I'm not sure UA really is that isolated from discovery
OK, let me rephrase it differently: My article isn't a PhD thesis but a blog post I wrote in about an hour and updated afterwards. I'm sure there are many applications to UA that weren't covered iny my article. I meant to say just now, UA in my article was not intended per se for content discovery. I'm sure there are many more applications for it, and among them content discovery.
You might be surprised.
I might, we have to first implement a test environment and analyze the resulting data. This was just a first post.
A static snapshot can't determine the rank of a new agent
Correct, that's why I included D, the damping factor, which holds a beginner amount of UA.
That sounds more like an undesirable failure-mode to me rather than a desirable property. They should have voting power.
Failure-mode? I was merely referring to the monetary upvote value a new user has currently: $0.00
The rest I'm on board with but ...
This is absolutely true. I also think of it as a failure mode which really puts off newcomers to the platform who aren't bootstrapped by knowing people. It's hard to get in, hard to find traction, and hard to get rolling and stay rolling.
I'd very much like to see what the current connectivity map of all the users on Steemit looks like, though. Even if UA is not, ultimately, particularly a good method of determining whether a user agent is a bot or not (and there may be factors that neither one of us or is aware of that makes that a harder or easier task than expected), as a form of simple understanding of the community as its architected, the value is definitely high.
Your "connectivity map" === my "follower graph". In my example, I began with the example-graph to visually explain. However, in a real-world application (Steem itself), the follower graph is derived from the follower matrix in stead of the other way around.
PS: I've just published a follow-up article! You might like it!
UserAuthority (UA): explanations, applications and implications