The main thing I see happening if this would become a thing is that voting circles would simply shift into the group of high-staked, high- UA authors. And "pay for a follow" would become an additional income model for this group.
The difference is, however, that due to its complexity it's far more difficult to 'game' the UA mechanism than the current voting system. It's not easy to estimate the effect of a specific account to follow you. It depended on number and 'quality' of the followers of this new follower. Also the more people you followed yourself the lower your impact on the UA of every person you follow would be.
Furthermore, if an account already had a high UA (in case the UA system had been implemented already) he should think twice before selling his followership by risking his precious high UA (following the 'wrong' people could damage it). In addition also the one who paid for followership couldn't control if his 'business partner' would unfollow him again later ...
I don't claim such a system couldn't be gamed, but for sure it would be more difficult.
Directly under the mentioned article of @cryptoctopus is a very interesting discussion about possible gaming of UA mechanisms.
Of course it would be very interesting in case @scipio or @holger80 replied to your comment as well.
Also, think about those stake-holders, who don't want to blog but focus entirely on curation. Most likely they will never gain a high UA which will make their vote significantly less worth then that of those who curate and blog. This can't be desirable, can it?
They didn't need not to blog to get a follower base. They could also write interesting comments, be highly regarded witnesses or developers. If they only owned a big stake (for example from the golden mining era) but apart from that did just nothing (or were writing ultra short nonsense posts just to upvote them themselves, as often seen nowadays) - then I actually think it was justified to subtract something of their vote weight compared to users with lower stake but more community related activity.
The formula given in my article is just one possibility. Of course one could multiply the term
UA(voter) / UA(average)
with a number smaller than 1 for example.
Why should a curator be forced to engage beyond his activity as a curator? To me curation by individual accounts is one of the most important activities here. Whoever is taking this up should get rewards in sole dependency of his/her stake AND his/her capability of spotting undervalued content early. Requiring a curator to additionally drop interesting comments and this in high frequency is an unreasonable demand. And being a witness or developer is just unrealistic for most of us.
Why should a great curator have less good followers than a great article composer?
I would follow you as good curator and thus hopefully increase your UA. :)
If you ask me it shouldn't but that's simply how it is. Currently it doesn't matter but something like the proposed UA would discriminate those non-blogging curators massively.
I think it's just speculation that curators would face a hard time in the new environment.
They are precious upvoters ... and the higher their UA the more precious their numerous upvotes. So one could also come to the conclusion to benefit oneself when increasing the 'UA' (and thus the vote value) of successful curators by simply following them.
I might be missing the complexity but as I understood it the UA is simply the number of followers, weighted by their respective UA. To game this seems rather straightforward to me. The vector is the monetization of the follow-button.
As I see it, this approach would not eliminate the pay-for-upvote economy yet rather put a pay-for-follow on top of it.
Still, whoever believes that he found a better logic for reward distribution in the context of a blogging platform should aim for an SMT. I think this is really what SMTs are meant for.
In addition the UA of the followers is also divided by the number of people they are following ...
I already tried to explain why I think that's not so easy. If for example you buy my following, how can you be sure that I won't unfollow you later again?
I would implement some changes (for example a reward curve which start as n^2 and ends linear) without any hesitation in the current (in my opinion very easily exploitable) system.
There is really no difference to what currently happens with delegations.
Account A pays fees to account B as long as it follows /delegates.
Account A stops paying fees to account B as soon as it unfollows / undelegates
Why should monetizing an account's UA be less accepted than leasing out it's stake? I doubt that this would come at the risk of a decrease in UA. The monetization of followings is quite an established business model out there in the web.
I think one difference is that you normally don't delegate (get delegations from) a lot of accounts. However, to get a high UA you need a lot of followers. It causes way more work to keep an overview about all your followers than about a few delegators or delegatees. Also if you terminate a delegation you have to wait five days (after HF 20) before you can use your STEEM Power again, unfollowing happens immediately without any negative effects.
Concerning the second point you were really fast: I deleted this part of my answer already, because I am not sure myself if this point is a valid one ...
It won't be more work as it currently is to lease out stake to a single entity. Quickly, services would come up to which high-UA accounts can grant their posting authority to. The service will then manage the monetization of followings and send a cut to the high-UA account (or an alt of it).
Anyway ... :)
Ich würde mich - unabhängig von deinen berechtigten Fragen bzw. Einwänden - sehr freuen, wenn die Macher des Projekts, @scipio und @holger80, (als die eigentlichen Experten) bald mal ein wenig an der Diskussion teilnähmen und einige der zahllosen Kommentare beantworteten ...
Ich habe den Artikel nachts geschrieben, also kaum geschlafen, und obwohl schon heute die Bundesliga beginnt, muss ich noch am Feinschliff meines Wett-Programms arbeiten. Ich werd' mich also nun vorerst mal aus dem Staube machen (müssen). :)
Danke Dir für die gute Diskussion! Deine guten Intensionen stehen für mich gänzlich ausser Frage. Ich persönlich bin halt der Meinung, dass das stake-weighted Prinzip das beste, einfachste und transparenteste System ist das wir haben. Aber Alternativen dürfen und sollen gerne als SMT erprobt werden.
Grüsse!
Thank you very much for this article and your support @jaki01!
Here is a table of accounts with the highest number of followers:
Having a huge number of followers does not guarantee for a high UA value.
The UA of an account divided by the number of accounts, it is following, is passed to its following accounts.
So follow me and I follow you does not work, as an account gives linearly less UA to its following accounts when he follows more and more accounts.
We are working on countermeasures to detect and neutralize follow rings. When A follow B and B follow A, this can be easily detected and such "follow ring"-follows will be removed for UA calculation. This is done without any manual involvement and when A and B starts following other accounts, their UA blockage will be removed.
I'm also working on an inactivity factor (no vote or post/comment within 30 days) that will move parts of outgoing UA of inactive accounts to null.