This comment was posted to another post, by lextenebris 11 days ago:
"I feel like I owe it to you to actually have a brief discussion about UA and all its works, but it will be brief since I've already taken the drugs which will ease me into a dreamless sleep and because I've written so much on the subject over the last week or so in Replies as it is.
So, the summary: UA as a mechanism is a joke, Steem-UA is a pyramid scam effectively levering those delegations to be laundered by the process of vote dispersion, and that's it. UA is an ordinal ranking based on follow edges which, once all is said and done, has some filtering with negligible observable effect aimed at removing obvious bot groups and minimizing the impact from users typically referred to as "lower value." What it actually does is reduce the active user list to that of those who have engaged in a follow operation or a delegation to Steem-UA, which looks a lot like the ordinal rankings of accounts on the system via SP with some very lightweight changes based on relatively clear and observable traits.
That makes you a just a restatement of SP, for the most part, with some chunks cut out, and Steem-UA just the latest bid bot to come along.
Because the system is essentially seeded with witnesses being the most trusted entities in the system and trust moving out via the factors of who those witnesses follow – your ranking, your qualifying value in UA isn't dependent on anything you've written or have been involved in saying, necessarily. It is purely and simply taking your following/followed behaviors as proxies for the quality of your writing and going from there.
I've been dealing with @scipio for six months or so on the underlying architecture for UA, pointing out where programmatically it is unable to match the promises that were established as the base measure for the thing, and likewise being increasingly creeped out by this Steem-UA project which is being run as a black box, not coming forward with the very clear proof that claims have been made about UA achieving (easy mechanical recognition of who the spammers are on the steem blockchain as well as the vote selling bots), but instead rolling straight out with a vote buying bot of the most transparent sort.
And all the while, all of the focus is on follows – an account-level operation – and never a word about actual content and how it should matter, because it doesn't.
I have a longer, more detailed, more math-forward version of this discussion that I have been debating posting on Steemit, but the time may have come.
Regardless, congratulations on identifying a pyramid scheme before you got too far sucked in. This is a useful skill to have."
Nice contributions you got there. I read all through and was informed and motivated. @surfyogi