Utopian-io Vote Analysis: January 2019
As promised in the December Utopian analysis that I posted last week, here are the corresponding stats for January 2019. This brings me up to date with the Utopian votes analyses. The next monthly instalment will be at the start of February, with normal service resumed.
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.
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:
The overall contribution percentage (including task requests) for January 2019 was 62%, representing a small rise from the 60% level in December and a halt of the downwards trend in this statistic: October (76%) -> November (66%) -> December (60%).
The main change from December to January was the increase in voting power allocated to moderator comments, a 5% rise from 18% to 23%, matching the corresponding December rise from 13% to 18%. Both these increases arose from a change in the reward structure in mid-December through which moderator rewards were increased to compensate for the significant fall in the Steem price (mid-December was the low point of the bear market). The January increase is simply a "working-through" of this change, representing a full month's impact, whereas for December the impact represented a half-month application of the new structure.
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.
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:
![]() | ![]() |
While the comparison from November 2018 to December 2018 was very steady, January 2019 represented a significant change in vote allocation. The main movements were:
- Translations, down 12% from 38% to 26%.
- Development, down 2% from 23% to 21%.
- Blog, up 10% from 8% to 18%.
- Tutorials, up 6% from 4% to 10%.
These changes represent a move towards a more even distribution across the largest contribution-types.
With 15 contribution-types the theoretical allocation per contribution bucket is 6.7% (at least I believe that this is how it works). We now have five contribution-types competing for the "surplus" from the ten smaller contribution-types, as well as some increases in the rewards for the smaller contribution-types, reducing the surplus available for the very largest categories.
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.
As in December, there has been a general contraction in the number of contributors rewarded by Utopian-io from December to January. This is mainly impacting the Translations category. Based on the pie charts in the section above, it looks like the rewards for translations have been squeezed by other categories, leading to an overall fall in contributors supported.
The are however strong increases in the number of contributors rewarded in tutorials, bug-hunting and ideas. For the latter, the "ideas-hub" initiative may be bringing more ideas-orientated people to Utopian.
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.
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. Nothing to see here.
5. Summaries of the top 50 Utopian contributors
Congratulations to all those who made it on to the top 50 list for January 2019!
There is an exceptional effort at the top of the rankings. Someone has been working very hard!
A noticeable change from December is that there are now three blog-orientated contributors in the top 15; perhaps not unexpected given the increase in the overall blog contribution rewards that we saw in section 2. And yet more evidence that there are many different ways to successfully contribute to Utopian-io.
January 2019
December 2018
December top 50 for comparison.
November 2018
November top 50 for comparison.
Repository:
This analysis relates to the Utopian open-source project. The relevant repositories are:
- utopian-io/utopian-bot
- utopian-io/utopian.io
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.
Thanks for reading!
Hi @miniature-tiger,
excellent follow-up to the December report! Close to a quarter of the voting power to the mod rewards is quite a lot and certainly something to keep an eye on. I'm glad the contributions share increased as well. The breakdown by category is very helpful. Having a good balance between the larges categories (in terms of vote value) looks like a healthy state. However, as pointed out by @espoem, the number of contributors can be quite different across the categories. How did 'blog' gain 10% of the overall vote shares even with a slight decrease in the number of contributions?
The distribution across contributors is very impressive! Can you remind me of the y-axis units here, is it SBD?
Your contribution has been evaluated according to Utopian policies and guidelines, as well as a predefined set of questions pertaining to the category.
To view those questions and the relevant answers related to your post, click here.
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[utopian-moderator]
Hey @crokkon!
The table of numbers in section 3 is a count of contributors over the month rather than contributions. I keep meaning to add a count of contributions but it requires a second run of the analysis. Maybe next month!
Anyway, we've gone from this in December:
To this in January: (charts on the same scale)
So it's a general increase in the rewards per contributor, particularly at the top end. Some of this I would expect to come from the increased potential rewards from the max percent hike in mid-December. But mainly it's likely to be from a jump in the number of contributions from each contributor.
All the figures are vote percentages awarded by Utopian. So it can be thought of as awards rather than rewards. The total vote percentage for the month is around 33000%, i.e. 330 100% upvotes, slightly more than 10 100% upvotes per day which is due to the compounding effect of batch voting.
Translating across to $rewards from these figures will depend on the Steem price and the position of each vote in the voting batch. So the comparative charts would look a little different expressed in rewards. I think a rough conversion in January would be around 60/70%, so a score of 800, i.e. 8 100% upvotes would be around $500.
Thanks for the review!
Oh, apologies, you are of course right, I misread the table on the contributor counts even though it's correctly described. Thanks for the clarification and additional information on the vote distribution! :)
Thank you for your review, @crokkon! Keep up the good work!
Excellent detailed analysis! This is great data which I'll use in explaining Utopian to potential investors.
Thanks!
If there are any stats that you would find useful, let me know. I may be able to dig them out.
Very interesting as always! I knew Igormuba was posting a lot, but seeing this really puts it in perspective. The difference between him and 2nd place is already crazy.
Think it mostly has to do with the fact they realised they can write multiple parts about the same project.
It's some effort! Particularly given the rewards for tutorials and blogs are smaller than for the bigger categories. He's actually top of both the tutorials and blog categories for the month. I need to up my game!
The changes in translations and blog categories are huge considering the number of people who were involved in translations. Not going to say that I am happy to see the "sudden" increase in blog category as I read many of them and some of them were, well, meh.
Interesting to see the rewards per person. You do a good job with these analyses.
Thanks @espoem!
The number of contributors rewarded for translations has halved since October. It would be interesting to see when people "drop out" - whether there's a correlation to the lower Steem price / lower rewards or if it can be shown to be from missing out on the upvotes. A challenge for another day!
Well it’s a good thing those moderators get more/bigger votes. That’ll keep things headed in the right direction.
Steem is up 50% since that change was made in mid-December, so there's probably some scope for a tweak back towards contributions now.
hi, Tiger.
I strive every day to leave good original content on this platform to which I invest time and money, I want to know the reason why you have done this: @ miniature-tiger has muted you!
Hey @equipodelta.
It's nothing personal! I mute users who post non-Utopian content through the Utopian-io tag. Simply because the Utopian-io tag is the main way I keep up to date with Utopian contributions and having to filter through stacks of non-Utopian content is a bit of a pain. There's a lot of it!
So that will be the reason. Like I said, nothing personal, just trying to simplify my visits to the Steem blockchain.
Hi, thanks for the reply, I had worried a bit.
If I was a little ignorant about the tag, I apologize, I have rectified the details. A hug.
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