Nice work on actually implementing this @scipio!
I am still not convinced that followers are a good metric and I will not change my follow habits for ua.
I am intrigued when selling high ua followers will be a thing ;)
If UA proves to be a good metric, I will see to add it to minnowbooster and steemvoter. Having the api closed is sad but understandable. I suggest you look into caching ua scores in a database and have a web service just look them up. Once you have the data, lookups are dirt cheap.
I'd assume you can tweak the algorithm just like Google did and is doing constantly so that exploitations vanish.
Also can't imagine so many high UA users can be corrupted that "buying UA follow" would be worthy.
Tweaking until which endpoint? How would the UA derived content ranking need to look like before it's considered a good metric? As soon as the majority of the high UA-accounts are happy with trending? No cynicism here, I really would wish to get an answer to that.
Personally, I already consider it much better than, like, anything else in the ecosystem (SP, reputation, etc).
But nothing's perfect, even Google and Youtube witnessed shortcuts and exploitations at one point.
For them, user satisfaction with the accuracy of results was the major driving factor, and I'd imagine this is what Steem needs, too.
That when I go to /r/cryptocurrency, or in fact, any blockchain-related community, I don't have to hear people shitting on Steem and how trashy its content is.
That when I go to Trending, I don't have to scrool through 42 pages of marketing garbage or cliché garbage before finding ONE interesting post.
I don't give a fuck about the satisfaction of high-UA accounts. I just want quality improvement and less circlejerk.
Considering how many of the top 100 UA scorers are bidbot owners and/or delegators, I would think they are already 'happy' with Trending.
Bidbot owners, not the bots themselves. UA can contribute to break bot dominance.
We will see how it plays out. I hope that the ua score becomes a good metric over time.