Testing The New User Authority @Steem-UA With A 250 Steem Power Delegation

In my recent post 1UP Community Levels, User Authority & The Ten Starting Communities I introduced the new Steem Authority (Hive account@steem-ua) and that we will integrate it into 1UP via their official API. Today I delegated 250 Steem Power to them to test their Algorithmic Curation Program.

User Authority Helps To Build Trust

In order to give users access to certain Steem applications like 1UP a trust system must be established to avoid the massive onslaught of abuse as money is involved. The current reputation system of Steem is relatively easy to manipulate by throwing votes from upvote bots at them which increases their reputation to 40 or even 50 with the right amount of money. Hive account@steem-ua is using a complex algorithm based on who follows who plus various other factors.

With that system you can measure the attractiveness to others for each user. It allows to keep bots and altaccounts mostly out as it makes it very difficult to get a decent User Authority score for them. Each application that uses the API from Hive account@steem-ua can set the entrance level to their ecosystem as high as they like to find the right balance for their needs.

On the upside we get a pool of trustworthy members in terms of them being a unique person through hivemind approval. In my opinion that is much better than any forced, centralized Oracle system which could be abused. But that also can be a bottleneck for user adoption if the requirements are to high.

Find Out Your Own UA

On the official UA homepage you can find your own UA score by connecting the page with the secure SteemConnect service. You can also find a list with the top 100 accounts on that page where witnesses, community leaders, whales and platform accounts jump at your attention. This makes sense as many people will follow such accounts.

My current UA score is 5.668 with a UA rank of 429. I am humbled to see that the community deems my content as so influential to make it possible for me to get such a high score. Thank you for that!

The Algorithmic Curation Program With @Steem-UA

The Hive account@steem-ua account is the first usecase for the new User Authority. Everyone who delegates Steem Power to the account will get a certain amount of upvotes per week on their posts based on their UA.

You can find the details of the SP delegation below:

SP Delegation	Sponsor Benefits & Upvote Frequency
25 SP	max. 1 Hive account@steem-ua upvote per week
50 SP	max. 2 Hive account@steem-ua upvotes per week
100 SP	max. 4 Hive account@steem-ua upvotes per week
250 SP	max. 7 Hive account@steem-ua upvotes per week
>= 5,000 SP	Stake-Based Sponsor Rewards + max. 7 Hive account@steem-ua upvotes per week

Unlike services like Hive account@qurator that promise a fixed upvote strength for delegators, Hive account@steem-ua has a very different approach by basing the upvote strength on the UA score of the user. I am curious how this will play out in reality after delegating 250 Steem Power to the project.

Conclusion

Here we have another case for Steem users making the ecosystem better themselves. Whether User Authority will bring the expected results only time can tell. But the massive interest in the service in such a short time proofs that there is demand for alternatives to the current system.

Personally, I have high hopes for that approach to make it possible for my own 1UP project to avoid heavy abuse right from the start and find the balance to allow as many people as possible to participate.