The other day, I was approached by @scipio and introduced to the idea of User Authority. They ( @scipio and @holger80 ) have been working for months on this project.
Two blogpost introduced me to the concept:
- How-to solve SPAM and Democratize Steem: Introducing UserAuthority
- UserAuthority (UA): explanations, applications and implications
If you are technical, these blogpost would make a much better introduction. But if you are like me and would like to have it layed out to you simply, this article is for you.
What is User Authority ?
First, let's identify some of the problems that Steem is facing:
- The current reputation system is broken and can be easily gamed
- Trending/Hot section doesn't showcase the best quality content
- People game and spam the system with hundreds of bots
- Abusive self-voting
- Flag war
User Authority(UA in short), is a spin-off of the PageRank algorithm that made Google the number search engine in the world. This algorithm (along with other metrics) calculate the probability of landing on a given website by randomly clicking hyperlinks. Now rather than hyperlinks, @scipio uses ACCOUNTS instead of websites and FOLLOWS instead of hyperlinks to generate that probability distribution.
UA calculates the "influence" of any account as a probability distribution. In essence an account can directly "earn" a higher UA rank in 2 ways:
- Create brilliant content
- Provide a great service to the steem community(aka utopian, steemmonsters, etc)
For more details, I would suggest that you read his article but this definition should suffice for the purpose of this article.
Applications of UA
The real value of UA will kick in once more and more communities/apps/smts will start using it. After months and months of research and development, it will soon be available to use.
Because UA would require hardforks to be implemented on the blockchain level, they've decided to create an API for applications to use. (curation guilds, apps, SMTs, etc.)
As more people start using UA to prevent spam, better curation, trending/hot pages, create lists for airdrop and so on, the more people will care about the quality of their own UA. So it is imperative to find communities, SMTs, Apps that will decide to use it once it is launched.
Here are some applications that UA can be used for...
Better Solution Than Oracles
Rather than relying on third party services to create ways to verify that I am a unique user, UA gives us a high probability that at a certain threshold, we are dealing with a genuine account and not a bot. All that with data already available from the blockchain.
Forget about KYC/AML and other shady way to verify you are real. Now you can have an anonymous passport guaranteeing that you are a real person behind a real account.
With this, SMTs can implement the famous 1 person/account 1 vote that Steem has been proposing simply by plugging into the API.
Responsible Delegation
One of the thing that is difficult to do when a given project is giving delegation, is to make sure that you are rewarding genuine account and not bots. Also, you need a way to discover the best content without having to go through all the content manually. If the requirement to receive delegation was to use UA to prevent spam and abuse, then we would have a much better use of that gift given to apps built on Steem.
Better Content Ranking / Better Trending Page
You are sick of the content being ranked by who can buy the most upvotes from bots? Applications can now display great content that disregard someone's ability to buy exposure with bot upvotes. With this come a better curation experience for those looking for quality content to upvote.
Unfollow > Flags
With UA implemented in a given community or app, the most punishing act one can do is to simply unfollow an account. As an account loses followers, the more this account loses it's ability to get exposure, less exposure = less organic vote, etc.
Now it's not just the action of 1 person with large SP that can decide what has to be punished or not, it's the wisdom of the crowd.
Spam/Abuse Prevention
The goal of any given account is to increase their UA and according to what I've read, it's very hard to game and can't be bought. Apps, curation bots...and even promotion bot need to have a dynamic whitelist/blacklist...that is time consuming and difficult to maintain. Now UA does the job for them.
Conclusion
This is from my limited understanding of UA. I'm excited for this technology to be released and for SMTs/Apps/Communities to start using it. Feel free to ask your questions below and I will try to answer, if it's more technical, @scipio might be in the comment section to answer them ;-)
I'm also here to answer technical questions.
I hereby want to publicly thank you for being such a wonderful colleague on working on UA with me. You deserve all the followers Steem has!
Hey @scipio, I’m a content creator and I pride myself on my ability to write good songs with great production and video. I’d love to be able to provide good quality for UA. When and how can I sign up and get involved ?
Oh good! Last time I looked into this I noticed that the UA model basically looks at the ratio between follows and followers. If you have more followers then you get more UA, but if you follow more people you lose lose UA. Is this still how it works?
That's partially correct, UA does not directly look at the ratio between an account's follows and followers.
It matters more who follows an account and also how many others that account follows.
The most optimal increase for your own UA score, is be followed by an account that itself has a high-UA score, but does not follow many others.
One such example would be @neilstrauss : Neil is (arguably) (one of) the best Steem author(s), a real user (not a bot, and not an alt-account), and Neil is followed by so many people because of his amazing content. However, Neil himself is very careful about who he follows.
Thank you for that comment, I was just a tad bit concerned when I saw "Unfollow > Flags" headline. This cleared it up. I want to get the number I follow back down to a manageable level, however when I first read that paragraph I got just a little concerned it was going to be another follow for follow if you want a reputation (UA) score.
@cryptoctopus meant with
Unfollow > Flags, that with UA it's more powerful (and safe! ;-) ) to un-follow a user you disagree with, than to flag his or her content. Because by unfollowing that account, on average, it receives a lower UA score, hence less influence and power to monetize its account and content.That was a little of what I gathered, I was more concerned that the people following the most people would have an unfair advantage over those that choose to follow fewer people so they can better manage their feed. So with a bit better understanding that fear is no longer really there.
It's actually the other way around: an account following thousands ("N") of other accounts, can only distribute 1/N of their own UA per follow
So I posted this asking cryptoctopus further down, but think it belongs here...
So what about this attack vector: An attacking user creates one hundred accounts. These accounts all follow each other giving them a neutral UA. Then all of these accounts follow the attacking user to transfer their UA to the attacking user.
Wouldn't this be a way to undermine the UA system?
I like the idea behind UA, I'm just worried it can be easy to take advantage of.
Answered in the top comment! ;-)
I don't like this.
I feel like it will lead to people unfollowing weaker users in order to improve their UA.
If you would re-formulate this into a question, I'd say its an excellent question! :-)
Q:
Would people trying to improve their own UA lead to the unfollowing of weaker users?A: unfollowing accounts, on average, doesn't directly increase your own UA score! Nor does the opposite apply: by following a certain account, you don't directly increase or decrease your own UA score.
The entire follower matrix, currently, consists of about 150 million individual follows. Via that extremely complex network of follows, it's close to impossible to predict if following or unfollowing 1 account leads to an increased or decreased score of your own account.
As said, UA is very hard to game. Also don't underestimate its complexity, nor base any of your conclusions on a simplified assumption.
That sounds like... a pyramid.
Also, the way you are describing it, okay let's say it doesn't directly increase or decrease your own UA score, what I'm saying is that the impact that follows can potentially have in any system where UA is important is that follows become hoarded like a finite commodity which is clearly anti-social, because you've stated that following less people is better for the people you follow. Is this not the case?
It is true that by following a reasonable amount of people, your own UA is proportionally distributed best to the people you follow.
Up until today, many Steemian-beginners ask for follows("follow me and I will follow you!") But that doesn't work because it adds zero benefit, and others find that irritating so as a net consequence, asking for follows results in less followers.
Also it has nothing to do with a pyramid. All that UA does, is empower real users providing awesome content and/or helping the community.
You are getting worried by over-simplifying the extremely complex follower graph that has been on Steem as long as "following accounts" is possible. There simply is no direct causal effect to increase or decrease your own UA by following or unfollowing another account, where that "rule of thumb" would apply to every account and every follow or unfollow.
PS: this is pretty technical and mathematically complex, but we've incorporated a mechanism that effectively combats an account following nobody.
Accounts that receive follows but don't follow anybody themselves, are "dangling nodes", that would lead to a division by zero problem, and or would be able to sink-in UA. We circumvented that problem by introducing a virtual account called "Omega" (or "Everybotty" as @Holger80 and myself have dubbed it). In our computations, every account virtually follows Omega, and Omega follows every account plus itself. Then we subtract Omega's UA from the matrix, and normalize all other accounts from there.
And also, we can tune the systems behavior with varying the damping factor. No worries!
Is Pagerank used by Google a pyramid? I mean, because of PageRank people got careful about the quality of their hyperlinks, who they link to and because of that made the process of finding relevant website around certain topic way easier.
Now, we have a metric that tells us who's most followed by real users and who are bot swarm...it's a win/win, much better than the current system.
All I'm saying is that entire careers have been built out of reverse engineering the pagerank algos, and if there's money involved people will always try to "crack" algos.
and those career almost no longer exist. "SEO Expert" are now building websites that are actually doing what the are supposed to do, create value around a particular niche. Black hat is pretty much dead.
So what about this attack vector: An attacking user creates one hundred accounts. These accounts all follow each other giving them a neutral UA. Then all of these accounts follow the attacking user to transfer their UA to the attacking user.
Wouldn't this be a way to undermine the UA system?
I like the idea behind UA, I'm just worried it won't work.
@scipio
I would say unfollow users that you are not reading anyway. Following someone would actually mean that you care about their content. If the person has a low UA, then following them actually is helping them get attention from other people. If you unfollow, it's because their content no longer interest you.
Also, following a strong UA doesn't do anymore good than following a weaker account.
100% correct
This post made me feel a little more hopeful today, so thanks for that @cryptoctopus!
I realize everyone has their own reasons for being on Steemit; I am basically a content creator and social engager, for lack of a better term. I find it frustrating that the reputation system here IS as broken as it is.
I have long found it frustrating to create something every day that's hopefully interesting and "of value" and watch it take eight months to move my rep a single point; while someone spends $100s to promote their every mediocre post with bots passes me in a couple of months... while simply "churning" the same 500 SBD over and over and over. I find it frustrating that the only person on Steemit with a rep above 80 was basically serial spammer with a personal whale account.
At the same time, I recognize the challenges. The world is filled with people who would rather get ahead via manipulation than via authentic contribution.
I am also very aware that the attractiveness of Steemit as a content platform is the freedom to post pretty much whatever you want. I love that about this place! What I don't love is that there's a measurement system in place that allows people to artificially create the illusions that crap is quality.
Yes, of course! "Quality" is subjective. And I hope people can still have the freedom to post 100 crappy memes a day... BUT that they will be rewarded with precisely the handful of pennies and attendant reputation that deserves.
One thing I HAVE noticed is that the majority of "quality contributors" tend to follow only a fraction of the number of people following them. Often by a factor of 10-to-1 or more. I feel it is overly ambitious of me to pretend to follow over 500 people... and yet each one was put there because they had something worthwhile to add. Meanwhile, I have NO IDEA who most of my 4400 followers are. Which brings me to the next thing...
Content CREATORS vs Content CONSUMERS.
I don't know how and if this proposal will address this, but Steemit seems to have somewhat of an imbalance in the sense that it is so heavily skewed towards content creation. Few — if any — people talk about Steemit as "a great place with interesting information!" It's nearly always "A great place to publish and get rewarded."
I could see how a better "User Authority" system could also serve to build a READER (and subsequently CURATOR) base for Steemit... because I think we need more readers (aka "content consumers") here.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this, and also thanks to @scipio and @holger80!
Sorry about the dissertation length comment... this topic happens to be near and dear to my heart.
Brilliant comment! Tusind tak!
Your talents are multiple ;-)
I'm big on this idea, and feel it could work brilliantly on Steem.
It sounds like even more of a reason for the engaged accounts to tie themselves in with one or more dapps and communities. A follow by one or more of the leading community accounts sounds like it could really boost ones UA score.
Looking forward to seeing how UA develops. Nice work @scipio and @holger80!
Couldn't have said it better myself! 💯
This looks like a great initiative!
Thank you! We're doing our best! ;-)
I really hope UA will be implemented!
Thanks! We will! It's almost live!
I would be surprised if the UA-algorithm cannot be gamed, and I would be even more surprised if it can be used securely to identify real unique persons ... at least as long as it only pulls data available from the current blockchain. But I like to be surprised ... good luck with it :-)
Every algorithm can be gamed, but gaming UA is very hard, and on top of that I can alter the formulae (change weights, increase/decrease the damping factors, change how Omega virtually follows and a number of other tweaks and tunings).
UA is not about revealing people's real life identities: but it does effectively predict which accounts are run by humans, by bots, and which accounts are alts.
So in the end of the day it's you who decides who should get a good UA and who shouldn't? :-)
But yeah ... protocols hard-coded in the consensus layer will always be a difficult beast to tame, a slow-moving target while the people that really want to game the system can move around very quickly. People will always be upset about all the gaming and will always complain and whine and eventually argue. As an open-source add-on-the-top API service people the algorithm can be tuned anytime and people who don't like the way you are tuning it are welcome to put up their alternative version of UA.
I hope we'll see it rolled out and in use soon (even if I doubt it's a silver bullet), and I think I may agree with @glenalbrethsen that the reputation system ought to be scrapped. While I think the reputation system isn't completely flawed, I see no reason why we need such a scoring system as a part of the consensus algorithm.
Sometimes things work in a very serendipitous manner. Thanks @tobixen, for tagging me, or I would have missed this completely.
I suppose this is why we can't have nice things. That even a protocol that is meant to give folks a proper ranking has the chance, however less easy that it may be, to be gamed. Worse than that, however, is that people will even try to game UA, because they will still find it better to spend however long it takes to get around it than basically working the system the way it was intended.
If all of that time effort could be harnessed and channeled for good... :)
Answered in the top comment!
Hey, @cryptoctopus, @scipio and @holger80.
Thanks @cryptoctopus for writing this post. I've ran into the other articles you cite and read at least one of them, but when things get too far into the technical weeds, it's hard slogging for this aging brain of mind. I appreciate you putting things into terms that are easier to understand. I'm sure there will be more to learn and grasp, but for now, I think I have an idea of what UA is and what it could do.
I've read through some of the comments here, but not all, so if I repeat what's already been asked, I apologize. You can simply refer me to where you've answered it already if you like.
It occurs to me, since it's happening to me, that most of us are being followed by bots, alts, etc., of every flavor and stripe. UA is supposed to be able to tell what those accounts are and downrank them? Meaning, their UA will drop because they are bots?
Now, I think I understood that it matters less who follows us than who we follow, although, in that, there's no way to know really how that's going to affect my UA. But if the purpose is to have a higher UA, why wouldn't it behoove me to follow those who have higher UA? I mean, I want to associate and read from the best STEEM has, right? Or is the purpose of all of this to essentially make it worth my while to follow all kinds of human accounts, no matter where their UA may be, within a certain limit. In other words, being choosy about the accounts I follow, but diverse in them, too.
The UA value of an account is only determined by the follow/unfollow behavior of all STEEM user. When they follow bidbots, they have a high UA and when they stop following bidbots, their UA will drop.
Following or unfollowing other users do not change the UA of an account significantly. In order to improve my UA, I have to act in the way that the number of followers increases. The best way is to this is by writing good content. For UA, it does not matter if the post is upvoted or not. It's only matters if it's read and user wan't to read more by following me.
So accounts with high UA are not followed because of their high UA; they are followed for their content.
Hey, @holger80. Thanks for responding. Okay, so to make sure I get this. You're talking about the UA of the bidbots going up and down as people follow or unfollow, right?
Okay, so it's dependent on who's following not who you follow. Okay, so in this case we're all hoping that we're being followed by those who want to read our content. Which is pretty much the way it's supposed to be now, except that it's not really. At least not in a proportional way.
Okay. So followers/unfollowers moves UA.
Create giveaways all the time and make following mandatory to participate. Can you cheat the system like this?
Good question! Yes, and no.
Yes => in theory it would be possible to buy follows in order to increase your own UA (albeit pretty costly to do so).
but...
No => there are multiple scenarios in which that would prove to be counter-productive. For example:
depending on the entire follow matrix of Steem, it is possible that by following account X, your own UA decreases, so that give-away could be costly.
your own UA depends to a large extent of who follows you. It's possible that receiving 50,000 low-UA follows accumulate to the same score as 1 high-UA follow. Losing that one high-UA follow because of "follow-selling" could lower your UA score as a net result
PS: Built into the UA algorithm are damping factors! Those are mathematical tricks to tune the overall UA distribution, when needed.
I like the idea, but have a question. If the major weight is around the number of followers an account has, then wouldn't people just use the bots of fake accounts to 'follow' accounts to game the system? Alice attack scenario, by creating loads of new zombie accounts for the sole purpose of following a user to inflate their UA score?
Second concern is that those users who have lots of followers already will always be ranked with high content, even if the content is not worthy. We could create a whole new set of problems (maybe better or worse than what we currently experience).
Are there other platforms that have successfully use this technique?
I can talk about the second question, the first one is better address by the article I linked to above but in short, it's not a problem. It's not about the number of follows, it's about the matrix of follow (being followed by someone with high UA). For example, I have 17000 follows but I only follow about 100 people. That signals that my content is appreciated by lots of people. My follow has much more weight than Joe Blo who just started. But if Joe Blo writes awesome content, he's start ranking when people like me start to follow him.
IF someone who has a high UA start writing crappy content, then people will stop wasting their follow on them and follow someone else with better content. UA is dynamic and constantly changing since the sum total of all UA is 1. Someone whos' a top dog today could be at the bottom of the barrel when they start writing crappy stuff.
Did other platforms used that technique? Google!
Good questions!
Q1:
A1: People try anything so I'm sure they will try this as well! But as I've explained in the comments, the incremental value every follow from account X passes on, is decreased when X follows more accounts.
Say your absolute UA is 100 "points", and you follow 200 accounts with it, then
100/200=0.5is passed on to every account you follow.Now, suppose 10,000 bot accounts are created to all follow 1 account. Each and everyone of those 10,000 bot accounts receives close to zero themselves, so they pass along close to zero to that 1 "real account". Then, if that 1 "real account" only receives follows from those 10,000 bot accounts, wouldn't it be extremely obvious that it's an
account swarm? I could even visually show those relationships.@cryptoctopus talks about blacklists and whitelists: a scenario such as this would be an extremely good candidate to get blacklisted for. There's "raw UA", and there's "Community / dApp / SMT / service" implementations" based on UA. Blacklisting based on certain behavior, such as you were accurately describing, is one of them.
Q2:
It's not about the amount of followers, but about how much each of those followers contribute "UA-wise". 1 Follow from a high-UA account can easily contribute more than 1,000 low-UA follows from bots.
Also, "New rules, new games, new behavior": UA is dynamic, with eery follow broadcasted **all accounts' UA scores change! People can follow and unfollow as much as they like to, when they agree or disagree with another user's actions. It's a democratic system. Those users received their follows for what they did in the past. If they start to behave weird, they will most probably get unfollowed.
Q3:
Nope, it's created by Moi! and it took months to develop. My original articles were referenced at the top of this article.
"PageRank-based models" do exist for quite some time (since 1998 at least when Larry Page co-founded BackRub (later: Google) with Sergei Brin). But UA works differently nonetheless (also its technical & mathematical implementations differ, but both models are probability distributions).
I do like the idea. It has serious merit. For Q2, perhaps run an analysis to show the weight associated with accounts that have large numbers of followers. That will uncover if the 'UA-wise' factor will be a problem.
@scipio this sounds very good. How would we use this technology to benefit ourselves and the steem community? As a small Steemit user, anything that helps me grow my account is appreciated 🤗
Exactly like @cryptoctopus has explained it! By creating amazing content that everybody loves, and/or by doing other good things the entire Steem ecosystem benefits from!
Thank you
Hey @scipio and @holger80,
first I wanted to thank you guys for putting time and effort to come up with a solution for the totally broken reputation model on steem.
a) My first question is, why is it called UserAuthority? Why not something like UserGraph ?
b) Are you guys in contact with Steemit Inc. about it?
What is their opinion about your solution?
c) What are your plans in general with UA? As we need a Hardfork for this, the whole steem network need to come together to decide about it.
cheers
geronimo
Hi!
Q1:
A1: Because the "graph" is only a way to visualize it, the "matrix" (of principle eigenvalues) is a mathematical representation of "the state of the follows network on steem", and "authority" is what it all boils down to: how much authority / influence / visibility does each account have seen from a probability distribution perspective
Q2:
A2: Yes!
Q3:
A3: they didn't delete my account yet, so I guess everything is OK! ;-)
(You'd have to ask Steemit Inc, I'm not going to comment or speculate about the opinions of multiple people within the Steemit Inc organization).
Q4:
We're going to deploy it as a service. Stay tuned for more!
Thanks for sharing this great blog and the announcement within' @cryptoctopus
Have a great Day and looking forward for more great announcements from your blog page
I’m really rooting for these kind of projects. But first we need SMT’s to arrive. So far there has been only talk, that’s it. I definitely will be one of the first once using UA since spams, bots... are getting out of control. And there is thousands like me rooting for these kind of projects.
UA has been around since it has been made possible to follow accounts! :-) (Since HF9).
However, nobody computed UA until now!
BTW, @holger80 and myself have privately developed UA already. We're only finalizing the computation results right now, in order to properly present UA.
why wait for SMT?
That’s why!
well..don't we still have the problem of spam, vote buying for exposure, flag wars without SMTs?
This has been proposed for SMT but I remember it being stated (I think by @ned) that this many not be happening here anytime soon.
I'm for UA!
Thx! So am I! :-)
UA doesn't have to wait for SMTs to be deployed. But when SMTs are deployed, UA can serve them with data the SMTs can benefit from as well, making UA even more useful.
@cryptoctopus thanks for sharing this great article. My question goes thus; how does one detect an account that's been operated or used by Bot for upvotes and the likes. Cause with the few i came across, it indicate real users on their Bio. Thanks.
Because UA is a probability distribution, the sum of all absolute UA is equal to the number of accounts in Steem. And the sum of all relative UA is 100%, or 1.
If one bot follows another bot, that could lead to less UA for both bots... It gets pretty math-heavy to try and game UA! ;-)
And of course this is perfect for all genuine minnows working hard on their own accounts: the more real people learn about how great your own content is, the higher your own UA score will grow, all automatically!
Interesting. I assume a bots with a lot of fake followers will more likely decrease each other's UA if they follow each other right?
With every additional account you follow yourself, the incremental contribution of your own follows decrease.
For example, imagine your own absolute UA score is 100, and you follow 100 people, then (damping factors excluded) you contribute
100/100 = 1to every account's UA that you follow. If you would then follow an additional 100 accounts, so 200 in total, you then contribute100/200 = 0.5to every account's UA that you follow.I follow the change that is been propose. My only thing is that as a content creator I loved Instagram until they changed their algorithm which really killed the platform. While the changes Instagram introduced are not related to this changes on steemit. All I want to say is: I love steemit and I really think it is a great social media & dapp platform, whatever changes that are brought on they must not kill the good vibe in the platform. Let the problems of abuse etc be resolved without killing the great platform 😁
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These means that the trending page and hot page will determine with a number of organic search query and backlink that point the article. Therefore, SEO and keyword rich article is a must. In my opinion, that would be great.
Because UA is a probability distribution which sums up to 1 (or 100%) purely based on account relationships, it's a zero-sum game: if one account increases its UA, another one will have it's UA scored decreased slightly. Following accounts is entirely democratic and dynamic rather than static: every follow and unfollow broadcasted on the blockchain (currently ~ 150 million) changes UA scores for all accounts.
UA doesn't have to dig into content itself. UA looks at the influence / reputation of the author and voters of content, instead of trying to analyze the content itself.
not quite. Google is based on that. Steem would be based on UA which is not determined by backlinks but by follows.
Hi @cryptoctopus as you mentioned about the spam happening in steemit and specially for bots. There are many bots and people use them to upvote their posts. Can you please help me understand if this is allowed as per steem policy. I am not sure if steem promotes bot voting. Thanks in advance.
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It is allowed to promote your posts. The problem that @cryptoctopus is talking about, is that the current Trending page mostly shows the content that was promoted the most, regardless of its content quality.
UA can change that.
Ok. I got you now. Thanks
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The Steem team is fighting! They must be able to win.
Same here, you're not rooting for Rico Verhoeven: read what the article is about and then think how to respond in a way that makes people want to follow you, for your great content and for how interesting you are! That's what will be reflected in your UA score.
Thank you for your admonish!
It was after reading this article that I sent out the above phrase. At the same time, I also wrote my own short speech, and posted my own blog:
Everyone must be honest and follow the Steem platform rules.
Steem system will launch "stealth ID card" recognition technology.
"UA", "ID", "stealth ID card". I need to invent a "sID (stealth ID)"? NOT!
In addition, I also browsed your that two articles, because I am not a technician, in fact, I don’t understand. It is precisely because of the popularity of this article that it has attracted the interest of pre-reading your article.
I hope you will succeed!
Thank you!
@tipu upvote this post :)
This post is supported by 0.54 SBD @tipU upvote funded by @cardboard :)
@tipU voting service guide | STEEM Monsters Lottery | For investors.
https://steemit.com/@cryptoctopus#Most welcome your post is very nice
Another good example to decrease = lower your own UA score / rank.
It's a nice picture of a butterfly, but your comment is completely out of context. That will not bring you real follows from real people, and as a consequence since other accounts are increasing their UA score, you are not, thus you will get a lower UA rank the next day!
^^^ Because UA is a probability distribution, the sum of all relative UA (the UA of all accounts added up) is equal to 100%. By providing comments such as these, that will not bring you new genuine followers, as a result your own following does not grow, but since that of others does grow, your own UA score is lowered.
The solution: read what people write, and interact with them by using your brain.
https://steemit.com/@scipio Many many Thanks
You got a 16.31% upvote from @postpromoter courtesy of @cryptoctopus!
Want to promote your posts too? Check out the Steem Bot Tracker website for more info. If you would like to support the development of @postpromoter and the bot tracker please vote for @yabapmatt for witness!
Congrats, this post is featured on today's daily news (in Chinese :D)
This wouldn't require a hardfork, or even witness approval. Steemit.com could instantly switch to UseeAuthority.
So I'm a bit unclear, is that an actual feature to be deployed or a proposal that needs to go through approval?
Based on watching "flag wars" between high SP users destroying low SP users - something like this sounds like more what Steem is supposed to be be. Distributed. Not concentrated power in the hands of the few.
(presuming any sort of "flagging" is eliminated... flagging seems way to easy to abuse seeing it from the sidelines)
Answered in the top comment!
Very interesting idea.
Is the development far enough along to share some concrete examples? I'd be curious to see some of the scores of some of current community members.
Almost there! Stay tuned for more! ;-)
it is Very helpful article because this article clear the many doubts regarding UA (User Authority). New People will get help to understand by reading this article. I thank to @cryptoctopus for this Article. Very Very Nice !
Timing, timing, timing. This would have been a really great way for the Byteball airdrop to identify (and reward) the actual high quality content creators as opposed to those having paid their way to a high reputation score.
I've followed this project for quite a while on the sideline (@scipio probably knows) ;-) so risking to sound like just another crypto lambo moon-braindead, my only question about this brilliant improvement is: When?
We do not have any plans to end the Byteball rewards for users linking their Steem username to their Byteball wallet, so this will definitely be relevant for us too. Particularly, since it would potentially allow us to remove the current rule of only rewarding accounts created prior to the airdrop announcement on July 12th. Requiring a UA score above a certain threshold would allow us to offer the reward even to new users who in time achieve a high UA score.
Interesting. I haven't claimed my byteballs yet. Might be worth waiting a little longer.
very nice
There is a whole new black market that sell fake passport now with all the ICOs having KYCs.
On other hand, i think there is a deepest problem that i think should be addressed by the community and @steem and @ned:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@phgnomo/why-steemit-is-not-attractive-to-quality-content-producers
Would be nice to her your opinion about that @cryptoctopus!
I unfollowed a few accounts and I'm sure they still pop up. Its annoying so that would be a plus.
Love it!! Resteemed.
The idea to provide an API in order to accelerate the implementation is awesome. Please keep us posted on the progress!
PS: Thank you @scipio who directed my attention to this article :-)
Great post Buddy.....
I am new in steemit so Please Follow me and Support me in recent post
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I'm so grateful for this work you're doing. I'd been speculating myself on ways the system could be more fair and it always seemed to come down to things that could be done by SMTs that wouldn't work on Steemit platform. I honestly still don't really understand why, but then I'm not a technical person. It sounds from this post that UA still needs to be done off the main STEEM platforms. I'm curious how communities fall under the SMT conditions. I thought those were to be built directly on the Steemit platform. What is it that makes changes like this not work directly on Steemit/Busy/etc?
Im rather late to the party here, sorry. I am after going back over @scipios posts to see if the actual math was supplied so I could refresh my memory on how this works, and I have read the comments to this post. great summary @cryptoctpous and nice work on the q&a @scipio
People try to game everything, find some time of loophole they can play to their advantage. Without re-running the code, its kinda hard to find these right now. I would like to see how popular alt accounts fair out, I know many people with alt accounts almost as popular as their primary account.
I can also see the 'follow for follow' trend returning and lol unfollow wars could become as popular as flagging wars.
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STOPIsn't it something a bit like Steemhunt's current approach? I think it's a great solution to fix Steem's current problems. All the best for @scipio. Hopefully we see changes coming one day.
I am excited for improvements of Steemit!
After HF20 you can create a cheap account. Then I create 5000 accounts you all follow each other. and then I take a fee to follow someone. I guess that's the way it's gonna be. Or wouldn't that be possible?
This is an example, I have no intention of....
https://steemit.com/charity/@donacionesacv/this-small-needs-your-support-and-collaboration
This is a great example of how to lower your own UA score / rank!
(And in case you don't understand, this is not a compliment, but an example of what does not work.)