Utopian-io Vote Analysis: February 2019

The Utopian voting stats for the month of February.

January was a month of significant change for Utopian voting, particularly in the distribution of vote-power between different contribution types. Larger categories saw a fall in vote power with some of the smaller categories gaining ground. Did February see that trend continue?

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:

February

January 2019	December 2018

November 2018	October 2018

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The overall contribution percentage (including task requests) for February 2019 was 62% which is unchanged from January. Generally the reward split has now stabilised following the downwards trend in the contribution percentage over the last three months of 2018: October (76%) -> November (66%) -> December (60%).

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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:

February

January 2019	December 2018

November 2018	October 2018

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The changes from January 2019 to February 2019 are small, representing a consolidation of the significant movements seen from December 2018 to January 2019.

The main (although generally small) movements were:

• Translations, down 3% from 26% to 23%.
• Blog, up 2% from 18% to 20%.
• Iamutopian, down 2% from 12% to 10%.
• Tutorials, down 4% from 10% to 6%.
• A general increase in the small categories, led by video-tutorials reappearing with 3%.

As in January, these changes represent a general trend towards a more even distribution across contribution-types.

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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.

The comparison from January to February is fairly stable, particularly given that February is a slightly shorter month. With the Steem price starting to pick up and the exposure for Utopian from the Utopian Colony campaign, I would hope to see a rise in these numbers heading through March.

The largest reduction was for development contributors, with a reduction from 47 to 37 contributors supported. In the comments to the December analysis it was noted that development contributions were being squeezed, with even some high-scoring contributions not receiving the Utopian vote. This is likely to have disincentivised some contributors. A change in the voting algorithm has been made to help alleviate this issue, with the introduction of an age-weighted sorting component to help pick up contributions close to the end of the 7 day voting period. Hopefully this should assist in attracting back development contributors to Utopian.

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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.

February 2019

January 2019

The timing of voting remains steady, with contributions voted on average around the 1.5 - 2 day mark and moderator comments around 2.5 days.

There are few more contributions in the 3.5 - 6.5 day time-period than in the previous month. This is likely to be due to the introduction of an age-weighted sorting component to the voting algorithm, as detailed in section 3 above.

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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 February 2019!

After an exceptional single effort in January, a return to a more typical distribution-tail for February.

It is noticeable, and perhaps not unexpected, that the very top contributors receive votes across a number of categories and contribution types.

February 2019

February top 50.

January 2019

January top 50 for comparison.

December 2018

December 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!