RE: Introducing UserAuthority (UA), @steem-ua and UA-API !
You guys really need to put together some graphs so that the users have a better grasp of what the distribution of UA is across the population.
For example, I know from the table on the website what the high-end distribution looks like – but I have no idea whether outside of the rich and famous, I'm doing okay, I am coming in at a pack level which is less than impressive for my content creation, or how UA is distributed throughout the population as a whole so I know if there are Pareto curve representations or other longtail effect.
I have a number but I don't have any context, and I need that context. Without the context, I don't actually know what that number means in relation to the numbers given to people elsewhere on the blockchain. I don't know if it even is meaningful.
So, some sort of graph which shows the distribution of UA across the population in general. Some kind of graph or other representation which shows the distribution of UA and what accounts are in the area that I am in terms of my ranking. And some kind of way for me to put my account in and have the UA ratings fan out from my account along the links from people I follow and who follow me. All of these are going to be something really critical to demonstrating what this number is actually supposed to mean and how people can use it.
I look forward to seeing some of the stuff come to fruition and maybe power some useful tools.
Here you go ;-)
Well, this looks extremely familiar. It's the same curve which describes the distribution of SP across the population, except that it doesn't flatten out at the end quite as quickly.
Taken as a sum, how far down the curve in number of accounts before half of the population has half of the total UA ranking in play? About 20%?
This kind of curve is the product of nature, you can't get a normal distribution in anything when human action is involved. Pareto distribution is all we'll ever gonna get.
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.
PS: This is a log-scaled UA Score distribution, on a 0.00 - 10.00 scale, where it gets increasingly harder to go from 7.00 to 8.00 than it is from 2.00 to 3.00.
PS2: this is merely a UA representation right now. Things could change drastically now that UA is out in "the wild", making people more aware of who to (un)follow.
Right, which is pretty much in line with SP in that sense. It might be worth plotting this with Y scaled log to flatten it out more for differentiation.
In fact, it'd be an interesting comparison to see how UA and SP scale accounts in different orders, or by how much it does. At some level, it's already described as a bit of a proxy. The question is whether it is ranking things significantly differently or largely the same in aggregate.
Also consider , when relying heavily on follows it will inevitably lead to a black market of -
Will follow for X $ for Y Days $
If anything, paying for follows will be considerably easier than paying for votes. Follows cost nothing. And while each additional follow scales the overall value of your following by the number you follow, despite all the effort on the front end to screen for isolated island networks and the like, it will be extremely easy to build inheritance architectures of follows that fairly straightforwardly game the system as long as one or a few witnesses jump on board, and given that there are witnesses who are heavily involved in the bot community as is – why wouldn't they?
I really appreciate the effort by devs but the criteria needs to be really diverse for the rankings to be meaningful in longer run.
From my previous comment, factors such as :
Hello, I do not think I have run across your account before. So we may run in entirely different areas of steemit. A comparison of our UA may help me understand what the number means.
According to the UA web site, my stats: "score is 4.009 and you have a ua rank of 3389"
Fairly close numbers. Most of my content is just new user related, recently a few photo post, and for most of Jan-July a steemit game/challenge. So basically average to below average post quality.
Or you could spend five seconds looking at the stuff in my feed, and actually learn something useful and interesting about what I write and what I do. Something far more useful than a single numeric metric which provides no context, no real information, and nothing that actually reflects your interests or your personal inclinations.
I could tell you what my UA is, but all that would be is one more number floating around in the air. Like a stale fart.
And that, in particular, is one of the real failure modes of UA. It doesn't provide us, as users and as consumers, a tool for finding things that we want and will enjoy. It provides no meaning at all. If you said, "I like to write about video games, role-playing games, and game theory," I might say, "me too! I'd like to read what you write!"
But that's not a number. That's communication. That's content. That's useful.
And there is the problem. This provides us nothing. Nothing at all.
As tools go, this is purposeless.
It's illustrative that nothing involved with UA has anything to do with content. Nothing at all. And it's content that really matters to us as users and consumers, and even as creators. What we create, what we enjoy, and what we want to see our primary and it doesn't matter how many followers someone else as, how much delegation they do, or any of that garbage bullshit crap.
All that matters is content.
These numbers don't matter at all.
Ultimately, that's the problem.
Hey @shaka ,
tks for the upvotes...fam
You're truly a hero: not only making the idea work out both in theory and practice but also spending time and effort to make responses like this.
You rock.
Thx! ;-)
Agreed.
I second this! :)