@steem-ua, Let's UNITE: My Open Letter to All Accounts

In this article, I will explain brutally honest, what my actual goal is with @steem-ua, why I created @steem-ua, why I want it to be a "Steem Movement", how its growth mechanisms function, and most of all how everybody active on the Steem Blockchain can benefit from it. This is my Open Letter, my shout-out to everybody, to UNITE, in an effort to make the Steem Blockchain what it could be, to live up to its full potential, both in terms of market capitalization and in terms of a healthy ecosystem.

Sure: UA & @steem-ua - two completely different things that are closely aligned, though - both have their criticasters. And critique is of course fine, welcome even, provided it adds value. But to those that try to hold back @steem-ua and/or label it as "another smart bid bot" (which it is not, and never was intended as such, as I will explain in this Post, again, more in-depth than ever), to those I say: give @steem-ua an honest chance to grow! Just look around on the Steem Blockchain right now and just FEEL the positivity. As @meno has dubbed it: the Hopium that's present all around now. Personally, I'm proud for co-creating that general feeling of positivity that's all around us now. Even if @steem-ua would fail to grow to HUGE proportions, and I really hope it will succeed of course, then at least we have experienced & felt a touch that Steem(it) is not some "failed social experiment". Dear criticasters: I will address your concerns in this post as well, as good as I can. I will really try to do so... Because I want to UNITE & ALIGN INTERESTS IN STEEM, with @steem-ua!

Aligning interests

While co-developing UA & @steem-ua with @holger80, I've been in direct contact with many "Steem Prominents". In those early conversations, I explained what UA (the influence metric) is about, how it functions, if & how it could be gamed, how to harden the algorithm against various kinds of attack vectors, discussing many scientific papers on Social Network Influence Models & Algorithms, regarding Mathematical challenges, Computer Science challenges, about the Blockchain, its decentralized nature, and on marketing UA and monetizing UA. And as we progressed, I learned more and more about valid concerns that needed to be addressed. Interestingly, while taking in and comparing everything that was discussed, it struck me that similar types of - let's call them: "aspects" - came up, and that those were brought up by people of similar backgrounds having similar (self-) interests. And so I began thinking about how - if possible at all - I could "position" UA in a way that would ultimately let everybody on the Steem Blockchain benefit from it. By aligning everybody's interests.

Identifying the current Steem Problems

If you look at Steem evolving in its two years after inception, I've identified the following problems (at least, how I perceive them):

• "in the beginning", a few very early adopters and Steemit Inc itself, acquired a gigantic amount of Steem. The distribution of Steem is skewed, being held by relatively few Whale Accounts. And while that by itself is in fact a similar distribution of how capital is distributed "in the real world", there is (at least) one difference: STEEM is not the only tradable Crypto out there.

• by making it very hard for new users to earn a decent earning, most of them fail at learning how things work before ever getting noticed and supported by the dolphins, orcas and whales that would be able to teach and support them and keep them active on Steem.

• the same problem occurs the other way around: those dolphins, orcas and whales willing to help & support the new & promising users simply are unable to find them within the "sea of plastic soup". I see in front of me chaos: thousands of people, most of whom have different interests and strategies, unable to find one another. Some succeed in that, those willing to persist, but the majority of new people is long gone before getting "picked up", never to come back (at least not very soon).

• the beauty of cryptography and decentralization is at the same time the biggest enemy of Steem: as soon as one type of "abusive behavior" is detected and addressed, another one occurs. A continuous Cat & Mouse Game. While in "the real world" it's quite easy & common to confront and stop an individual or group of people doing "bad things", on Steem that is not so simple: a user doing "bad things" cannot easily be stopped doing it. Many disagree for example with the way @haejin operates, perceive his actions as "bad", and some such as @berniesanders, @transisto and @fulltimegeek try to stop him doing what he does. Hence "Flag Wars" occur, as "flagging" (= "downvoting" instead of "upvoting") is seen as a mechanism to express one's disagreements with another person's rewards.

• but while being busy with "reward quarreling" amongst "The Big Guns", the "Little Guys", the N00bs, the people new to steemit, get lost! They walk away, for not understanding, for not getting "picked up", for not getting "taught", and for NOT EARNING.

• in an effort to earn, people self-vote. While an occasional self-vote is mostly seen as OK, especially on Self-Published Quality Posts, doing so at large, continuously, gets the platform as a whole nowhere but back to zero!

• the decentralized capitalistic fundamentals of Steem, where each account is also a wallet, makes Steem complete completely different to all other big Social Media Platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, you name 'em!). And exactly because of those capitalistic fundamentals, suddenly people behave completely different! Please show me one other big, successful, social site, where "I like Fish" as the only Post Content, is rewarded with hundreds of dollars! I don't know of any!

• in an effort to "get noticed", n00bs comment "Good Post Friend!", "I like your Post Friend!", expecting big rewards, because they see them everywhere. Why not test it out yourself? Let's see if it is that easy to earn big, right? Some of them get flagged, others don't but earn zero anyway, and then they leave... Simply for being lost, not picked up...

• others try to use & abuse, then get caught, and simply begin over: I've experienced it first-hand, while being @Utopian-io Advisor in its early days. I saw thousands of "contributions" then, explaining how to install app X on Android, app Y on Android, app Z on Android, all of them on iOS as well, and "suggesting" the color "Blue" was better than "Green"... just to get the upvote. The Big & Mighty Utopian-io upvote. Google Translate was used massively, on "manually" translating Open Source repos only used by a few, just to get the Utopian upvote. I can go on for ages about all different types of abuse I saw. Moderator Teams were organized to combat the abuse. Some moderators went rogue even, for the upvote of course. Abusive users were banned, only to return minutes later with a new Anon-Created Account, to continue as before, now challenging the moderators even more because now the Bad Actor how to abuse smarter, under a different name, un-identified. The Cat & Mouse Game continues...

One Common Denominator: We All Want to Earn

I can go on, and on, and on, and on. But one common denominator remains: We All Want To Earn With Steem!

And what is the best way, the most profitable way, to earn big with Steem? Only 2 variables both need to be maximized:
-a- to individually acquire as much STEEM as you can, and
-b- to collectively make the price per STEEM, ergo the Steem Market Cap, go Sky-High

All of the formentioned "Steem Problems" are directly caused by (almost) every individual pursuing their own maximization of -a-. But that is futile when -b- is not addressed collectively. And I don't mean "Pump & Dump"! No! I mean really solving the "Steem Problems" caused by -a-! I don't mean "artificially boosting demand"! I mean really creating demand for STEEM! Sustainable demand! If Steem(it) was fun, and positive, and entertaining, and profitable, and energetic to everybody, then why on earth would anybody want to leave??? User retention would be 100%, not close to 0!

The solution: -1- a new Influence Metric & -2- a Scalable Algorithmic Curation Mechanism

UA, the Influence Metric

The "Reputation Metric", which - in short - reflects how much rewards an account has earned over time, doesn't say that much now, than it once did. Because of the "bid bots", one can re-invest their liquid earnings and boost up to trending, where visibility leads to clicks, and clicks to views, and views to ... upvotes. Rince & Repeat.

The core problem with that approach, mathematically speaking, is that the sum of all distributed rewards keeps growing, as does the combined Reputation Score of all accounts together.

Enter UA (and I'm not going into the tech nitty-gritty of it, here, again, I already did that, and will do so again, but not in this post, lengthy as it is already). The core difference of "UA" as compared to "Rep", is that UA is a Probability Distribution summed up to 1, or 100%.

To put it as simple as I can: UA is scarce by design, it has zero inflation, the total is and always remains the total: 100%. Where one accounts wins, another loses, the sum always remains 100%. That is what makes UA fundamentally cool, regardless if you agree or disagree that the "Follower Graph" is or is not a good signal to use at the core of UA. That's just an implementation detail, really...

We added the sub-algo "WitnessRank" to initiate the Trust Vector with: the People vote for the Witnesses, assign Trust to them, and in turn the Witnesses - via who they follow - pass on that Trust to all other accounts. We created a Two-Way Loop. Of course UA is now biased towards the Witnesses! I intended it that way in an attempt to DeCentralize UA, after trying to get it HardForked multiple times via my earlier UA Posts!
WitnessRank is not causing UA to be "Dirty Data", it is not "Over-Fitted", it is Democracy in Optima Forma!

(PS, side-note: if there is one thing missing regarding Witness Voting, as far as I'm concerned, it is the same Stake-Based Disagreement Mechanism applied to Witnesses as it exists to disagreement on Votes. But let's not discuss that idea here and now...)

@steem-ua, Human-Powered and Scalable Algorithmic Curation Mechanism

OK, now that we have a zero-inflation Influence Metric, and a hardware stack streaming all blocks produced continuously, updating the UA Matrix every 3 seconds (computing the resulting UA_Account scores is now done ~ twice per day), why not set it to work to Algorithmically Curate the Entire Blockchain?

Enter @steem-ua

OK, all good and well, with @steem-ua we can now curate all content on the entire blockchain - coooool! - but powerless. What is missing? SP is missing, a solid and powerful Voting Strength is missing. Powerful enough to curate Rewarding & Fair, to all. How to get those SPs?

Enter SP Delegation

Another extremely cool feature the Steem Blockchain has is SP Delegation. What is SP anyway? It's Vested Steem (not that a n00b understands that from the get-go, but anyway). And what can SP (Steem Power) be used for? "To earn "rewards" with via curation" is the most encountered short answer. Many beginner Steemians ask "And where do the rewards come form then?". The obvious answer is, of course: carefully controlled Steem inflation, and that means that owning SP gives you a proportional stake-based say ("vote") of who will receive what. The content authors get their share of "author rewards", the content voters / curators get their share of "curator rewards".

Delegating SP is therefore nothing more than a very interesting and smart way to hand-over "voting rights" to another account, which is therewith also given the rights of receiving the curator rewards of those delegated SPs! By delegating (parts of) your self-owned SP to another account, you empower that other account with a stronger "vote", and the only "opportunity costs" you have from the delegation is losing the curation rewards while delegating. The second you change your mind about handing over your voting rights, you can revoke them and they won't be available to use by the Delegatee immediately. (It does take currently 7 days, since HF20 5 days, to getting those revoked / un-delegated voting rights back.) Apart from that cool-down period, the Mechanism of Delegating SP is really elegant.

Enter DECENTRALIZED SP Delegation: "The Power of Many"

What if.... All would UNITE, stand strong, together as one. Seems "Utopian"? (No Pun intended @elear, #I-am-Utopian too, and you know it... thankfully). What if we would & could collectively UNITE forces? If each of us would add a bit to empower something HUGE? While at the same time, where we all have a say, via the Witness Voting and who we choose to Follow, control that something HUGE. @steem-ua might look like a machine, but it certainly is not Artificial Intelligence. It is a carefully constructed Democratic Mechanism, a huge chunk of data in a matrix (now) sized at ~ 1.2 trillion EigenValues, and it summarizes what WE all "vote" for, individually. UA = All Steemians.

And the missing piece of the puzzle: that giant pile of data to which we all add our say, is empowered by every account choosing to empower it, via delegating (parts of) their self-owned SP = their voting rights.

Do you know precisely how your car works? No? Does it keep you from driving it?
Do you know exactly how your body works? No? Does it keep you from wanting to be alive?
Do you know precisely how UA and @steem-ua work? No. But if you look around everywhere, look at all replies, see @steem-ua SPREAD THE HOPIUM, like what you see happening.... then support it! Just try it out! EMPOWER IT BY DELEGATING TO IT! "The Proof of the Pudding is in The Eating".

The Growth Mechanisms of @steem-ua

Please have a look at https://steem-ua.com/delegators. In there you see a (slightly cached) status of all accounts currently delegating to @steem-ua, ranked by their delegated stake. This looks like a Steem Project active for at least one yer, don't you agree? Wrong: we're live for 10 days now. And while that page is pretty big already, my goal is for that page to grow 100x the size it is now.

Also, have a look at https://steem-ua.com/stats (our WiP, Work in Progress Stats page). Those are not images, but interactive Plotly Charts. You can hover the charts, zoom in, check some details. Currently, these are only delegation charts, but we plan to add more as we progress.

Check the bottom chart, the one now labeled "Percentage of SP delegated by < 5000 SP and >= 5000 SP delegators" (OK, we could shorten that, maybe ;-) ). What you see happening in there, is that over time the smaller SP delegations are cumulatively growing in size. The downward spikes on Sep 4, 2018 on the blue line (and the now mirroring orange line as well of course, we want to add more categories, hence the two currently present) represent big delegations coming in from @cryptoctopus and @stellabelle and @daveks. If we keep progressing like we do here, my prediction is that the blue line will overtake the orange line.

But does that happen all by itself? No. What is happening here, is that the high-SP delegations "pull in" the smaller SP delegations. It's the orcas and the whales with their Power Delegations inviting the smaller SP delegators to join in. @steem-ua currently needs orca & whale support, in order to grow at a sustainable pace.

Precisely because of our "business model", requiring SP delegations to participate in the Algorithmic Curation Program, the more SP delegators @steem-ua has, the more contrubutions (Posts) it curates & votes on. That causes the average vote to decrease in value, because as @cryptoctopus has put it yesterday: "350k SP is peanuts". And he is correct. We need way more SP to algorithmically curate the entire blockchain with... We need whale support. Now.

Why @steem-ua works for everybody

Let's review different types of accounts that @steem-ua serves well:

• New Plankton accounts: yesterday, after talking to @hanshotfirst, @helpie a few @curie curators, we improved the organization of the @steem-ua Movement at the steem-ua Discord Server. With the new role of "UA Scout", human curators can spot & identify plankton accounts, upvote their content, and therewith "tick" the @steem-ua Algorithmic Bot to curate & upvote those Plankton account's content. New Planktons delegating to @steem-ua is not needed at that point. Also, right after upvoting them, @steem-ua also adds a SmartComment right after voting, the Planktons are invited into the steem-ua Discord Server where the "UA Guides" will interact with them, introduce them to how Steem works, connect them with other Steemians, and help them find their way. The UA Guides more or less "coach" the plankton to make sure they learn & grow and stay. The upvote of @steem-ua means a lot to them, if you are in doubt if my claim is correct then read this: https://steemit.com/@steem-ua/recent-replies : Hopium!

Result: increased user retention, positivity all-around

• Established Plankton & Minnows: after "getting a taste of the Hopium", everybody wants more. What is happening already, is that the small-SP delegators are powering up! Previously, they would power down as fast as they could, and convert to fiat. Now they are investing in themselves, to increase from 1 @steem-ua upvote per week, to 2, to 4, to 7.

@steem-ua is NOT a bid bot, not at all! The height of the upvote is completely independent to the amount delegated.

The planktons & minnows get their ROI via the Algorithmic Curation Program, using UA data and upvoting - again - independently to the amount that was delegated, via the formula:

UA_Vote = x * UA_Account + y * UA_Post + z * UA_Comment

... which, in essence, means:

• the higher am account's UA score, and
• the better the votes on a post, computed by all post voters' UA scores, and
• the more interaction & user engagement on that post via the comments
  ... the more powerful the @steem-ua upvote.

^^^ This means that new, not yet much-followed, relatively unknown accounts publishing magnificent content still get a good upvote by @steem-ua ! And in each curation / voting round, all UA_Vote scores are weighed proportionally to eachother, to determine the voting percentage with.

Only the frequency of upvotes increases via this schedule:

SP Delegation	Upvote Frequency
25 SP	max. 1 @steem-ua upvote per week
50 SP	max. 2 @steem-ua upvotes per week
100 SP	max. 4 @steem-ua upvotes per week
250 SP	max. 7 @steem-ua upvotes per week

What is happening here, is that @steem-ua incentives investing in the Steem Ecosystem == investing in yourself.
Remember what I wrote way up in this post?

And what is the best way, the most profitable way, to earn big with Steem? Only 2 variables both need to be maximized:
-a- to individually acquire as much STEEM as you can, and
-b- to collectively make the price per STEEM, ergo the Steem Market Cap, go Sky-High

@steem-ua is aligning -a- and -b-. We are aligning individual interests (owning as much Steem as possible) with collective interests (increase demand for SP, decrease supply of liquid STEEM).

Shout-out to the orcas & whales: please delegate enough to @steem-ua to make sure that its voting strength ensures that 10 * 7 * 250 SP self-voting at 100% remains to be worth far less than 7 small @steem-ua upvotes per week! If we do that, I predict 60,000 accounts to power-up to at least 250 SP and delegate!

Result: increased demand for SP, decreased supply of liquid STEEM

• Dolphins & Orcas & Whales: we have also available the "high-SP Stake-Based Sponsor Rewards".
  Currently, in order to enter high-SP Stake-Based Sponsor Rewards Program, a delegation of at least 5,000 SP is needed. (I am considering lowering that threshold to 2,500 SP, we ran a poll and all were in favor of doing so).

Where the plankton & minnows get their ROI via, mostly, blogging and getting their posts upvoted, Dolphins & Orcas & Whales can enter the high-SP Sponsor Rewards Program. we created - as announced - a new account @steem-ua.pay, posting weekly reports as well as auto-generated comments on behalf of the high-SP Sponsors (the ones at least not having declined any rewards). Due to high amount of @steem-ua SP Delegators, the (current) limitations of the Steem Blockchain where it is quite impossible to set hundreds of beneficiaries and provide liquid rewards, the lack of liquidity in the @steem-ua account being unable to pay liquid Sponsor Incentives (after all we require SP Delegations instead of liquid payments as the bidbots do), we needed to create this system to reward our sponsors with.

@utopian.stats has been doing so for months (currently paused / stopped), to reward their Community Managers and Moderators with. It's merely a payment mechanism, as explained.

Now, the interesting part is that since we see the percentage of the Cumuative smaller-SP Deletions grow over time, using their proportion of @steem-ua's Voting Strength as well, we are able to provide very decent high-SP Sponsor ROI, as you can see for yourself at the first Sponsor Pay-Out, here: https://steemit.com/steem-ua-pay/@steem-ua.pay/steem-ua-high-sp-weekly-sponsor-rewards-program----2018-09-05

Result: Dolphins & Orcas & Whales now have the opportunity to both invest in the Steem platform and themselves, earn a pretty decent weekly ROI on delegations while at the same time collectively both support STEEM price & market cap, plus incentivize plankton & minnows doing their best to grow, earn, connect with & befriend others, create a fun environment for all and THEY WILL STAY.

CONCLUDING: DOLPHINS, ORCAS, WHALES & STEEMIT INC

--- PLEASE PARTICIPATE IN @STEEM-UA -----
Let's just try this, and at the very moment you think @steem-ua is not any good, screwing things up, just undelegate and revoke your "say"!

LET'S UNITE! STEEM ON!
@scipio

@steem-ua: Use Your Influence!

Visit the steem-ua.com website - View your UA score

@steem-ua Algorithmic Curation & Upvote Program:

SP Delegation	Sponsor Benefits & Upvote Frequency
25 SP	max. 1 @steem-ua upvote per week
50 SP	max. 2 @steem-ua upvotes per week
100 SP	max. 4 @steem-ua upvotes per week
250 SP	max. 7 @steem-ua upvotes per week
>= 5,000 SP	Stake-Based Sponsor Rewards + max. 7 @steem-ua upvotes per week

PS1: delegation requirements could be subject to change, which will then be posted about that prior to changes being applied.
PS2: @steem-ua reserves the right to reject upvoting accounts demonstrating abusive behavior.

Quick Delegation Links:
25 SP | 50 SP | 100 SP | 250 SP |
500 SP | 1,000 SP | 2,500 SP |
5,000 SP |
10,000 SP | 25,000 SP |
50,000 SP |
100,000 SP | 250,000 SP |
500,000 SP |
1,000,000 SP

Join the @steem-ua Discord: