KE Ratio: A Personal Perspective
The first time I came up with KE Ratio was in August of 2024. It has come a long way. Recently PeakD front-end kindly integrated with every hive users based on community request. I am deeply thankful and honored that community is finding the metric valuable. When I wrote the first post, I had no idea if anyone other than me will ever use it.
The goal of this post to do a personal reflection on how I am viewing this simple quantitative metric to understand the general behavior of a hive user. That was my original intent to design it and it remains the same. Again, as a recap:
KE = (Author Rewards + Curation Rewards)/Held HP
KE = 1.0, you hold exactly as you earn (approximately!)
KE > 1.0, you hold less than you earn
KE < 1.0, you hold more than you earn
Below are some of the key posts on KE, where you can see how I arrived at the current derivation of the ration from its original post linked at the first line.
@azircon/splinterlands-contest-posts-and-curation
@azircon/but-what-if-i-sold-hive-to-buy-sl-assets
Some of these posts had massive engagement in hive standards. That led to 
Author Rewards = 30804 hive
Curation Rewards = 235719 hive
Staked (held) HP = 1093527 hive
KE Ratio = (30804+235719)/1093527 = 0.24
This is objective fact. It can be found for any hive users. It is profound.
How do I use KE and Reputation
For those who don't know Hive uses a number called Reputation, which is what you see next to your name. However, it is a derived number just like KE. There are two reputations:
Raw Score
Derived Score
You can check your raw reputation score here: https://hiveblocks.com/@azircon
Please replace my name with yours. In my case:
Raw Score = Reputation 634,124,980,050,379
Derived Score = 77.22
If you ask me how did I get 634 trillion to 77! I have the answer! :)
Derived reputation score = ((log10(abs(reputation))-9)*9)+25
Reputation score is calculated using the mathematical function Log base 10. It is easy to raise your reputation at the beginning, but the higher your reputation, the harder it is to increase it. In fact, each time you want to increase your reputation of 1 point, it is ten times harder! Since it is a log function, it is exponentially difficult to raise it from 77 to 78, compared to say 67 to 68, by ten times ten, 100 orders of magnitude! :)
Accounts with a low reputation cannot harm the reputation of someone with a higher reputation. This was designed so that say a bot with negative intention and low reputation can't harm the reputation of a community member with higher reputation. Thankfully that still works. Notice, anything I publish, even a comment gets downvoted by 10 to 13 accounts in automation, but they can't hurt my reputation!
The original intent of reputation was:
It is an indicator that shows how “trusted or appreciated by the community” you are.
It is a tool that prevent user with low reputation to harm other users.
However, no tool or ratio (yes, that includes KE) is perfect. So you need a human mind to analyze it. Clearly there have been many examples where a high reputation user is an major extractor. I have many examples in that category, but here are some
Thankfully most of them are gone, but a rare few are still leeching! Here is one:
You do the judgement if you are inclined to support an user with high KE or not. Most of the active community members have decided a cut-off of KE = 1 or KE = 3 is okay. Just as any cut-off there will be borderline cases, and you must use your personal judgement on how you vote. KE = 3 means the user have taken our 3X the rewards they have earned from hive. I consider that acceptable. We want people to use their hive earning, but just don't use it as a cash cow!
On a personal concluding note:
- an old account with high Reputation and high KE is far worse than a new account with low Reputation and high KE
- a low rep and low KE means either a dormant account or a holding account
- curation projects have high KE as they distribute their earning to delegators
I have published numerous plots on the subject, please feel free to look at them. However, above cartoon is a simplistic but easy to understand (I hope) view of the relationship between Reputation and KE. I think together they tell you a lot of a person's behavior towards long term investment in hive. If you have a high KE and you like to lower it, just power up some hive. It is extremely easy to do especially if your HP is low.
Having a low KE is an investment in yourself and hive community!
"and that gentleman is governing dynamics"
