Three days ago, I wrote a post about reputation when the Steemit.com UI was acting up and dropped everyone down to newbie levels. The post was about the broken metric and the like and someone mentioned 
My own rank has hovered around the 220 mark for many months now and my posts that get voted on are generally ranked in single or low double digits for the round. This is supposedly the way it is meant to work as I have a pretty high rank and I get a fair bit of engagement on my posts and Steem-UA is meant to offer a more objective view. Witnesses (I am not one) get a higher ranking because they should be more trusted for example.
I mentioned the two devs in the comment (
That is a pretty big drop. So I looked at the comment before:
Boom!! :D
What have I done wrong?!?!?!?! :D
I don't put a lot of stock in reputation systems overall as reputation is far too subjective to be restricted to an algorithm that only looks at a narrow part of the data, but that is still a pretty interesting drop considering the timing.
For reference, this is the third last:
Of course, this could be a glitch in the algorithm, a reformulation of the algorithm or, someone didn't take too kindly to being mentioned - I dunno but this is the problem with a reputation system that is largely blind. Yes, the problem is that if it is too open people will maybe game it but, if it is not, it could be used nefariously - even if unwittingly. It could also be that suddenly a host of users above me suddenly did something awesome that raised their Steem-UA score - Dunno.
The Steem-UA project started about 9 months ago if I remember and I supported it heavily as I was hoping it would be able to distribute small amounts of Steem with a wide coverage and while it got traction early, it was unable to keep it long-term as delegation didn't return much of anything to the delegators and, the devs lost a bit of interest in the project itself as likely, there are many more interesting things going on for them.
What I have noticed however is that the project itself seems to be doing pretty well in terms of curation and it is in a powerdown mode sending Steem out to the developers.
It is good that developers get paid for their work, but I am not sure if this was quite the intention of the system or at least, what the community delegators thought it was going to be - Especially since it was pitched to me to get Steem powered up and take liquidity off the markets.
This is
I think that constitutes putting liquidity onto the markets, not taking it off. 
For me, while it is nice to get a little vote, I am going to pull the rest of my delegation (which has dropped from 2500 down to 250) as I don't feel there is the activity or value being added to the community through it at the moment. It feels like it is a forgotten project that keeps ticking over while at least one of the creators is not even on Steem anymore. It is okay to leave Steem but it seems a little bit like milking the pool consistently.
This is one of the great things about investing delegation into projects though as while there is an opportunity cost loss, I haven't lost anything and while I believed in the project, was happy to support it. That has changed so I can end my delegation and move it to somewhere else where I think it might be more beneficial. Maybe delegate to a minnow or something. There are a lot of small accounts delegating to steem-UA and I recommend they keep their delegation there while it supports them enough in their eyes but at the same time - does it support the ecosystem enough? I don't know. I was surprised to see so much Steem being taken out of it though and it could be that they each put the Steem into it to start the project so are getting their investment out and to exchanges,
... but it was still a surprise.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]
I have no idea about how to data dive into these kids of things and there is plenty of room for misreading and I might be completely mistaken so - take all this with a grain of salt and make your own investigations and judgments.