RE: Introducing UserAuthority (UA), @steem-ua and UA-API !
A Pareto distribution is natural; it is normal. You see it outside of human activity as well; anytime that there is an advantage to be had in an agent population by having more of a thing to get some of the thing, you get Pareto longtail distributions.
A lot of the discussion around cryptocurrency and especially around steem seems to go in a direction which denies that Pareto optimizations are desirable or necessary, and flying in the face of logic and reason like that is a good, solid way to fail.
So – we have another Pareto-reflecting curve on our hands with an exponential top-end and an exponential bottom end. What we really need is some way to visualize the difference between the rankings of the accounts involved in the traditional Reputational curve and the ranking derived from UA, and whether or not they are significantly different in ordinal rank for any given account or whether they, by and large, are in as much lockstep as they appear to be.
Because if it's just Rep but with a few accounts left out, it's not really very useful or revelatory. If it's a different Pareto distribution of the account list, how much different is it?
We could start to figure out how different they are with some pretty simple tools. You could start with a simple diff of the ordered list of all of the accounts by Rep next to all of the accounts ordered by UA. If there are transitions or transformations, that would be an easy way to start getting a handle on how to visualize them. (I'm thinking in particular of diff algorithms which let you know for any given member/line where/how much it has been moved, which is really all we care about. Magnitude of move and direction of move should be pretty easy to depict in some sort of graphical way.
After all, we know that UA takes significant computational resources to calculate. It has to be updated, effectively, for accounts of interest, every time there is a transfer within the event horizon of any given account. That means there's a significant cost for calculating UA for any given account. If it doesn't really do better than Rep for the vast majority of the account list, that's a lot of wasted energy.
So this is the kind of thing we need to see in order to determine if this is actually a useful metric or just another way to write Rep that takes longer and kills more electrons.
One example where UA shines is in - for example - recognizing @thejohalfiles as being influential. Without blogging an account cannot get upvoted nor increase its Rep score.
It's interesting that you would use that example, because it supports my position that follows are definitely not useful as an indicator of quality.
This account has no blog posts. It's influence is not related to its interaction with the social network in an observable way. While it does have a number of comments, none of them are particularly revelatory or insightful beyond a base level I expect of all people who interact with others on the social network.
So there's no reason to think that this one should "shine" at all.
And that's a problem, because we as users – no matter what we want to use UA for or what we imagine it might be used for – need to understand the reason that one account may be higher rank in UA than another. As it stands, and as the explanation and descriptions have changed, UA becomes an ever more amorphous single number attached to accounts which, in some way, at great computational expense, provides a number. One which doesn't come with an understanding of why that number is what it is, one that hinges on an interpretation of the platform mechanics which is unintuitive, and one which appears to be fairly readily gameable by engaging in behavior which isn't in the best interest of the way people are using the social network.
I think those issues are a problem.
But first we have to have an understanding of how UA differs from Rep in a real sense, in the context of comparing the two spaces as they stand – and you clearly have all the data necessary to do exactly that at this point, so let's do that.
After that, we can talk about what is going to be necessary for UA to be a meaningful designator, in part by allowing the system to give feedback to a user about why the ranking is exactly what it is.
We know exactly what Rep is all about and what it hinges on. It's about getting voted on. Stuff you make gets votes, your Rep goes up, it's a very simple signifier (even if it has some very obvious flaws as a comparator).
UA is a black box, and the things that you've said about what go into making the black box tick don't really jibe with creating a useful singular ranking of accounts for the purposes of a user looking to discover content, which is the one thing that it should do.
Ultimately, on the issue of UA, we have to ask what "being influential" means if it's not about actually blogging or not about actually engaging people in comments. What kind of influence are we talking about? Because if it's just "this is an account that throws around a lot of SP," we already have very clear rankings for those.
A good reputation (UA score), being highly regarded and thus having many followers, can also be based for example on being a good developer, a wise witness or a precious curator.
And finally, if there is no logical reason at all for having a high UA score, then many people could simply decide to unfollow a certain account so that its UA would decrease.
Hold up. Let's be frank. There's no way that a "precious curator" is going to have a high UA score, given the things that are defined as the inputs into the algorithm which drive the ranking.
A curator has no reason to be followed, and so they don't tend to be. They don't tend to delegate out large amounts of SP, they don't tend to leave a lot of comments (because curation is hard enough as is, and unless they're a bot or bot-assisted they don't have time thanks to the fact that Steemit makes content discovery and uphill battle), or in any other way interact with the blockchain in ways which this metric considers useful.
A fact which has been pointed out to you by other people as well.
No one will stop following someone that they have on their list because they think their UA score is too high. That is ridiculously stupid and you should be embarrassed for even saying that in public. People stop following an account because they write or publish things that the follower doesn't want to see, so they stop following them so they no longer see that content.
A lot of this is just coming down to you guys saying, "UA is an important metric because we say it's an important metric and it measures lots of things and you're going to want to change your behavior because it measures things."
No. That's not how this works.
How is UA better than a near trivially computed metric based on an accounts number of followers divided by the number of people that it follows? How does give me any more information than just that? As a user, I know how the simpler metric fails, and I know how it succeeds and what it does. I understand what it communicates. UA does none of that.
I like a good fever dream as much as the next guy, but this is silly.
I see no reason why a curator shouldn't have a high UA score. Especially if UA could have an impact on voting weight in future. In my recent article I mentioned the example formula:
vote_worth = UA(voter) / UA(average) • SP • vote_strength.
If a high UA score strengthened the voting value of a curator (who may upvote your articles), then of course it could be worth to follow him.
I will. And I did already. I unfollowed inactive accounts as well as accounts which make much money with less effort in my opinion.
Somewhat related: thank you very much for defending me with your full-power vote in another discussion thread, I haven't got such a strong upvote for a year, literally
You are welcome! :)