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"
| Me | You | |
|---|---|---|
| Rep | 58 | 59 |
| Followers | 1408 | 539 |
| Following | 133 | 68 |
| SP | 720 | 680 |
| Age | Aug-17 | Nov-17 |
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.
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!
Those are 2 different problems , recommendation engine vs curation engine.
It's aged artisanally , not stale...
Those aren't even remotely two different problems, they represent the two things being done to try and solve the singular problem of recommendation and curation, which are the same thing. Pointedly, UA does not purport to be a "recommendation engine" or "curation engine" and really only supports its own voting engine which is cranked by effectively its own SP and issues out up votes to people who have registered with it and offered it enough material.
That will earn you some votes with the percentage that a a complex algorithm (you weren't expecting that were you?) decides you can have based on the amount of SP that you have given over into their care. You know, just buying votes in a slightly different way.
A recommendation engine or curation engine would care about the things that I am, personally, interested in and want to look at all the data that's coming in, see if it fits, and if so give it to me. That's not what we're getting.
If nothing else, this new UA algorithm appears to focus entirely on trying to drag systems which were never meant to do what they're doing into doing – this.
Sorry, but you're talking out of your ass here: the upvote from @steem-ua is completely independent of the amount of SP delegated to @steem-ua. Provided @steem-ua has enough SP, I'd be perfectly fine with upvoting some post with $100.- when the content is magnificent, even when the author only delegates 25 SP.
And also:
UA != @steem-uaUA is a metric, @steem-ua an Algorithmic Curation Program using that metric. @steem-ua does not restrict contributions on a topical level, all types of content are eligible for its algorithmic curation and an upvote, but since we can simply not upvote all content on the Steem blockchain, we'd need ~ 100 million SP to do that (maybe some day though! dreams, dreams...), we need another type of filter: delegating SP to @steem-ua, even 25 SP will do, is that filter.
On a personal note: having an alternative opinion is fine with me, spreading around false rumors and even blatant lies is not. If you have any questions regarding UA, you know perfectly well where to contact me for answers on Discord for example, we've been talking for months there.
Sorry , I don't follow.
Recommendation is based on interests and Curation is generic authority based reward allocation.
Yes, you can say recommendation can take an input from curation , that is , recommend something with high authority and matching interest.
To me , they seem different yet connected problems.