Developing a STEEM Contribution Score Table
One of the primary goals of Steem’s reward system is to produce the best discussions on the internet
I have read Steemits whitepaper over and over, each time picking up on more and more. The quote above was taken from page 16.
So Steemit want to produce the best discussion on the internet but the problem is, finding them. To produce the best discussions, we need the best articles and I have found some awesome authors writing top notched article and really engaged curators that are commenting and engaging with these authors and rewarding the posts with votes.
Why Do We Need a Contribution Score?
There are now over 1M registered accounts on Steemit. However many of these are bots, or services, or scammers and cheaters. @steemclearners and @cheetah work hard to fight spam, along with many others fighting to save the rewards pool. But some accounts are finding ways around it, or open multiple accounts. Then you also have the circle jerks whose reach is limited to a small few accounts.
With all of these problems finding truly engaged people on the STEEM blockchain can be difficult. There are tools to sort and filter content, but it can be rather difficult to find consistent steemains. Consistent as in they are working towards the goal of producing the ‘best discussions on the internet’, that spread their engagement far and wide, that post quality content and comments and have a long term vision of STEEM.
We have seen the successful results with @abh12345 league of engagement and my Indonesia league of engagement. However these leagues are limited to opt in and many people on Steemit never see the posts and so don’t get involved.
In addition to all of this, competition is coming to STEEMIT. Once such example is ONO. ONO are currently running an on boarding process, where 300K people will be invited to the app prior to open launch. They are currently boasting 285K users with 65% retention rate.
Retention is a massive problem on Steemit and there are many factors involved in the disappointing rates I previously published. So many accounts are bots, there are delays in registration, some people lose their keys and open new accounts and some people are just grabbing account names while they can.
With the ONO on boarding process, all of these problems are eliminated as they are using a multiple step identification process, and they also have their own contribution score.
There are other platforms to that are rewarding crypto currency to content creators and curators, such as Wildspark and Brave.
The STEEM Contribution Score Table
To help solve some of the problems identified above I am currently developing a STEEM Contribution Score Table as a resource for you to find the most active and engaging people on the STEEM Blockchain and I am looking for feedback to help refine the scores.
The table will be published on our new @steemcommunity witness website…schhhhh because you are getting a sneak preview. You can access and interact with the report here
http://steemcommunity.org/steemit-contribution-score-table/
Important Notes and Questions:
1. We have created an exclusion lists of accounts that are not included. These are a combination of @steemclearners blacklist, @buildawhale blacklist and an exclusion list created by myself. (This exclusion with full details will be published at a later stage)
2. The score calculation is a secret, if I tell you I will have to kill you. However it does include the following data points.
- Number of Posts made
- Number of direct Comments left of post
- Number of Replies to comments
- Number of replies to replies
- Character count on posts
- Character count on comments
- Number of Votes Made
- Number of Self Votes
- Number of Distinct authors voted for
- Total witness votes cast(current value)
- STEEM powered up
These data points aim to capture positive activity on the STEEM Blockchain that encourages true engagement, discussions and long term vision. Each data points is weighted with my secret formula. This list is subject to change.
Do you think there are data points missing that would result in a more fair contribution score?
3. The table shown today is based on yesterday’s data. Do you think it would be more accurate and fair to have this table calculated on the previous week’s data?
How the Contribution Score Table Might be Used
As the STEEM Contribution Score Table identifies the people that engage most with the STEEM blockchain in a positive way, this table can be used in a number of way and not limited too
- Find the most awesome people to follow
- Find the most awesome people to engage with
- Find people worthy of up votes, additional rewards or even gifts
- Find people to delegate to
So there you have it, the outline for this project. As I said, you are getting a sneak preview and this is not the final workings. You will need to keep an eye on @steemcommunity account for launch when I am happy with the calculations, however I do feel it will continue to evolve.
I’m so looking forward to your responses and feedback on this, please do leave a comment below.
Like what I am doing, vote @steemcommunity as your steemit witness. I am one half of this witness partnership with the awesome @abh12345
I thought that was a fantastic table, it ran smoothly on my computer, no glitches no upsets. I would like to see one more column, where you can see where you place in the table. I may have overlooked it but I did not see a ranking column. I also think a weekly recap would be better, as I have just read one post by an individual that he is limited time wise from work and life and only has 3 days where he steems M, W, F. so I think a weekly flow would be better. The easy link button to the persons page was great
I like the http://steemcommunity.org/ web page. Clean and uncluttered and easy to see. I think you and Asher are doing a bang up job as witnesses.
hay @bashadow and thank you for such wonderful feedback. Yep its missing a ranking column. Its on my list to add for sure. it is a must have. I am also hoping to add a user search
Here here. I guess that feature would be mandatory to develop and the first item in your TODO list.
Splendid job and initiative so far by the way.
Thanks you sir
This looks great! I hope my ideas have contributed to it a little.
~~From just a cursory browsing it looks slightly too heavy on comments vs posts. ~~ Edit: From a little more detailed looking, it's more the weighting of votes that I think is a bit off.
And I would definitely expand the range to be a full 7 day payment period since that is the window that steem operates on.
The next trick will be to turn it into a status badge that people can use/display that will encourage others to improve their steem game.
"The next trick will be to turn it into a status badge that people can use/display" Cool idea :-)
Yep I think the consensus is 1 day is too short
Uhm, after the recent beating scrolling throughout the whole list looking for my name. I don't think 1 day is too short. Unless, unless you plan to make also some sort of friendly internal search engine to explore the entire table easier. :)
This is great. It helps when my name is towards the top of the list. :)
It seems like there's plenty of user input here. I really don't have any, other than to say whatever you feel is the best way to score user Steemit contribution is fine with me. I'm thankful that you will only be looking at what's on blockchain since, as you say, it would be impossible to score everything else.
Some have been asking for a month worth's of data, others for a week. I agree that there probably should be more than a day's worth of data, but I'm not sure how much more of an indication of contribution a month's worth of data is going to be over say a week, unless someone goes crazy at the end of the month or something.
I do have a question, though. In this screenshot of the data, it shows that I had 11 comments and 47 votes yesterday. Is this supposed to be for a 24 hour period? Also, are the number of comments just for a post, since the replies to comments (2) and replies to replies (22) are listed separately?
In other words, this is showing I had a total of 33 comments, replies to comments and replies to replies, right? I happen to keep track of all comments and upvotes I make on a daily basis for the engagement league. I actually had 47 comments all told and 65 upvotes, so that's the reason for asking about the time period.
This is an awesome initiative. So many active and engaged steemians that go for the most part unnoticed or undervalued. I think what you have is a great starting point to have.
This would be really hard to do, but would be interesting to see a creation vs reward score. For instance if someone is making great posts consistently, but getting very little rewards to somehow bring those accounts to the front as well. Maybe tie this into account age as well, so for those that have been around months/years and barely make $1/post can get some more publicity.
I assume this would be extremely difficult to do / manage, but you asked for suggestions. Best of luck.
that would be a little complicated but is an interesting metric. Worth looking at for sure. Thank you for the suggestions
This is awesome @paulag. It has the right potential to help us see what type of accounts we are supporting and will make it easier for the good guys to stand out. I'm excited about this. Rep is a useless indication of a user's behaviour and this will solve that problem for me.
thank you @jusipassetti, I am glad you will find it of use
I am glad you brought that up, I could not agree more about reputation score, this will be the New Reputation score people will turn to.
thank you @bashadow, it would be awesome if people looked at it in that way :-)
This is great @paulag.
of course, my only argument is the self-voting metric as that has never been a great indicator considering people trade votes.
or, those with small votes who have powered down a lot (and may still be getting large support). So, they can't contribute much in value to others because they have extracted it all but can say 'I don't self-vote'. I find it somewhat disingenuous.
Of course, this is just one metric on the list but something I think should be thought about as I think that those who do get support from the community have a responsibility to give support back. Many can only offer moral support going on how few have powered up earnings.
I have not taken in power downs....and probably should. Maybe power down as % of earnings. I would agree, those that do get support should also shown support. Maybe I could factor in something on how many unique votes an authors gets as a % against how many unique authors they vote for. Hmmmm. Have to think about this!
Without knowing how one could add variables to make this more inclusive, I do find it odd I am not to be found on the list. While it is true that I do not post often (maybe once or twice a week) I do the following:
Rent delegation so I can interact on others posts much more. (I realize that you may frown on this however due to it not being allowed for your league of engagement).
I recently renewed my delegation for another 2 weeks, and according to SteemWorld this is a breakdown of my last 7 days.
3.49 % self, 177 upvotes, 62 accounts, last 7d
As the people I interact with could attest, our exchanges are usually several posts back and forth, and at times my comments/replies could be a post itself.
I find that one of the most common complaints from those who leave is the lack of engagement on their posts. I would think my renting delegation at a loss out of pocket so that I can not only upvote more, but search out what I believe to be quality content to engage is a much needed valuable contribution to the site.
Also not sure how this could be measured, but I have donated to a worthy project here on the platform to the tune of roughly 37 SBD in the last 6 or 7 weeks. If you look at my wallet, you would see that is maybe a 5th of my total value. When added to the delegation I rent to give votes to those I find writing quality content and for our conversations on their posts, my wallet could easily be worth another 50% of what it is currently at if I was just powering it all up and self voting.
I could continue listing actions that I do in order to improve others experience here on the platform, but I do not want to make this some kind of virtue signaling post. More wanting to express there are other ways to bring contribution to the platform than by the variables you are using that somehow doesn't even have one like myself on its radar.
Your name is on the table. I need to add a ranking column and also a user search.
Rented delegation is not a data point in this table and score. Neither is giving free delegation, which I do and could also decide not to and use it to self vote. What people chose to do with their finances is not part of this score. My wallet would be a lot heavier too if I took a different approach.
I also give away SBD as prizes, which supports different communities and have given sponsorship on contests ran by others. I do this with the believe I am helping the growth of steemit and the long term vision. However it is impossible (well for me anyway) to find a way to filter this information so it can be scored. I can only work with data that is available or easily accessible.
If we are thinking long term you might want even a longer period than a week. Maybe even a month if that not too much strain on the system. Contributions take a lot of effort and time. You could be very active for a week and then not so much the next. If someone is basing this data off who to delegate to I would imagne they want to have a longer term prospective of that person.
I think for now day scale can help find outliers for further review to see if it’s creating something that could be exploited for an easy and higher score. If I just spammed an auto reply back bot with “lol” how far would that get me? I don’t dare as other bots will notice and start calling me out for acting like a bot.
Otherwise, interesting system. Makes me wish I was having more discord conversions on steemit!
I am trying to move as much conversation from discord to steemit at the moment.
so far running this on a daily basis I I have been able to identify problem accounts rather quick, but as you mention, as a tool for others a month may be a lot better. Thank you for you comment and feedback
I don't know how much trouble all of this is, but if once established, if not to difficult, you could run a weekly one, a monthly, and then a 6 month trending one. Start like you have decide the workload involved and bandwidth for data collection, and if it looks feasible, a later expansion to the monthly added, and semi-annual added.
this is an interesting idea
Great idea, but I think the timeframe must be must longer (I would put the ideal value at 1 full month). One day is really a too short window to correctly asses the activity on a given account.
The problem is with the different apps that are now on Steem and also different behaviours that are not easily identifiable via an algorithm :
PS : How can I check one particular account on your tool ? I'm not familiar with MS BI...
at the moment you can not check on particular account with this tool, but I have it on the list :-)
"People are sometimes really active on various Discords and not that much here on Steemit, how to weigh that "external" activity ?"
I think discord is a problem for steemit. You see there are still no community features on steemit, but when hivemind launches then I hope all discussion will move from discord to steemit.
"Some witnesses aren't posting a lot, but are still big contributors to Steem"
This is not in line with the whitepaper statement above. Yes there are contributing and adding value, but this contribution score is for active ON the blockchain, not around it.
"Some people aren't posting that much, but still offer great content when they do (example of DeepDive articles who require a lot of work hence a minimal activity)"
the data points are weighted a different values. Posting is only one aspect of making steemit great.
"How to asses DLive because the chat during the video (and the numbers of viewers) are not put on the blockchain, so all DLivers will have approximatively the same profile (except for the rewards)"
Again, we are rewarding activity on the block, not off the block. those with steemit accounts can post comments to dive streems or videos that are on the block. I'm not to interested in those that have not yet signed up to steemit.
"How to assess developers ? (Who contribute via Utopian or not). A lot don't publish or comment much, but their contributions to Steem can be great."
again we are looking at activity on the block not around the block.
"How to evaluate strange behaviours (circle voters who still put out genuine posts on one account) ?"
I can not share this with you at the moment, but I have a way!
Thanks for your response.
If it's only based on the activity "on the block" it's great. I would love to have a tool to see the engagement score (as it seems similar to @abh12345 engagement league formula) of anyone I want to check.
The only problem I see is that if the tool is used by a lot of people to upvote or follow (and as a consequence being on the Leaderboard of that list has a certain return value), some will find a way to make it to the top by reverse engineering the formula and abusing it, but that's the price of glory.
Looking forward to be able to check the score of anyone with a Steemit account, I won't be able to help point out discrepancies in the formula before having access to that.
lol wont be sharing the formula :-)
Suprise me mom, first post after holiday, nice to see you again
and you @mrday. its all go. Like I was never away on holidays :-)