Utopian-io Vote Analysis: April 2019

The Utopian voting stats for the month of April.

April saw the end of the Utopian Indiegogo campaign and a restructuring from delegation support towards fiat support. The corresponding drop in Utopian Steem Power combined with a fall in the Steem price over April led to substantially reduced rewards for Utopian contributions as the month progressed. How have these significant changes impacted the voting breakdown?

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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.

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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:

April 2019

March 2019	February 2019
January 2019	December 2018
-----------------	------------------

November 2018	October 2018

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The overall contribution percentage (including task requests) for April 2019 was 62%. This level has remained pretty stable over the last 6 months.

The end of the Utopian Indiegogo campaign and its marketing saw the "other" category reduce back to 2%, in line with earlier months.

The mspwaves trail has ticked up, reflecting the drive to promote Utopian through the radio shows.

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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.

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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:

April 2019

March 2019	February 2019

January 2019	December 2018

November 2018	October 2018

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There were some significant changes from March to April 2019:

• Graphics, up 7% from 4% to 11%.
• Development, down 6% from 21% to 15%.

The reduction in development contribution share deserves a little more study (the graphics impact is covered in sections 3 and 5 below). The daily contribution vote share chart shows the development vote share tailing-off in the second half of the month.

Possible explanations include:

• The Steem price dropped over the course of April, from over 50c on April 6, down to 35c by the end of the month, reducing the fiat value of rewards. However "reward" reasons would be expected to have impacted all contribution types.
• The Utopian Colony funding from Freedom resulted in a restructuring of Utopian support, with 2m of SP delegation removed on 5 April to fund the Colony project. This was announced on 11 April. Again this will have reduced rewards.
• Easter holidays.
• Everyone playing (or working on) NextColony.

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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.

After an uptick in contributors supported from February to March there was a general decrease for April, particularly in the development and blog categories. Contributor numbers does appear to be heavily influenced by reward levels.

The number of graphics contributors supported in April has not risen substantially from March, suggesting that the increase in the vote share for graphics is due to increased contributions by existing contributors.

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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.

April 2019

March 2019

After a reduction in contribution vote timing at the end of March there has been a steady increase in the delay, back up to the 2.5 day level seen in early March. This may be due to a change in contribution types towards smaller categories but this could not be confirmed without further study.

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5. Summaries of the top 50 Utopian contributors

Congratulations to all those who made it on to the top 50 list for April 2019!

Three graphics contributors make it into the top 20, explaining the rise in the vote share for this contribution type. In comparison, no graphics contributors were in the top 50 in the prior 2 months.

April 2019

March 2019

March top 50 for comparison.

February 2019

February top 50 for comparison.

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Repository:

This analysis relates to the Utopian open-source project. The relevant repositories are:

• utopian-io/utopian-bot
• utopian-io/utopian.io

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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.

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Thanks for reading!