As we move toward Utopian v2, sustainability becomes a major focus. We have been testing the voting distribution for over an year. We've seen how it affects the rewards, and therefore the usage behavior, quantity, and quality of the contributions incentivised by Utopian.

It is clear that rewarding everyone is unsustainable, and the new bot, just released yesterday, takes this simple fact into account.

The Issues

No amount of delegation or stake can guarantee scalability of incentives with the aim of rewarding everyone. Delegation itself is not a sustainable component for an organisation wishing to grow and walk on its own two feet.
Incentivising each and every contribution does not produce positive competition. Every contributor expects a reward, whatever the quality provided.
Distributing the rewards to everyone lowers the value available to high quality contributions, making the rewards distribution potentially unfair or insignificant in the long run.
Focusing solely on Utopian as a source of rewards is against the basic principle of decentralization. The community has to buy into the system to grow their own incentives and those of others, independently from what Utopian can deliver.
Distributing the rewards across all categories, based on the numbers of contributions received per category, hurts the opportunities categories with lower participation have to grow, as categories with a bigger number of contributions consume the voting power that could have pushed those categories forward.
Collision between the rewards assigned to Utopian contributions and those followed by the trail, when the queue was growing too fast, often denying the trail the opportunity to catch valuable posts from the trailed communities.

The Solutions

The solutions the new voting bot provides aim to bring to the table a sustainable voting distribution. This distribution is biased toward quality and not quantity, as it should for our long term aims.

Precedence of the score

The Utopian Quality Score is assessed by our moderation teams, comprising over 50 professionals in their respective fields.

The score is what makes the Utopian engine work, reducing abuse and supporting professional quality assurance on the platform.

In the last 2 months, our dedication to moderation processes has been immense. We have collected dozens of materials and publications to create a new version of the guidelines, suitable to assure quality for organisations of all sizes, implementing industry standards across all the categories. A new Utopian quality questionnaire is also in the works. This new questionnaire will guarantee more granular and accurate reviews. Utopian v2 will bring multiple reviews per contribution, which will help our quality assurance become even more professional and fair for everyone.

The new voting bot will give precedence in the queue to contributions with the highest score and will consume the available voting power daily to reward those. We are very proud of this new approach. It incentives positive competition across all contributions, and turns the voting distribution into a sustainable system. In this new system the minimum quality to get an Utopian incentive is dictated by the community itself, and the value it can provide.

Reserved Pools

One of the main issues with our previous voting bot was that categories with higher contributions were consuming most of the incentives that would otherwise be available categories with lower participation. This is why the new voting bot reserves the same amount of voting power pool for each category and dynamically shares the pool between all the categories as demand requires.

If a category goes over the reserved pool assigned, it can share the reserved pool of categories that are not not using theirs up, until those categories grow enough to consume their reserved pools. This change assures each category can grow at its own rate.

The Trail

Utopian incentivises awesome initiatives with which we share vision and effort, such as @SteemStem, Hive account@steemmakers, MSP-Waves, and others. Quite often our voting bot hasn't been able to reward these contributions due to the internal queue growing too fast and denying the trailed communities our incentives. To fix that, the new voting bot reserves a pool for the trail as well. Just as it does for our own contributions, the queue will be biased toward the highest quality contributions.

Technical Details

If you wish to learn more about the technical details of the new bot and the story behind it, have a look at https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@amosbastian/developing-the-new-utopian-bot

To sum up

The new voting bot will make sure to prioritise the best of the best. As a ongoing contest, running 24 hours and 7 days a week, only the best contributions will access Utopian's incentives. We hope our community of contributors and project owners will challenge itself to provide the best quality. That is how you can win the Utopian's ongoing contest.

We also believe the new voting bot will sustain the growth of the communities we support outside Utopian, under the same framework Utopian has adopted.