User Authority - a personal look

Besides this being a very ugly post, I also thought it might be interesting to have a look at a few numbers that may effect the User Authority score and have a look at a comparison between those and the actual score. I have no idea how the algorithm works except that according to the top 100 that is visible, a vast majority of them are witnesses which means there is a heavy bias on witnessing, regardless of what the account actually does. This may or may not make sense depending on how you look at it.

Anyway, the User Authority is heavily influenced by the follows and who one is following and last night I went through and took my following count down a few by unfollowing accounts that hadn't posted in the last few months or, I haven't engaged with in the last few months. It won't change my feed much as some hadn't posted in the last 6 months. I went from 150 down to 133 but, this change isn't factored into the UA score yet I think. I don't recommend trying to change the UA score by unfollowing but, I do recommend cutting deadwood from one's feed.

https://steemd.com/@tarazkp

Ok, so my account creation date was 29th of January 2017 and my ID is: 129,866. People talk about retention/churn rate and if you consider how few active accounts there are now (guesstimates are around 60,000), you will see that back then with much fewer users, there must have been a great number of alts created by the first ones in. Interesting in my opinion. People talk about churn rates as if it is an issue but rarely factor in all of the alts that were created and fallen dormant as people often find it difficult to manage more than one or two. Also, there are a great number of parked names that skew the numbers.

Next, let's look at a few rankings which I took from https://mysteemitfriends.online which is a handy tool I came across a week or so back and it is a little bit of fun to have a look at what goes on. For example, have a look at the pending post payouts and how many are bidbot boosted accounts, look at the account join date and reputation and also, how many of the top 50 of those are powering down. There are very few there who are organic accounts.

My rep is 72.74 which is not a boosted rep and that puts me at 115. There are boosted accounts higher. Although the Reputation system is useless, I see my own as representative (to me) because I know what I have done to get there. In the larger scheme of things, the reputation is pointless which is something I recognised at the start of my Steem journey. These days it is the bidbots but, circle jerks of large accounts play a heavy roll in many people's account building too, and always has.

My Steem Power ranking puts me in 573rd position which is very sad considering how many people have earned a fair bit more than I. There re many accounts who have literally earned hundreds of thousands of Steem here but hold almost nothing. Their choice, perhaps it holds price down so distribution can happen. Perhaps. Pretty much though, if you have over 100 Steem Power, you are in the top 5% of holders on the platform and if you have 500 SP, you are a one percenter.

Next is the follower count and I ,don't have so many considering I get a great deal of engagement on my posts in comparison to some. Some large names with 5x the followers don't get anywhere near the same level and definitely not the depth. I have always taken the approach that followers are very important here but follower numbers are not. Who your followers are matters a great deal. I am fortunate that my work and content here has resulted in high quality follows and a fair number of people willing to engage in discussion. It took me six months to reach 500 followers.

So, User Authority (announcement post) is a system where:

In essence, UA can be seen as a new Reputation metric: it looks at the entire Steem Follower Graph and carefully tracks who follows who. It doesn't directly care about how "rich" an account is, or how old it is, or how much an account has posted, but please keep in mind that those factors do indeed indirectly influence any account's UA score.

This is mine.

https://steem-ua.com/

6.074 and 261

Good, bad, mediocre? I don't really know but it is lower than my Rep score (meaningless) higher than my SP holdings (good considering the ramifications of using SP as an indicator) and much higher than my follower count (again, good because of the resteem nonsense and Instagram f4f fools).

The UA is a half-measure in my opinion as even though it looks at the relationships, it seems to miss the engagement levels of users which is of course, very hard to quantify I will assume but, when it comes to interaction between users, it will have to be measured at some point. I am pretty sure @scipio shouldn't release the algorithms but at the same time, this is going to raise questions if this score is to be used to affect user experience and of course, opportunity. After all, it is positioning itself as an authority and with that comes many caveats and concerns.

What would be interesting to see @scipio, is the top 100 with the 'witness multiplier' removed to see how "normal" users rank in the system against each other. The reason is that it could help people identify accounts that are ranked highly so they can be identified, studied and perhaps it will have an effect on other accounts and the way they engage, post and behave. If this ranking is meant to improve the system, users should be able to use it practically to improve their own approaches and behaviors and a lead by example process can develop as it could bring more of the engaged users to the forefront.

I like the idea of it though and I think in time it and others will develop various methods to rank and sort users for various purposes. SMTs are likely to use these algorithms to affect user experience, filter and of course, scale their reward systems in a much more fine grained way than things like 'airdrops on reputation or SP'. It is going to get interesting because most likely, some accounts are going to appear near the top no matter how they are sorted while other will swing wildly. I figure that with these things like most others, consistency is a key.

The Steem environment is changing in many ways which I welcome in many ways but, it is going to cause new and unintended stresses in areas that we may not have experienced pressure before.

Lots of fun to come.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

Thank you to @magicmonk as your https://mysteemitfriends.online tool is fun. And, @scipio, @holger80 and the @steem-ua team.