My conclusions on using @steem-ua as a minnow with only 2.642 UA
I am a convinced supporter of the idea behind @steem-ua, but I was critical about certain aspects of the implementation, especially their algorithmical curation. Nevertheless I tried it to get a better impression if this is just another bidbot or an honest initiative to help minnows that make good content.
While I am certainly a minnow, I would not claim that I make the best content. However, I always put in some work and certainly am not a spammer or shitposter. I did not have too high expectations for the @steem-ua upvote. My UA score is a lousy 2.642 and while that does not determines the upvote alone, it still means that most of my readers will also not have a that high UA either.
I delegated 25sp. If I would be the most ruthless self-voter (I am not!) in one week that would equate to a 1750sp upvote. On top of that there are the curation rewards that for simplicity i will put at 25% giving me a total value of 2187.5sp. It should be mentioned that by doing this I would not have created any value for the steem ecosystem at all.
Instead I delegate the 25sp to @steem-ua to get one weekly upvote. I got the upvote on one of my better posts, with lots of comments (not sure how exactly the algorithm will decide but the selection seems fine to me.) And this upvote was worth 3867.5sp, almost twice of what the most aggressive self-voting or delegations to bidbots would have been.
And this as a minnow with not that great connections. Of course this will likely go down since @steem-ua is still new and a lot of the people that have delegated are bigger players. Most minnows were probably very cautions because they did not trust to get any valuable upvotes on their posts, but they will come given these possible rewards.
In summary I think that this delegation service is great because it rewards the right people. If you just post spam, you will not get a good upvote. If you post some good content, delegating will reward you, even as a small minnow. This project works as long as the bigger fish continue to delegate to @steem-ua, to make sure that their sp will end up supporting real people putting in some effort.
My current recommendation to all minnows is to think about how many quality posts you make in a week. Then if possible delegate that much sp to @steem-ua and benefit from the service. I will probably go to 50sp delegation supporting 2 posts a week which feels about right for my posting patterns.
I have had a similar experience. My ua is around 1.708 i think, but the upvote I got was 2orth the sp. Thanks for sharing how its going for you, definitely a project with the potential to reward those that put some effort into what they do.
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I didn't count on it, but that's my take on it as well - currently it seems more profitable than self-voting for anyone having a decent number of followers to "invest" in steem-ua - because the top delegators have gone all-in and delegated quite a lot to steem-ua.
For people that are completely new to the platform, and not having any followers at all, delegating to steem-ua seems like a bad proposition. It seems to me that newcomers will have a hard time on steem - without followers, without reputation score and without any "user authority", no matter how good content one produces, it's unlikely that it will be read and upvoted.
I did briefly mention in another comment somewhere that with steem-ua, there are basically someone sitting at the control panel tuning the knots to decide how the algorithm should work - basically, who deserves a good score and who doesn't? I dismissed the problem in the next sentence, because if someone disagrees very much, anyone can fork it as long as it's open software. But, hey, wait, where is the code? I can't find it anywhere. Googling a bit, it says it's supposed to be open source, but they want to make more comments in the code and fix some bugs before opening the code repo for public view. I'm not much impressed, this is not quite the "open source"-way of doing things.
They have an API, but it "can only be used by registered partners"? That's also fishy. And why does one have to log in to be able to see the score? It's quite much against the idea of transparency, IMO.
Completely new people will probably not benefit, you need to have at least a few people engaging with you posts. But from that point onwards it currently is great to use it. I am not sure if this was planned, but currently it is like a charity that uses the steem of the big whales to upvote a lot of smaller fish on not too crazy criteria and that is great. I think the logical step would be to pay curation rewards to the big delegators so they dont loose out compared to tedious manual curation.
On the project being closed source, I think this is what happened. They wanted to make the algorithm public and I have seen the idea illustrated in an old post by @scipio. But the method presented there would have resulted in vote-boots and advertisement spam bots taking the top spots in their UA ranking.
So they had to start changing the algorithm. They fixed it in some why by setting the witnesses as sources of authority, a choice that certainly is debatable. The current algorithm probably does not have the mathematical beauty and simplicity anymore and they are scared to show it as it might confuse and turn away potential sponsors.
Of course I dont know at all what really happend, but there needs to be some reason why the witness trust was introduced, an element completely absent in the early discussions. But I think that the authors do have good intentions and hope that they will bring us the math soon. In the end open source always wins. If they keep it a secret for too long others (maybe including me ?) will start their own open development.
This is an interesting experience @frdem3dot0 😉 I read so many posts about steem-ua and I still don't know my poin but my rank probably 36k something 😆 I'm thinking about delegate my sp while I myself a delegatee from 2 dolphins 😐 let me ask you something (well.. I am a good engager with no self-votes and no connection too) you delegate 25 SP and got votes from steem-ua for a week, so you will revoke the 25 SP after a week? Is it something like steem-ua leasing your 25 sp for a week?
Thank you for sharing your experience✌
thanks a lot for the comment. You can always withdraw the lease, but it takes one week after you cancel your lease until you get your sp back. I recommend to try it for a week or two and see if it makes sense.
Here is a link for the delegation btw : 25sp
Well.. I think I need to wait a little more time for that😔 I still need the SP to increase my SP and pay it forward to the community until the end of the month. But now I know how it's work. So.. it does mean if I never cancel the lease then steem-ua will keep on upvote the good content post?
Exactly, you delegate 25 sp once and just leave it active and then you get one upvote per week.
Aahh.. that's sound cool.. need to check whether the first 500 account delegation quota already fulfilled, thank you for your information.. uhm😊 have you ever heard about @kiwibot
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by frdem3dot0 from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
@frdem3dot0 Thank you for not using bidbots on this post and also using the #nobidbot tag!