Idea: Proposal backing, or the proposal system as a marketplace of ideas

On the current testnet, during council term 12, we had 41 proposals submitted--this is an average of 5.8 proposals per day. This is a very high throughput compared to most DAOs I have seen. It is predictable that as we approach mainnet, this number will likely significantly increase, potentially upwards of 100 proposals per day may be submitted.

Even at the current scale we deal with very real issues of surfacing proposals (https://github.com/Joystream/joystream/issues/1244) because once a proposal is moved onto page 2 or 3 it isn't going to recieve as much attention. For now the solution for this is for proposal creators to highlight their proposal creation on Discord and after that for members of the council, or proposal creators to highlight that their proposal is still active and has not recieved enough votes yet--such a system is obviously not going to be at all sustainable if we want to scale to a significant number of proposals being submitted each day.

For added context, this is the current activity with communicating proposals to the council on Discord over a 6 day period:

Most of the proposals we currently deal with are for essential platform decisions (mint refills, bounty proposals, KPI proposals) and we have not yet attracted any significant number of "creative" proposals that come outside the immediate scope of the governance system (such as spending proposals for creating a short film or documentary). While this use case can't be used as an example just yet, one day it will come and there needs to be care taken to promote a system where ideas can still be introduced without ramping up the cost and excluding large swaths of the community. If anything we may even want to have more than this.

This "problem" leads to several outcomes:

A noisy environment where it is difficult to treat all proposals as equal, since there are just so many of them
An environment where the incentive to spam proposals for advertising purposes is attractive if the price of proposals is kept too low (Support Mike's Validator!). The price of proposals can obviously be increased but this comes with significant drawbacks explained below.
An environment where increasing the cost of proposals would be thought of as an appropriate measure. This is highly problematic, as seen from the example of Axies (https://cointelegraph.com/news/nft-game-creator-flips-axie-infinity-virtual-land-for-9-200-gain-in-one-year) where the entry price has risen from being low to being in the hundreds or thousands of dollars for new users. This is the kind of environment that stops average people from participating and ends up making the community and platform boring as the number of voices heard is significantly reduced and likely only ends up with whales being able to participate at some point (which seems inevitable if no other approach is taken)

Idea: After a user has submitted a proposal, allow any member to "back" a proposal, by adding stake that is treated equally to the proposal author's stake. For example:

John submits a spending proposal with a stake of 83k JOY hoping to get 750k JOY financing for his short film project, the amount asked for is not insignificent, but it is not especially large. John already has a decent reputation on the platform and has a channel with a moderate viewership.
After the proposal is submitted, it competes for attention among 100 other active proposals. It is unlikely it will get necessary attention unless it is promoted via communications (which will lead to unfavorable outcomes, specifically a spammy/noisy environment)
Sarah is a long time Joystream user, who does not participate as a council member, yet has a decent amount of funds, she is well known in the community and decides that John's proposal has merit and would be beneficial for the platform (overall good) and decides to back the proposal with 300k JOY from her own finances.
This backing raises up the profile of the particular proposal within Pioneer allowing it to get more attention from the Council.
The proposal either gets approved, rejected or slashed. And both John + Sarah's funds are treated equally (e.g. if John's proposal is slashed, then Sarah's funds are also slashed).

Another example would be a known creator asking their community to help back their proposal within the governance system. Rather than one large backer, multiple smaller backers could allow the proposal to have its profile raised.

Maybe there is a way that Sarah can profit from her backing of the proposal, but this may attract Sybil attacks.

Joystream / joystream

Idea: Proposal backing, or the proposal system as a marketplace of ideas #2529