They say that the DAO will become decentralized as it goes on.) Founders still control the initial distribution, core teams still propose 90% of initiatives, devs still push the actual code and the community just rubber stamps things, if they even show up at all.
True decentralization can be difficult and slow and in the fast moving world of crypto, no one wants to wait for 30,000 strangers to vote on what font to use. 
 

DAO Proposal #347: “Change logo to include frog.”

Quorum: Not reached.
Treasury: Emptied due to unrelated bug bounty paid to someone named "0x420Dank".
 
So are DAOs dead? Not at all but we’re still in the early days I think, with room for improvement, but hopefully not all DAOs are like Helium, so are you involved with any DAOs? Are they good or bad? Have I just been so disillusioned by Helium's DAO that I am missing out? 
 
As always, thanks for reading and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.