Thanks for bringing attention to UA @abh12345 ! Your article is creating awareness among people regarding who they follow, who follows them, and makes people think which effects those follows could have on their own UA and other accounts' UA.

I've read all comments (up to now) in the comments thread. Indeed, most seem positive, some are more concerned about what would UA bring, and - indeed - it's pretty hard to comprehend, let alone predict in advance, all possible angles regarding UA.

Firstly, I'd like to say that me "inventing" UA back in November 2017, was merely an idea I had to improve the Steem experience, for most people, genuine users. To get community support, I stepped back from UA for a while, in an attempt to let others build it. If that would have happened, it wouldn't have been "a @scipio product". I talked about UA to many people, via DMs, but apparently developing UA seemed (too?) difficult, for most.

So, I decided to develop UA myself, together with my friend @holger80. It's an extremely complex endeavour. To do it right, we have streamed all blocks in chronological order, to check for account creations in chronological order, and to check for follow broadcasts in chronological order. Currently, that's around 150 million follow operations, and every minute more are added.

With that, we can re-construct, also in a chronological order, how the entire Steem follower graph has been built over time. And from there, we can compute every account's UA historical progression over time as well.

This is a situation "as-is" right now. If UA were only "a fun number", then interest would fade away. If UA gets used in various ways, then we have a new situation: some people will use UA as it is intended - an"influence" metric where "publishing interesting content & doing good for the community, are assumed to get you more followers hence a better UA score. UA could reflect each account's behavior and intent.

But some will try to game UA, and I know how they will try to. Currently, we are in the process of simulating virtual attacks of all sorts we can think of, some real, some far-fetched. But we're trying ourselves to "break UA" and to see how we can harden UA against those "attacks".

Please remember that Google is for 20 years now trying to harden PageRank, and it has a staff of thousands of very intelligent PhDs. Those people are pretty much all brilliant, not something "a @scipio and a @holger80" can outperform in a few hours of brainstorming. But we still try to do our best.

Any system can be gamed to a certain extent, provided an "attacker" doesn't care about time nor costs. We're trying to make UA as resilient to those attacks as we can, and in order to do so, we must put in a tremendous amount of effort (and server & bandwidth costs as well, in order to compute everything).

PS, as a primer, I've also been working on various presentation aspects of UA, including brainstorming and working with others.

In cooperation with designer @fabiyamada this has been created as UA's logo!

You like it? :-)
Cheers, @scipio