When I was 12, I first learned about the "tyranny of the majority" in my US History class.
Tyranny of the majority is whenever in a democracy, the majority pursues its goals at the expense of minority groups. e.g. US white majority's subjugation of black and Native American groups. In the case of DAOs, wealthy whales tend to have the most voting tokens, which risks them monopolizing the decisions for their selfish gains.
So how do you prevent this danger? One good way would be implementing governance & voting mechanisms that tip the balance more towards minority groups.
For this essay, I'm going to highlight three DAO voting mechanisms designed for creators to prevent an abusive majority from running your DAO into the ground.
Proposed by Vitalik, this is a voting mechanism between 1T1V and 1P1V (one person, one vote).
A single voter can repeatedly vote for the same option, however, to avoid giant whales monopolizing the vote, the marginal cost of each subsequent vote will be more expensive than the last. The downside is you need a strong identity verification system, linking to social accounts/DID services to reduce the likelihood of fraud accounts.
Example: Gitcoin DAO uses the quadratic voting mechanism to decide which projects to fund with Ethereum Foundation.
Rage Quitting ensures that everyone still retains full custody over their share of assets in the DAO treasury.
In this model, when a DAO proposal gets submitted, it needs a sponsor before it can be put to vote. If approved by the majority, the voters can still withdraw support and receive any undeployed capital they contributed to the DAO. This ensures the majority doesn't squander these resources for their selfish gain.
Example: Time Wonderland recently allowed token holders to rage quit to recover their assets.
This model balances the scale by giving whales less voting weight than minority holders.
Example: WOW Pixies DAO is a women-led DAO that approaches each proposal with 2 votes to ensure the votes of male whales don't overpower the votes of women. First, they take a 1P1V vote (using Discord identity) through emoji reactions. Then, if it passes, they'll take a 1T1V vote using Snapshot.
This approach is similar to how the US Congress requires a legislation to pass both the House of Representative (V proportional to population) and Senate (2V per state).
As a creator, the tyranny of the majority problem can get painful if it steers the DAO ship in the wrong direction.
Hopefully with these 3 voting mechanisms, you can solve this problem and run a fair, balanced DAO voting system.