Keeping It Simple: No More 1UP User Levels

With the upcoming 1UP SMT system we will reward users for using the unique 1UP voting mechanism. In my first draft for the user level system I came up with a complicated way of making the user engagement count in the long run via level up and hand out more daily 1UPs. In order to keep the platform as intuitive as possible I have decided to skip that idea.

As explained in detail in my post from yesterday we will have community levels in order to define the influence of certain topics. That mechanism is helpful to let the system grow over time and enable more communities gradually.

To keep users engaged we can dedicate a certain amount of daily available voting power from the 1UP account and distribute it to the users. In order to give the highest value to the most valuable players we can use a relatively simple quality score which counts how many 1UPs a post gets and how early the user has given theirs. Discovering a new quality post is crucial and must be rewarded higher than an upvote on a winning post in the last second.

Every user would get a quality score for each of their upvotes. The more communities they upvote the more quality score they can accumulate on a day. A winning post could get a multiplier for the quality score but posts that don't win are also creating quality scores for their upvoters. I think to set the multiplier to 3 for winning posts against none for all others. That makes hunting winning posts interesting but not to much to create all sorts of voting strategies. Finally everyone has a number and the upvote value could be calculated out of that score.

I haven't made the final decision whether all upvoters should get at least a tiny upvote according to their quality score or if only the top X upvoters receive one. I assume it would be less problematic for the platform to ignore the long tail of users in order to safe ressources or otherwise spend a lot of time to upvote auto-generated comments for 1UP every day. It would also be less of a burden for the Steem blockchain.

Either way, I want 1UP users to concentrate on curating and finding the coolest content. Confusing people with complicated gamifications could be counter beneficial so I keeping it simple was something I hopefully came closer to by getting rid of user levels. I hope this system is still engaging enough for users to participate plentiful in the 1UP voting.