After reading through all the comments, I still do not understand the purpose of it, or the use of followers, or the use of following, as being part of the metric. I have a list of 30+ Authors that I do not follow, but when I want to find a "story" to read I can go down my list and see what they have that I might be interested in reading. I do not read stories everyday, and have other interest also. But with this new system, if it becomes a tool of vote discrimination or content discrimination, am I going to need to increase my number of following to include the top 100 on the UA list, we all put a lot of garbage out and I do not need more in my feed than what I already have.
A close look at the top 100, and I am not sure I want a high number.
Technically, you won't want to consider increasing the number of things that you follow to increase the top 100 on that list, because they would be receiving a small portion of whatever it is that you generate that's interesting to the system that provides a mechanical advantage, and unless they in turn decided to follow you, the directed acyclic graph of interactions is definitely going to favor them, as part of that energy passes on to those that you follow. You get your power from those who follow you. Ideally, you want more people following you than you follow in order to have enough energy to make a difference.
What you need to do is to encourage those people who are in the top 100 of the you a list to follow you, because that would maximize the UA that you collected for a higher rank.
The cynical mind suggests that UA is really trying to determine a fairly complex thing about a fairly complex set of metrics:
"Whose ass do I need to kiss around here?"
Consider the list of the top 100 holders of UA at the moment. They are known witnesses, people with vast amounts of SP, people who are known to be willing to extend that SP in the pursuit of an ongoing project, and who have a habit of delegating SP on and off.
It's an ass kissing sensor.
It uses a new metric to define a new set of whales (look at the new whales, same as the old whales) to whom you must appease in order to get ahead in things. And that's all it does.
We have one more, slightly different, set of people whom it would be wise to kiss the ass of. Oh boy! Just what I always wanted!