@steem-ua Still Alive & Kicking

Over the past 10 days there were quite some changes in UA ranks, which caused a lot of questions, and there were also a few posts (for example by @tarazkp and @soyrosa) openly questioning whether the @steem-ua project still needs, and deserves, delegation support. This post aims to answer these questions and concerns, so that hopefully all can conclude @steem-ua is still “Alive & Kicking” and simply fine as it is.

@utopian-io quitting their witness node and UA rank effects

As you might know, in short, the UA influence (or reputation) metric and ranks are heavily dependent on two core components, being:

-a- the Follower Matrix / Graph (who follows who), and -b- the Witness rankings (and who those witnesses follow)

Computation of UA scores for all accounts on the Steem blockchain is a massively complex undertaking with lots of number crunching. Something to realise as well, is that with every witness (un)vote and every account (un)follow on the Steem chain all UA scores change. When “plankton X” decides to follow “plankton Y” or “whale Z”, still every UA score changes, albeit slightly — that won’t effect big changes. Yet when a massive account like @utopian-io, which is not only very influential on the Steem chain but was also a top-10 witness account, decides to quit their witness activities, then all UA scores & ranks change a lot indeed.

You may like those changes, or you don’t, but this change in UA scores has always been coded like this by design: the event in which @utopian-io quit their witness activities and UA adapting its scores accordingly, is in fact proof the UA system is objectively functioning exactly as intended!

These UA score & rank changes can indeed be intuitively justified as well: as @utopian-io first announced quitting its witness, has been calling for voting on other witnesses they think deserve your witness vote, quit their witness node (server), and quickly dropped its witness rank, from a mathematical point of view @utopian-io itself became “less influential” on Steem (therewith not meaning to state that @utopian-io isn’t meaningful anymore: it still is!), ergo the UA algorithm now passes on less “trust” to the @utopian-io account itself (the UA algorithm detected a large drop in people voting for the @utopian-io witness, and the UA algorithm “assumes” that therefore less trust should be passed to @utopian-io), and as a direct effect the account @utopian-io passes on less trust to the accounts it (in)directly follows itself: hence, those accounts dropped in their UA scores and ranks.

And at the same time, due to @utopian-io quickly dropping in witness ranks, the other witnesses increased their witness ranks, some of which increased a lot, so more UA Trust is now being passed to those witnesses and as a direct effect also to the accounts those witnesses follow themselves.

Where some lose rank, others gain: the sum of all “absolute UA” still remains 1. This is nothing short but full proof that UA functions just fine as it is.

UA (the Influence Metric) vs. @steem-ua (the Algorithmic Curation Program)

As we’ve stated time and time again, @steem-ua - the Algorithmic Curation Program - is merely one possible application of UA, the Influence Metric. Almost 5 months ago, we’ve Open Sourced the UA code for anybody to download, install, verify, contribute to, and build their own dApps with. @steem-ua has always been and still is an ALGORITHMIC curation & up vote program based on UA scores: this is not per se better than full manual curation, yet it is different and a perfectly fine alternative to delegating to “bid bots” or “promotional services”.

@steem-ua is still being delegated to by almost 900 individual delegators: a few powerful supporters wholeheartedly delegating tens of thousands of SP to @steem-ua (e.g. @neoxian and @jaki01) enable hundreds of smaller delegators to get upvoted by @steem-ua with a higher value than they could receive if they would self-vote at 100%. In other words: @steem-ua helps to keep onboard these smaller accounts, to stay with Steem and grow their accounts.

If you’re a big Steem account and you’re primarily interested in getting rewarded a good ROI in terms of “accumulating even more Steem tokens by delegating”, then delegating to “bid bots” is your best choice. However, if you’re, being a big Steem account, more interested in adding more value to Steem, to grow the Steem user base, to increase demand for Steem then @steem-ua can be your preferred project to delegate to. Your big delegation matters: it supports hundreds of small accounts getting better upvotes by @steem-ua, and that by itself increases your own Steem holdings.

Thank you for your time! Steem On!