a @steem-ua upvote is completely independent from the amount being delegated.
The amount of the delegation buys the frequency of the steem-ua vote. If that's not counting as buying upvotes then I don't know what it is.
UA is *not a "black box", our algo is open source, our code is open source, we just haven't published the repos yet ...
Well, as soon as the code is out and thus accessible for review and independent testing I'll be happy to not label the UA metric a black-box anymore.
Well no! :-)
The more SP delegators there are, the more contributions we'll curate algorithmically, and the higher the UA_Vote threshold will be to get an upvote at all.
I clearly said max. 1/2/3/7 upvotes per week, not guaranteed "bids" or anything