Utopian-IO is breaking away from Steem's broken reputation system and making their own!

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@utopian-io/you-ask-we-deliver-new-reputation-system-new-decentralised-scoring-system-and-much-more

This is amazing news. Hopefully, when the Steem Team has less on their plate they can revisit their own sad rep system.

Failings of the current system.

Under Steem's reputation system your rating is based solely on stake. If people with money upvote you, you have high rep. If they downvote you, you're toast. This creates censorship and promotes flag wars. Obviously, flag wars should not be a thing. Every flag should stand on it's own merit. You see a post/comment that is flag-worthy, so you flag it. You don't then go full on @berniesanders and flag every post by the person, and every person that agrees with them. That's the tactical equivalent of the mob killing you and your family just to make a point.

Upvote bot cycle

Let's say you make a mediocre post and bid bot it into the trending tab. Let's say you do this 20 times. Let's also assume that all twenty times you broke even. The money you spent on upvotes was equal to the money that was paid to you at the end of the week. With this method, you've just created an infinite loop of undeserved reputation. Someone with much better content that didn't get the the trending tab will be left in the dust.

All of these problems show that Steem reputation is effectively worthless. Seeing that little number next to someone's name means absolutely nothing. Sad but true.

Utopian.IO

The new reputation system seeks to track other statistics.

... takes into account a user's number of rejected and accepted contributions, in which categories the user has contributed, in addition to the score each contribution has received.

There is also a typical wealth factor:

In order to find new ways other than liquid rewards to incentivise delegation, we now allow users to earn a higher reputation by delegating to Utopian

It's not ideal to give more rep to someone with money, but at the same time Utopian.IO gains Steem Power with this mechanic. It's a good project and they need all the influence they can get, so I'll let it slide.

They are also trying to decentralize the scoring system. Check out the original post.

Where is this going?

If you haven't already, read my post on ultimate blockchains. The cryptocurrencies of the future aren't going to be proof-of-work or proof-of-stake, they will be proof-of-reputation. Utopian.IO shows us the small stepping stones required to get there. A variety of metrics must be established in order to gauge the trustworthiness of an account. As time goes on, these metrics will become more robust and we'll finally see systems fall into place that shatter the old saying:

It's not what you know, it's who you know.

Someday citizens will finally be judged on merit alone and not have to crawl through the rat-race maze of corporate/social politics.