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RE: Could @steem-ua + @freezepeach form the perfect combo?

in #steem-ua6 years ago

There are two things that I want to bring up: (1) other stuff with the current STEEM reputation system, and (2) my own personal objections to the UA reputation system.


Another problem with the current reputation system is that it reflects votes coming from everywhere within the STEEM blockchain, so that number we see next to our usernames on Steemit will not accurately reflect our true reputation within a specific site or dApp, unless we are only using one such site/dApp. A reputation that is built entirely upon either only posting memes on dMania or only answering questions on Musing.io isn't exactly going to be useful in assessing a user's blogging reputation on Steemit. The more sites/dApps someone uses, the more difficult it becomes to assess.

Take a simpler case like my own: my current STEEM reputation level is 55 (and closing in on 56). But unless I publicly state it, most people wouldn't know that I basically have the equivalent of a 53 from over a year of blogging on Steemit, and another 53 from less than a month on musing.io. The 53 from Steemit isn't fully legit either because I did briefly experiment with bidbots and got a couple of significant-sized upvotes out of them, plus I'm enrolled in a couple of "long-term outlook" upvoting programs. So the reality is that I'm better at answering questions than I am at blogging, but no one would be able to figure that out by just dropping onto my profile page on Steemit. Some other site/dApp developers recognized this potential issue and wisely chose not to include STEEM reputation in users' profile pages on their sites for this very reason.


Now as for the UA reputation system, I first need to go back and expand on a comment I made in one of your previous posts about the price of STEEM going low -- if you'll recall, I mentioned a psychopath whale without naming them for obvious reasons. There are actually 5 users who I refer to as the "Psycho 5", because they have certainly been controversial users on Steemit, and in my opinion (after having read through a sampling of their content, as well as articles from other users reflecting on the "pros" and "cons" of each of those psychos), have done way more harm than good for STEEM's potential. 2 of the Psycho 5 are the pair that we associate with "that" cryptoanalyst, and are not in the UA top 100. The other 3 are all witnesses currently ranked in the 30s-50s (though one is no longer an active witness) and show up in the UA top 100 (all with a UA score over 7). That by itself tells me that I should not trust the UA system.

But the other factor is that witness stake seems to be the "root" of all trust, which I find problematic. In an ecosystem as large as the STEEM blockchain, it is possible to be highly respected and reputed as a content creator but be completely unknown to any witnesses (especially in the case of building one's entire reputation on a non-blogging site/dApp, e.g. Musing.io). That means such a person would be subject to the luck of how well they fare in the proverbial game of "6 Degrees of Witnesses" to determine how high their UA score could get. And to allow 3 of the Psycho 5 to have such significant influence on top of that... that sounds to me like trying to fix a broken system (STEEM reputation) by using a different broken system (UA score). I think the latter broken system has to be fixed first before we can even think about bringing in freezepeach to enhance the fix.


I think your hardfork suggestions are a better solution that steem-ua, but I doubt it would be enough. But short of a system in which the blockchain can forcibly strip bad actors of their stakes (which I think has 0% chance of actually happening), I'm not sure what other measures could have a significant impact.

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