Utopian-io Vote Analysis: December 2018
I've had a brief hiatus from posting to Steem. Since the start of the year I've been focusing on learning app development and picking up a new coding language. The more I look at the opportunities and new projects in the crypto space, the more motivated I become to increase my dev skills and get involved. Hopefully I'll be able to put this new-found knowledge to good use later in the year.
In the meantime I've a few analyses to catch up on, starting with the Utopian voting studies. I'll post up December 2018 today and January 2019 once I've finished processing that data. There look to have been some interesting changes.
As usual in this monthly analysis I look at the voting behaviour of Utopian-io across the month and compare to prior months. I aim to:
- Examine the breakdown of votes awarded by category and contribution type;
- Consider numbers of contributors rewarded for each contribution type;
- Review the Utopian vote timing to see whether posts are voted earlier in the seven day payout period; and
- Celebrate another great month for Utopian using some summaries of the top 50 contributors.
1. Allocation of Utopian-io votes by category
These pie charts illustrate how the Utopian-io vote power has been allocated between categories over recent months:
Task requests are now treated as a contribution type rather than a separate category for voting purposes. Adding together the contribution and task request category percentages shows a 16% drop in voting power allocated to contributions from October (76%) to November (66%) to December (60%).
The change from November to December is largely due to the increase in voting power allocated to moderator comments (up from 13% to 18%). This arose from a change in the reward structure in mid-December through which moderator rewards were increased to compensate for the significant fall in the Steem price (mid-December was the low point of the bear market).
For those new to Utopian a brief explanation of the categories of votes:
- Contributions (blue): Utopian-io mainly rewards contributions to open-source projects. Contributions are not just limited to coding (development) but cover a wide range of technical skills including graphics work, translations, tutorials, copywriting, bugs and ideas.
- Moderator comments (purple): Utopian has a team of over 50 expert moderators who review and score every contribution. Utopian rewards the moderators for their work by voting on their review comments.
- Task requests (yellow): Open source project owners can make requests for work to be carried out on their projects. These take the form of task requests. Only a small number of project owners currently use task requests but they can represent some of the most exciting opportunities for the Utopian community.
- Trails: Utopian-io also supports a number of Steem communities, typically those with links to the open-source world or science and technology. Two of these are separated out in the chart: steemstem (green) and mspwaves (red).
- Other comments and posts (grey): These are one-off votes on posts of high value or interest to the open-source community, such as the arrival of a new project into the Utopian VIPO club. There will also be a few votes that have fallen through the filters I use to determine the category separation.
2. Breakdown of Utopian-io votes by contribution type
This second comparison takes the contribution vote and task request amounts above (blue and yellow segments) and separates them between contribution types for the months in question.
There are fifteen contribution types (fourteen for October, with blog and iamutopian aggregated).
Again, the pie charts to summarise across each month:
![]() | ![]() |
The comparison from November to December is very steady. The main movements were:
- iamutopian: +5%, jumping up to be the third largest category.
- Development -3%, Blog -2%.
Translations remained the largest contribution type.
3. Numbers of contributors rewarded within each contribution type
The following table looks at the number of contributors rewarded by Utopian-io in each contribution type, with a comparison against prior months.
There has been a general contraction in the number of contributors rewarded by Utopian-io from November to December. This is likely to be due to:
- A general fall in contributions (and posting on Steem in general) with the reduction in the Steem price.
- The change in the reward structure in mid-December which increased the maximum voting percentages per contribution. This was to combat the significant falls in the Steem price and keep rewards attractive. Higher voting percentages per contribution would lead to a lower number of contributions rewarded, all other things being equal.
4. Utopian-io vote timing
The chart below looks at the timing of votes made by Utopian-io as measured against the seven day voting period for posts.
The y-axis represents the duration in a post’s life at which it is upvoted by Utopian-io. The x-axis shows time across the month.
The timing of voting is broadly unchanged from November to December, with contributions voted on average around the 1.5 - 2 day mark and moderator comments around 2.5 days. Given every Utopian contribution requires a moderator review before being put into the queue for once-a-day upvoting, a 1.5 - 2 day delay suggests the process is working as well as could be expected from a timing perspective.
5. Summaries of the top 50 Utopian contributors
Congratulations to all those who made it on to the top 50 list for December!
The transformation in top-rewarded users over the three months from October to December is stark. In October there was a clear domination from translation contributors. December, by contrast, is starting to show a concentration of moderator-comment / iamutopian contributors in the top-ranked positions, with 18 of the top 20 positions gaining some rewards from one of these two categories.
As in November, it's good to see that there's plenty of diversity by contribution type among the top 50 authors, showing that there's many different ways to successfully contribute to Utopian-io.
December
November
November top 50 for comparison.
October
October top 50 for comparison.
Repository:
This analysis relates to the Utopian open-source project. The relevant repositories are:
- utopian-io/utopian-bot
- utopian-io/utopian.io
Tools and scripts:
I used the block.ops analysis system to produce this study. Block.ops is an open-source analysis tool designed for heavy-duty analyses of the Steem blockchain data.
You can find the repository for block.ops here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops
The analysis used all the Steem blocks from the months analysed. This is approximately 900,000 blocks for each month.
The study can be recreated by:
- Loading the data for the relevant time period into block.ops.
- Using the utopianvotes command from the command line, for example:
$ node blockOps utopianvotes "2018-11-01" "2018-12-01"
As usual, the main difficulty in producing this analysis involved correctly allocating posts to their respective categories and contribution types. This relied entirely on the tags and links included in each post. The order / logic I have used for the allocation is as follows:
- Moderator comments based on having the appropriate links to Utopian guidelines and help.
- Contribution post type based on the tags 'Utopian-io' and the first contribution type that appears. Special consideration taken for idea / ideas and social / visibility.
- Steemstem post based on steemstem vote.
- Task request based on the tags 'Utopian-io' and the first task-contribution type.
- mspwaves post based on msp-waves or mspwaves tag.
- Other posts and comments based on postComment indicator.
Whilst I have made my best effort in this categorisation, I cannot promise to have allocated every post correctly.
Thanks for reading!
Hi @miniature-tiger
Welcome back and thank you for your contribution to @utopian-io!
Great to see you contributing again, and another excellent piece to start with.
Interesting to see that the total voting % to contributions fell in the months leading to December - The 75% in October 'feels' right and I would like to see the content again receiving the vast majority of the vote. I'm wondering if 'iamutopian' could have a section of its own, being a little like 'reviewer comments', but with a focus on the CMs review of the week.
Whilst this statement may be unpopular to some, I do feel that development should take the largest % of the vote - 51% for another category in November looks a little lob-sided and perhaps gives the heads at utopian-io something to think about going forward.
Although as stated by Amos, some good contributions missed getting a reward, I do feel that the review process itself works well, and 1.5-2 days is a reasonable turnaround with the manual process of the review, and the wait in the voting queue.
Well-written, superbly presented and chosen as a 'staff pick' for this week.
Asher [CM - Analysis]
Your contribution has been evaluated according to Utopian policies and guidelines, as well as a predefined set of questions pertaining to the category.
To view those questions and the relevant answers related to your post, click here.
Need help? Chat with us on Discord.
[utopian-moderator]
Hey Asher!
I agree on the total voting % to contributions - 75% does feel to me like the right sort of level for the 'core' purpose of Utopian and I'd like to see some tweaks to push it back in that direction.
I also think that development is the most important category and hearing that high-scoring development contributions were missing out on rewards is a little bit of a worry - it may discourage devs from engaging with Utopian / Steem. One possible change could be to increase the size of the development bucket (perhaps scaling in proportion to the maximum percentage reward for the category). Alternatively there could be a separate development bucket for Steem projects or VIPO projects or development-task-responses. All of this depends on what the goals / priorities are for Utopian.
I think the upvote timing is good now. Much better than when it was hovering around 6.5 days in any case!
Hey
Yes I didn't like to hear that decent (70+ scored) development contributions were missing out on rewards. Hopefully the recent adjustments stated by Amos can help with that.
Enjoy your weekend, I hear it's going to be a sunny one :)
Thank you for your review, @abh12345! Keep up the good work!
Very interesting read once again! Pretty funny seeing people like Tensor stick out so much (only read bar to be seen) and so many people without any contributions in the top 10 of December.
Although seeing this sort of reinforces my feeling that rewards for reviews and iamutopian contributions are / were too high, and the voting power would be better spent on upvoting contributions. I say this because of the fact that over the last month or so, loads of contributions haven't been upvoted despite receiving a good score (e.g. I saw a contribution in the development category with a score of 79 not get upvoted).
With the introduction of the age-weighted sorting and the decrease of rewards for the iamutopian category, this has been a bit better, but hopefully it improves even more in the future. Or maybe it will all get solved by STEEM increasing in price (we can hope) ;)
Glad to have you back!
Thanks Amos!
I think the issues with high-scoring development contributions not being rewarded arose because:
(a) Whilst the maximum vote percentages for individual contributions were increased, the vote-allocation-bucket for development remained the same size. Which meant there were fewer development contributions being rewarded, albeit with higher rewards for those that top-scored.
(b) The maximum percentages for individual contributions in all other categories also increased, meaning that other categories filled more of their own buckets, with less spare capacity available to be spread to development / translations.
I think that this will be more apparent when I post up the January analysis.
The age-weighted sorting is a good addition. I also think that giving priority to users that haven't received an upvote within the last 7 days (i.e. an additional boolean sort key for the waiting-rewards-queue) might help attract / retain more occasional users. This would not restrict contributors to one upvote a week but would make them more at risk of not receiving an upvote if they have already recently received one.
Am also hoping for a rise in the Steem price. As always!
Good to be back!
$rewarding 100% 13min
Impressive work with block.ops,
Unfortunately I have no clue about javascript. Do you store more information than hivemind? Whould your analysis also be possible using the hivemind database?I
Thanks Holger.
Currently block.ops stores data from the following block operations:
Plus virtual operations:
The Utopian analysis only uses the comment / voting information. It should be possible to produce it with steemsql or steemhive. Perhaps a couple of tweaks would be needed as it aggregates all posts on which Utopian votes, so including posts from various communities and tags (e.g. steemSTEM, mspwaves, occasional random new product launches etc). But any system that captures all the vote operations and tags data and the associated timestamps could produce it.
Hi @miniature-tiger!
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Your post is eligible for our upvote, thanks to our collaboration with @utopian-io!
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