For a good amount of time, user authority (or "reputation") in Steemit was more or less a vanity metric. Meaning that it wouldn't impact in any way your ability to interact with the blockchain, let aside your revenue here.

From a product design perspective, I always saw it more like a placeholder, a nice to have thing, that will be later on picked up and made into something useful.

Apparently, the dev team inside Steemit didn't pick it up, but somebody else did. On a side note, this seems to be the case with many Steemit features, where community members come up with better (or more functional) solutions, and "fill in the gap". Don't want to brag, but I would include steem.supply in this list too, as a tool which tries to make a better job at visualizing your upcoming rewards than the normal Steemit.com interface does.

But back to our Steemit authority. Like I said, two users, Hive account@scipio and Hive account@holger80, created a new algorithm, more complex and somehow more accurate (that depends on each user expectations from such a metric, so it will never be "perfectly accurate").

Here's how the new algorithm for UA (or User Authority) looks like, according to the makers launch post:

All UA scores are computed daily by first updating the Follower Matrix; we do that by continuously tracking every "follow operation" (= an account following or unfollowing another account) using Hive account@holger80's own Beem API for the Steem blockchain. With every new block produced (every 3 seconds), so is the UA Follower Matrix. And all those "follow operations" (~ 150 million currently) for all accounts on the Steem blockchain form a gigantic data cluster of ~ 1.2 trillion EigenValues. We then look at Trusted Accounts to initiate our sub-algorithm "WitnessRank" with: each day, we check all witnesses for being -a- active and -b- up to date, and -c- their Witness Stake; we use that Witness Stake to propagate "Trust" from each witness to the accounts it follows, and who they follow, and who they follow, etc. etc. etc. And after heavy-heavy HEAVY number crunching, as a result, the UA score for each account comes out.

So it's a quite a complex beast but, at least in my opinion, far more useful than what we just had so far.

But wait, there's even more good news.

First, you can see how you do in terms of UA by visiting this website: https://steem-ua.com. There is a top 100 already visible (spoiler alert: I'm on the 68th position, thanks to all of you that made this possible), but if you're not there, you can simply log in with Steemconnect and see your own rank and score.

And second, there's an API for this service, meaning devs can plug in and pull the UA ranks and score to be used in their own Dapps.

All in all, a very useful and interesting metric added to the Steem ecosystem.

Good job, guys!

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me Hive account@dragosroua.

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Wanna know when you're getting paid?

	I know the feeling. That's why I created steem.supply, an easy to use and accurate tool for calculating your Steemit rewards

It's free to use, but if you think this is a useful addition, I'd appreciate your witness vote.

Thank you!

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