As creator of the Steem Ocean website that includes a way of improving on Steemit's reputation system, I was intrigued to learn more about @steem-ua, which does similar and which has received over half a million delegated steem too - let's take a look.
@steem-ua, as I understand it, uses active witness accounts as a starting point for determining 'trust' within the Steem blockchain - with the accounts that are followed by active witnesses being considered more trustworthy than others. The 'trust' metric is then propagated through the Steem blockchain according to the steem-ua algorithm - resulting in a table/index that puts all Steem users in an order of 'authority' or 'trusted status' in relation to the witnesses. This is a bit like Google's 'Domain Authority' idea that gives websites a ranking of 'authority', based on the site's content and how it fits into all other sites on the web.
I personally don't really like Google's 'Domain authority' concept, as it tends to result in a centralisation of 'authority', whereby 'mainstream narratives' get regarded as 'the truth', while dissenters are sidelined. This is something of a risk with any system like this, however, since we are dealing here with follows on Steem and not with abtract information in the way that Google does - it is probable that the Steem-Ua approach will be less concerning to me.
My own system on Steem Ocean looks at voting patterns of each account and generates a similar index for 'generosity' that attempts to rank users based on how supportive they are of other users financially. As I understand it, @steem-ua takes a different approach that removes money from the situation and just looks at trustability in relation to the ultimate beacons of trust - the witnesses.
Now, while it is true that there is really no reason to think that witnesses are personally more trustable than anyone else - in the context of Steem, they are at least entrusted with the running of the blockchain and so far we have not had any cases of witness fraud being proven in a way that causes problems for the blockchain (that I am aware of) - so the idea of basing trust in the system from witnesses is decent. If the algorithms take into consideration the amount of witness votes that each witness has received, then we can at least say that 'the community' has decided on the basis of how much trust should be allocated through the User Authority system.. However, since witness votes are weighted by the Steem Power held by the voters, this means that the trust system and rank would still be being ultimately governed according to wallet size (I have asked @scipio and @holger80 for their comment on this).
In any case it is clear from the published top 100 list of Steemians on Steem-ua that the witnesses are dominating the list - which makes sense, given that they are the foundation of the rank.
My Rank on Steem UA
As it turns out, I am in position 125 currently in the rank table.
So I am only a few points away from being on the homepage for their website. I am pleased to be so high up the list, given the amount of time I have put into Steem - I feel good to be higher in the Steem-Ua table than I am in the general reputation table (I am around #250 there). I actually find this inspiring and it motivates me to want to work more in the Steem eco-system in useful ways. :)
Ideas For Integrating Steem UA data into steemocean.com
I have already been asked about the possibility of combining Steem Ua's calculations with the reputation and other data on Steem Ocean and I think this is a good idea (subject to me getting answers to my questions about how the Steem-ua algorithms work) so watch this space for more on that soon. :)
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
Vote @ura-soul for Steem Witness!
(Witnesses are the computer servers that run the Steem Blockchain.
Without witnesses there is no Steem, Steemit, DTube, Utopian or
Busy... You can really help Steem by making your 30 witness votes count!)
I was thinking, it would be really proactive for the ecosystem if our rep reflected our relationship with steemians of a variety of steem power and social affiliations rather than just giving rep to the people who interact with high-rep steemians.
I believe that is the underlying logic of the user authority. The only deviation from that, in the @steem-ua implementation, is the decision to start with witness rankings as the seed, as those are determined by stake weighed votes.
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Thank you @ura-soul for your insight regarding the steem-ua reputation system. I totally agree with you that the Foundation of trust in Steem starts with the witnesses and those people get voted by community and Steempower. Ok great, but how is the Link between Witnesses and regular user or Steem only investor going to function in the future, when we have the steem-ua system?
Does the small Accounts needs to pray for the attention of the witnesses? Can the witnesses really carry the responsibility to follow other small Accounts in order to raise their ua levels? I feel that this is the point where me as a little guys has its problems...I don't like ass kissing witnesses to get a better ua score. How can this work out for newbies who just joined steem...my concern is also that many SMT project will Airdrop Tokens to Users who have good UA score, therefore the witnesses. Now the reputation part and financial part gets mixed together again!!! They need to be seperated...here are users who invest a lot but dont create content, dapps or do witness.
I'm really curious how things will play out. Looking forward to your comment!
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The original idea of Steem was to provide a way of assessing 'proof of brain', so the subjectively 'best' posts get rewarded. This immediately met with the competing force of 'proof of wallet' - whereby those with the most Steem Power rose to the top. Using the 'reputation' system plays in to 'proof of wallet'. Using the steem-ua system (as far as I understand the algorithm) is a bit better in that it allows the community as a whole something more of a say, however, it certainly does appear to skew that in favour of the witnesses (rather than just whoever has the most money). In a sense, basing such things on money could be said to have some validity, but only if 'proof of brain' is already working (since those with higher quality work will also have more steem power) - however, since 'proof of brain' is competing with 'proof of wallet' - we have a problem.
My solution was to look at the 'generosity' of the voters on the blockchain to attempt to assess their level of social activity and support of others - rather than just looking at their wallet or their closeness to witnesses etc.
I still think this is one of the better ways to measure things, but it is not perfect. Ultimately, any such assessment is subjective - so there will always be those who are for or against it.
Thanks for your good explanation @ura-soul. I like your generosity concept it would be great to measure who is really supporting the Steem community at a wider range.
What comes to my mind in this whole discussion is that it would be nice to have different steem-ua measurement tools for different purposes. For example lets use Steem-ua for ranking posts in the trending section. Lets use your generosity Index to determine who is sharing and spreading the Steempower effectively. Lets create Steem-IA for investors to measure who is willing to hold on to its stake when it comes to Airdrops of SMT ( for example your score would be lower if you power down or selling steem but higher if you hold on to Steem power and if you are a buyer of Steem). Or lets create Steem-DA for developers.
Therefore different measurement tools would be more effective and the different kind of users ( content creators, investors, developers, witnesses) could focus more on their field of interest.
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Yes, those are all possible approaches - though I'm not sure how development could be tracked in a truly useful way, other perhaps than by having close human monitoring and also possibly keeping track of @steemprojects data.
I will bare all of this in mind in case I get more investor and developer attention (or I get more time to work on steemocean myself) :)
Thanks for having this conversation with you I really appreciate it. I guess ideas are easy to write down but harder to implement. Lets keep on working so that Steem becomes a place were everybody feels home.
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You are welcome, thanks for your thoughts too. Yes, there is always a process from imagination through to fruition with software and usually the implementation aspect is the most challenging and intensive.
Wow fair play, good ranking!
Being a witness and no. of followers (especially followers with a high UA/ witness ranking) are the two key variables for UA aren't they?
It certainly seems robust.
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As far as I am aware, yes - although we don't have all the details as the code is closed source.
Why is the code closed source?
The coders say they simply want to benefit from their work, rather than having others clone it and gain rewards from it. I can understand that, it's the same reason that steemocean is closed source.
Its like Windows OS closed sourced right?
I prefer open source.
Yes. Generally, open source is preferable, but when a project is small and one person has put a lot of time into it without any payout, I don't see that it is wrong for them to keep the code closed. The code can be opened later if need be. So far no-one has actually asked me for the code to steemocean anyway.
I guess those huge delegators to steem-ua already know the code because they wont be delegating that much if they won't reveal the code.
steem-ocean seems to be another incredible STEEM tools, very interesting regarding to the reputation and steem-ua. I really want to know more.
Thanks - you can read the 'about' page at steem ocean or just ask me direct questions. :)
I'm not familiar with steem ocean but I will check it out.
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Hi @ura-soul!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 6.595 which ranks you at #125 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has not changed in the last three days.
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 429 contributions, your post is ranked at #145.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
I'm thinking that improvements relative to your peers at this level is a real challenge.
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Yes, probably, but as I understand I just need to keep doing what I'm doing to improve anyway - so it's best not to be distracted by it :)
I upvoted your post.
Best regards,
@Council
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@ura-soul I think a combination of Steem Ia and Steem Ocean will give us our most accurate ratings poasible
Hello @ura-soul, thank you for sharing this creative work! We just stopped by to say that you've been upvoted by the @creativecrypto magazine. The Creative Crypto is all about art on the blockchain and learning from creatives like you. Looking forward to crossing paths again soon. Steem on!